From the Bookshelf: Exiles
Oct. 9th, 2025 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerI decided a little while ago to go into the city and attend an outdoor book fair. While I’ve been to it before, I was wondering about what, if anything, I’d buy there. That thought could have strengthened as I passed by the kiosk for a notable science fiction bookstore, conscious all over again of what frayed if not snapped certain of the strings connecting me to the genre in print.
When I saw a small hardcover on a table, though, I picked it up and looked at the blurb inside the front cover. Mason Coile’s Exiles promised “the first people arrive on Mars to find the robots that put together their base in disarray.” While the book seemed pricy (I suppose I haven’t been looking at hardcovers too much of late), I kept thinking about it, and then I bought it, not as my only purchase at the fair.
It took me a little while to start reading the novel, and I was conscious of some older science fiction novels and short story collections I’ve bought from used book stores or book sales but not got around to reading. Once I did start reading it, I read it at a fair clip. Early on, though, I wondered about the astronauts in orbit around Mars (after waking up from “extend-sleep”) while being described as holding coffee mugs and sitting in chairs. I wondered “does this spaceship have... artificial gravity?” There was at least the possibility of interpreting it as rotating, though, and I did keep reading at that fair clip.
I had picked up bit by bit how the novel’s first-person narrator is a woman, and then that her name is “Gold.” (Much later on I sorted out her first name is “Dana”; the two men with her don’t get full names.) It also got my attention that the construction robots had settled on names and genders for themselves, with Gold questioning the female robot. Big, yet somehow familiar (and maybe there’s a risk to adding “all too” to that) questions came to mind. Beyond that, I suppose I was also still wondering whether the science was quite as “hard” as it could have been. There was a comment early on that the astronauts had been sent on a one-way trip to Mars; my assumption was that their ship emptied its fuel tanks entering orbit and the “pod” they landed in would touch down in similar condition. However, later on it was established they could use their ship to go back to Earth but for lack of a code mission control was unlikely to provide.
This had a bit to do with the situation getting gruesome, which I fear had me wondering about my faint impressions of Mason Coile’s previous novels. I kept reading at a fair clip even so, all the way to the bleak, just a little ambiguous, and yet conclusive ending. Still, I did acknowledge it wasn’t quite the kind of “science fiction” mental strawman that may play a part in not reading as much of it as I used to. I can suppose there must be “science fiction,” even recent science fiction, out there that would meet the constraints that had snapped back into place for me while reading this book and yet feel positive and invigorating, but that has something to do with the frayed and snapped strings I alluded to.
When I saw a small hardcover on a table, though, I picked it up and looked at the blurb inside the front cover. Mason Coile’s Exiles promised “the first people arrive on Mars to find the robots that put together their base in disarray.” While the book seemed pricy (I suppose I haven’t been looking at hardcovers too much of late), I kept thinking about it, and then I bought it, not as my only purchase at the fair.
It took me a little while to start reading the novel, and I was conscious of some older science fiction novels and short story collections I’ve bought from used book stores or book sales but not got around to reading. Once I did start reading it, I read it at a fair clip. Early on, though, I wondered about the astronauts in orbit around Mars (after waking up from “extend-sleep”) while being described as holding coffee mugs and sitting in chairs. I wondered “does this spaceship have... artificial gravity?” There was at least the possibility of interpreting it as rotating, though, and I did keep reading at that fair clip.
I had picked up bit by bit how the novel’s first-person narrator is a woman, and then that her name is “Gold.” (Much later on I sorted out her first name is “Dana”; the two men with her don’t get full names.) It also got my attention that the construction robots had settled on names and genders for themselves, with Gold questioning the female robot. Big, yet somehow familiar (and maybe there’s a risk to adding “all too” to that) questions came to mind. Beyond that, I suppose I was also still wondering whether the science was quite as “hard” as it could have been. There was a comment early on that the astronauts had been sent on a one-way trip to Mars; my assumption was that their ship emptied its fuel tanks entering orbit and the “pod” they landed in would touch down in similar condition. However, later on it was established they could use their ship to go back to Earth but for lack of a code mission control was unlikely to provide.
This had a bit to do with the situation getting gruesome, which I fear had me wondering about my faint impressions of Mason Coile’s previous novels. I kept reading at a fair clip even so, all the way to the bleak, just a little ambiguous, and yet conclusive ending. Still, I did acknowledge it wasn’t quite the kind of “science fiction” mental strawman that may play a part in not reading as much of it as I used to. I can suppose there must be “science fiction,” even recent science fiction, out there that would meet the constraints that had snapped back into place for me while reading this book and yet feel positive and invigorating, but that has something to do with the frayed and snapped strings I alluded to.