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Before Mars Is an Unsettling Chronicle of Regret and Paranoia—on Mars
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I should have known before I started reading that Emma Newman’s Before Mars was going to leave me sleepless and unsettled. It’s the third book in her loosely connected Planetfall series, and the previous two novels, which are less prequels and more standalone novels in a shared world, each demanded to be read in a single sitting, the clock ticking through the small hours. Both Planetfall and After Atlas planted me in the heads of people trapped, whether by the legal system, by their pasts, by their crimes, or by their parents; I felt that struggling, drowning feeling to the roots of my teeth. Before Mars is equally stifling and unnerving, a futuristic mystery shot through with paranoia.
Anna Kubrick wakes up on Mars after a six month solo flight from Earth. She’s been sent by Stefan Gabor, the head of a powerful gov-corp, to his small settlement on there, ostensibly to act as a sort of artist-in-residence. Anna is a mid-level corporate geologist who dabbles in painting, and her pragmatically romantic renderings of the Martian landscape have caught the eye of Gabor’s husband, Travis. The rush to send her to Mars—which necessitates her lonely solo flight—and her shaky credentials as both a scientist and an artist undercut her position within the small community on Mars Principia before she even arrives. Personally, she’s already on shaky psychological ground, having spent more time than is healthy in ‘mersives (virtual memory simulations) on the long, lonely ride over, which can result in immersive psychosis: a paranoiac sense that no one and nothing is real.
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Anna is unsettled by her first reactions to the residents of Mars Principia, and theirs to her. She takes an instant, irrational dislike to the group’s psychologist, Dr. Arnolfi, while her interactions with medical Dr. Elvan feel unnervingly intimate—they seem to share a physical comfort with one another that defies explanation. Dr. Banks, the host of a ‘mersive that details the scientific wonders of Mars (and who Anna developed a bit of a crush on during her journey) snarls at her during their first meeting. The items in her personal gear seem to have disturbed—canvasses are missing, and a wedding ring somehow no longer has an inscription on the inside of the band. She also finds a small painting, in a perfect simulacrum of her own style, that warns her not to trust Dr. Arnolfi.
Even as she experiences cracks in the surface of her reality on Mars, Anna is riven with guilt the husband and daughter she’s left behind on Earth. Her child, Mia, wasn’t much more than a year old when Anna left Earth, and they’ll be parted for two formative years. It’s hard to say whether Anna feels more guilt about leaving, or for the fact that leaving relieved her from having to fake her unfelt joy of motherhood. Anna is keenly aware how societally monstrous it is to admit to an imperfect and incomplete maternal bond.
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It is astonishing to find such a parent in fiction who isn’t vilified or caricatured. Reading her personal thoughts, I experienced uncomfortable flashbacks to my own daughter’s infancy, when I was deeply in the clutch of what is incongrously referred to as “the baby blues” and finding it hard to do anything but endure the fact of her existence. I had a toddler screaming out his dethronement, and an infant who never slept, and I didn’t like either of them; love, well, it felt like a mirage. Whether you find Anna likable or not for admitting her difficult feelings for her daughter is irrelevant, as likability has been a difficult thing for all the Planetfall narrators heretofore. Outside of the dark, semi-dystopian futures they show us, these novels make us privy to the deeply intimate thoughts of prickly, conflicted people, and that intimacy is a gift. What matters is that Anna is real, and real in a way that hurts.
Planetfall tells the story of a religious mission on a distant planet, living in the shadow of an alien structure they call “God’s City.” We view the seemingly bucolic community through the eyes of a deeply damaged first-person narrator, and as the narrative unravels, so do her hard-coded avoidance and survival mechanisms. After Atlas takes place on Earth 40 years after the mission to God’s City left the planet; its protagonist is a child left behind by his colonist parents to become an asset of a gov-corp, not precisely considered a human being, who is tasked with solving a murder mystery in a situation so thankless it can do nothing but end in perpetual indenture. Before Mars is like these novels, though they all take place on different planets: its protagonist is trapped and scared, hounded by the ghosts of the past and the narrow possibilities of the future. It’s like the earlier books, and so much more.