Book Review of One Way by S.J. Morden

                 Review of One Way by S. J Morden

 

Eight astronauts

One killer

No way home

 [Cover of the book]

I’ve read a lot of books about Mars;  most of them fiction, most of them at least trying to be scientifically accurate as well as entertaining.  Andy Weir’s The Martian is probably the most famous recent book set on the red planet, and Ray Bradbury’s stories the most unlikely.  On my shelves, retrieved just now, I have The Book of Mars [1971] a collection of stories introduced by Isaac Asimov.  The most recent of those would be Bradbury’s The Lost City of Mars, written in 1966 and the earliest is A Martian Odyssey [1934] by Stanley Weinbaum.

More recent books in my collection are John Barnes’ The Sky So Big and Black, [2002] featuring fourth generation colonists under threat from a cyber intelligence occupying Earth, Joe Haldeman’s Marsbound [2008] and Mars One by Jonathan Maberry [2017].    Both of those last two feature teenagers travelling with families to join scientific missions on Mars, but have very different scenarios.

Even so, all of those books have one simple fact in common:  The characters in the stories wanted to go to Mars.  It took this latest book on Mars, One Way by S.J. Morden,  published this year, to come up with a new plot gimmick.  What if the astronauts were conscripts?  What if nobody cared too much whether they survived or not?

If I give too much detail I’m going to spoiler the book and this isn’t that sort of review.  But I can say that the viewpoint character is a murderer;  one Frank Kittridge, serving life for murdering his son’s drug dealer.  He and his fellow “astronauts” are selected by the corporation Panopticon,  which won a contract to build the first permanent base on Mars.  They also happen to own the prison in which Frank is incarcerated, and so have the power to offer him the world’s worst deal – if Frank wasn’t inside for life.  So Frank and a team of fellow inmates, all equally guilty, are sent off to Mars after a crash course which gives them the skills to live on Mars and build the scientific base.  Just.  With such sketchy training, you sort of expect accidents.  And they do happen, until Frank starts to suspect that one of his fellow killers might have taken up their old hobby.

It’s a science fiction novel incorporating one of the oldest kind of crime settings;  the locked room scenario, or perhaps Agatha Christie-style isolated manor house with a body and a group of guests, one of whom must be guilty of the murder.  Morden employs limited third person narration, so the reader only knows what Frank is thinking and what he sees.  This helps to create a very convincing setting that had me guessing right up until shortly before the answer became bleeding obvious.  At the beginning of chapters there are emails and notes between the corporation people, which does give a few chilling glimpses of their plans. 

There are elements of horror in the book as well, when one realises the perfect trap which Frank and the others are in, and also in the completely dehumanising way they are treated by the corporation’s people.  There has never been isolation so total, and the book does get very grim with little in it that’s fun.  I was entertained by the fact that the team doctor, Alice Sheppard, is also a murderer, put away for doing in quite a few of her patients, and now she’s in charge of their entire health program.  But that’s just me.  This is, by the way, the American penal system.  I didn’t think all of those crimes merited life imprisonment and certainly they wouldn’t do so here in Australia, except maybe for Dr Alice.

The characters are still in maximum security, whether they’re on Earth or Mars, and their incredible chance turns out to be not really that wonderful at all.  If you don’t have that intense curiosity and drive of a scientist or an adventurer who sees Mars as a new human frontier, it is indeed the most deadly of prisons.

The ending was annoyingly abrupt.  I did the turning-blank-pages thing at the end hoping there’d be something more.  It’s not that it left loose threads, but more that I wanted to see more happen.   Having said all that, I wasted several hours when I could have been sleeping, finishing this damn book, and I was like the walking dead the next day.  I just had to know whodunnit.  The book has an easy style to read,  the one viewpoint character and seemingly accurate detail.  I say that because it wouldn’t be that hard to slip inaccuracies past me, but I couldn’t catch any problems.  The story idea and execution were very intriguing.  I’d read more by this author.