Martian Sands: A Novel

Boy, was I glad to click "I'm finished" on this one. At no point did I know what was going on in this book. Fortunately, it was short. It was only when I read other reviews that I learned it is a tribute to Philip K. Dick. Now, that makes sense. I was confused in the same way I was continuously confused reading his stuff many years ago.

This story starts out with a bang--a visitor from the future offers Franklin D. Roosevelt the weapons and knowledge needed to end World War II quickly, provided his first priority is bombing the Nazi death camps. Then, however, the book shifts to Mars and we realize we're in the same universe as Tidhar's Central Station, which I reviewed just a few days ago. But while Central Station was a series of short stories rewritten and linked into a narrative, and Martian Sands is a novel, Central Station is a much better book and story. Here, there are various time streams going on, and while it isn't too confusing, we never get the alternate WW II history we expected from the book's opening. There is only one, quite satisfying, scene of the destruction of Aucshwitz. But most of the novel is a pulp fiction flavored science fiction novel that, while it has lots of interesting characters, including a simulacrum of Golda Meir, doesn't take enough time to do justice to all its characters and their intersecting plotlines. I'm not by any means looking for a 600-page science fiction novel, but a few more chapters would have helped. Not that Tidhar is ever less than interesting. The book is bursting with ideas and great scenes--a sentient bullet, for instance. And I'm sure in his head there is a whole constructed universe and there is a much deeper meaning that just isn't adequately conveyed in the book. Perhaps in light of his other work, which I will continue to read, I'll come to have more appreciation for this one. If so, I'll come back and update this review and point readers in the right direction (or reading order).

Time travel, Holocaust, classic science fiction worlds and artificial intelligence mixed into one novel can go either really bad or really well. In most cases, it will be predictable and flat, if not outright bad. Tidhar managed to find a way to mix all of those, make them his own and produce a novel that starts fast and speeds up from there.

It opens with an old SF troupe - what will happen if the president of the USA gets a visitor from the past at the start of the WWII that gives them knowledge of what is to happen and the chance to stop it - completed with some help from the future. Bill Glimmung, the guy that makes that trip back in time, even show the Pearl Harbor on fire (because the offer is not to stop what is happening in the war everywhere - Bill is back to try to save the 6 million Jews that died in the camps).

And after this short opening, without being told what the president decides, we in the future - where humanity had colonized Mars, Israel had built its new country on the new planet and pretty much everyone there works for them. And the faces of the new country are the faces of the old one - now recreated back to serve as figure heads and to unite the people. (when all this is shown first, it sounds megalomaniac and arrogant - by the end of the novel it sounds more logical and inevitable). The planet is not closed for anyone though so there is enough enemies, there are people that dream of the old Mars Empire (good old Burroughs' view of the planet), ubiks will show up and if you pay attention, a lot of classical SF world and authors get nods. But not in a way that stops you from reading - if you never read then, you won't see them; if you had, you will recognize and smile at the mention.

And this Mars of the future is also home of the Others (the AIs that are not exactly AI and that had been grown); of intelligent bullets and machines; of culture and vice - a lot like the Earth, except a bit redder on the outside. And one day, a few of those bullets will connect the lives of 3 people and everyone around them. And then time shatters.

Or does it? People get thrown into realities that are not their own (one of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Mars end up in Auschwitz; Miriam finds herself in a world where someone else lives in her house). But the realities bleed into each other, changing the perception and changing what is real. There will be an old ghost who is almost the ghost of a world that we all wish never happened, there is a chance for survival for people that are long gone.

And while the novel is speeding towards its end, you start wondering what of what had been said and done before was real and what was part of a reality. And especially towards the end, things happen in different times and places that somehow collapse together to the point where one wonders if reality even exists. Or if time is as linear as anyone believes.

Somehow, almost impossibly, Tidhar actually ties together all the ends of his story, without it feeling as if you got cheated and without the so standard deus ex machina mechanisms - in a way it is but it is part of the story and it all leads to it - a long time before it actually happens. At the end it all makes sense - in a weird way (even if the prose in some sections is unnecessary abstract - but then I was never a fan of abstract prose). And the question of "is there time travel in this story" has its answer - although it will be way too spoilery to answer it in a review.

Despite all that, it is not a perfect novel - more than once I was ready to scream at a character - some actions felt almost cartoonish, they were needed for the story to succeed. But even then the novel is enjoyable.