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A review by incipientdreamer
The Mars House by Natasha Pulley
3.0
<blockquote><i>There hadn't been anyone though, and he couldn't see why it was striking him as all tragic and gooey now. Some people didn't get a person. It wasn't a right; it was a gift, and you couldn't go around sniffing about it as if you were <i>entitled</i> to be worried over.
The thing was, it did seem to be a gift that everyone else got at least once.</i></blockquote>
I have no idea how to rate this book. Part of the reason why I took so long to finish this was because I kept putting it off so I would be able to stew in my emotions and think about what this book is trying to say (not very obvious) and whether I'm taking away the right message from this, and what my beliefs on many of these topics are.
A very big departure from most of Pulley's books, this is not historical fiction and while it sells itself as scifi, I would say it is pretty firmly in the realms of fantasy disguised in the shabby clothes of scifi. Technology and science don't make much sense and are very "just trust me, bro". I did try not to think too hard about it because I knew if I did I would not have been able to stop or get past the first few chapters. It felt like just a speculative world for the author to make her "what if" scenario to discuss the different themes she wanted to talk about. And there were A LOT of themes.
Pulley has so much packed into this book. Gender, ableism, class privilege, xenophobia, sinophobia as well as bodily autonomy. I was worried that it would be too much for a single book to handle and that she would end up making very hard statements on solutions for such complex topics. And while I'm glad she didn't make any such strong statements for frankly difficult-to-solve topics, her two sides weren't super extremes which liked because rarely are humans so easy to sort into boxes. I still had a very hard time figuring out what exactly she was trying to say. Because at times it does come across as this "China bad, china powerful, Chinese people are coming to steal our land and put their dictatorship in our country. The refugees are brutes and savages who will bring their basic religions and cultures into our superior cultures which is why we should let them die." But idk if my own beliefs made it feel like she was trying to say that even if the refugees have different beliefs about gender and power it does not mean we let them die because the purpose of a colony on Mars is to extend the human race?? But also sometimes it felt very settler colony-esque? Who's land is it anyway? The people who have been living here for generations or those escaping from Earth? I would like to believe that land isn't owned by one class of humans and it should be common decency to share it with people who have nowhere to go, but at the same time do those people have the right to claim that land as their own? Isn't that how you get Israel? Like I said it was A Lot and I could not parse what the author was trying to say, but perhaps the point of the book was not to be a Mother Goose story but to make you ponder about this stuff and realize what your own beliefs are and if they are harmful and bigoted. So I understand how this could very easily fall prey to cancel culture and people with zero media literacy will be ready to sharpen their pitchforks and burn Pulley on the alter of their hardliner beliefs.
At the same time, writing a romance between a white refugee with no rights whatsoever with very leftist beliefs and an Asian non-binary nationalist right-wing politician is something not easy to sell. (Pulley says so in her acknowledgements that her UK publisher refused to publish this book). I did struggle a lot to connect with Gale and I know it was supposed to be confusing and a hard pill to swallow, and the path to them NOT being a huge bigot that wanted to forcibly disable people and was telling refugees to stay on Earth and die, was bumpy (understatement) as hell. But I wasn't the biggest fan of it. Pulley's pairing seems to be a lovable pathetic soft man x morally dubious man with slight psychopathic tendencies that has a path to slight redemption but she seems to be pushing the line with this pairing a lot. Mori was a sexist pig and a manipulative asshole, Kite killed a whole bunch of people and was chill with it, Shenkov was a member of the KGB and now Gale is basically Trump. So yeah...idk what she'll write next. Probably not a decent female character.
I do prefer Pulley when she writes magical realism or fantasy as compared to scifi. This lacked that magical aura that [book:The Kingdoms|54680112] and [book:The Bedlam Stacks|31450615] (IMO her best works), there weren't passages that blew me away or made me want to sob into a pillow. She is really good at writing romantic pining so I did have that funny heart-twisting breaking that I call the "Pulley Effect"; but primarily because of how January Stirling was written.
The plot twist was also pretty much predictable but I did like that the "villains" weren't two-dimensional mustache-twirling evil. It was nice to see some nuance and that politicians are inherently fucked up and even the good guys are not saints. Despite thatI didn't like that Aubery was killed at the end, I do not understand why they would try to kill River at the end after that whole chapter about how they felt horrible for giving them fake sleep paralysis etc. Like I know they killed their partner for the lols but it seemed like they had "changed"? If that makes sense.
<b>Not the best thing Pulley has written IMO, also could have used a stronger editor since there were some strange grammatical errors. The political elements she touched upon were interesting but a bit much for a single book. It did feel a lot more original than all those marriage-of-convenience AO3 inspired books that have been coming out recently.</b>
The thing was, it did seem to be a gift that everyone else got at least once.</i></blockquote>
I have no idea how to rate this book. Part of the reason why I took so long to finish this was because I kept putting it off so I would be able to stew in my emotions and think about what this book is trying to say (not very obvious) and whether I'm taking away the right message from this, and what my beliefs on many of these topics are.
A very big departure from most of Pulley's books, this is not historical fiction and while it sells itself as scifi, I would say it is pretty firmly in the realms of fantasy disguised in the shabby clothes of scifi. Technology and science don't make much sense and are very "just trust me, bro". I did try not to think too hard about it because I knew if I did I would not have been able to stop or get past the first few chapters. It felt like just a speculative world for the author to make her "what if" scenario to discuss the different themes she wanted to talk about. And there were A LOT of themes.
Pulley has so much packed into this book. Gender, ableism, class privilege, xenophobia, sinophobia as well as bodily autonomy. I was worried that it would be too much for a single book to handle and that she would end up making very hard statements on solutions for such complex topics. And while I'm glad she didn't make any such strong statements for frankly difficult-to-solve topics, her two sides weren't super extremes which liked because rarely are humans so easy to sort into boxes. I still had a very hard time figuring out what exactly she was trying to say. Because at times it does come across as this "China bad, china powerful, Chinese people are coming to steal our land and put their dictatorship in our country. The refugees are brutes and savages who will bring their basic religions and cultures into our superior cultures which is why we should let them die." But idk if my own beliefs made it feel like she was trying to say that even if the refugees have different beliefs about gender and power it does not mean we let them die because the purpose of a colony on Mars is to extend the human race?? But also sometimes it felt very settler colony-esque? Who's land is it anyway? The people who have been living here for generations or those escaping from Earth? I would like to believe that land isn't owned by one class of humans and it should be common decency to share it with people who have nowhere to go, but at the same time do those people have the right to claim that land as their own? Isn't that how you get Israel? Like I said it was A Lot and I could not parse what the author was trying to say, but perhaps the point of the book was not to be a Mother Goose story but to make you ponder about this stuff and realize what your own beliefs are and if they are harmful and bigoted. So I understand how this could very easily fall prey to cancel culture and people with zero media literacy will be ready to sharpen their pitchforks and burn Pulley on the alter of their hardliner beliefs.
At the same time, writing a romance between a white refugee with no rights whatsoever with very leftist beliefs and an Asian non-binary nationalist right-wing politician is something not easy to sell. (Pulley says so in her acknowledgements that her UK publisher refused to publish this book). I did struggle a lot to connect with Gale and I know it was supposed to be confusing and a hard pill to swallow, and the path to them NOT being a huge bigot that wanted to forcibly disable people and was telling refugees to stay on Earth and die, was bumpy (understatement) as hell. But I wasn't the biggest fan of it. Pulley's pairing seems to be a lovable pathetic soft man x morally dubious man with slight psychopathic tendencies that has a path to slight redemption but she seems to be pushing the line with this pairing a lot. Mori was a sexist pig and a manipulative asshole, Kite killed a whole bunch of people and was chill with it, Shenkov was a member of the KGB and now Gale is basically Trump. So yeah...idk what she'll write next. Probably not a decent female character.
I do prefer Pulley when she writes magical realism or fantasy as compared to scifi. This lacked that magical aura that [book:The Kingdoms|54680112] and [book:The Bedlam Stacks|31450615] (IMO her best works), there weren't passages that blew me away or made me want to sob into a pillow. She is really good at writing romantic pining so I did have that funny heart-twisting breaking that I call the "Pulley Effect"; but primarily because of how January Stirling was written.
The plot twist was also pretty much predictable but I did like that the "villains" weren't two-dimensional mustache-twirling evil. It was nice to see some nuance and that politicians are inherently fucked up and even the good guys are not saints. Despite that
<b>Not the best thing Pulley has written IMO, also could have used a stronger editor since there were some strange grammatical errors. The political elements she touched upon were interesting but a bit much for a single book. It did feel a lot more original than all those marriage-of-convenience AO3 inspired books that have been coming out recently.</b>