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At the end of the twenty-first century, Earth is under the control of a single intelligence, the apparently benign One True. Mars, meanwhile, is slowly terraforming, and the human settlers there are still free of One True's control... but they need a pressure suits to survive outside, and it will be a century or more before the planet's fit for terrestrial life.Terpsichore Murray is growing up on Mars. She wants to quit school and become, like her father, an ecoprospector. He has other ideas: he wants her to stay in school. He does want her along on his next long trip but only to conduct a group of younger kids from the highlands at Mars's equator back to school in Wells City.What happens next will change Terpsichore, will change Mars, and will open the door to a new chapter in the history of intelligent beings in the solar system . . . all of them.… (more)
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The setting is Mars,
The story begins with the reflections of a cop/psychologist reviewing videos of interviews he did with a very young woman named Teri, an “ecospector” with her father. Ecospectors help terraform Mars and in doing so, they “roo” around the planet. They are individualists.
Something terrible has apparently happened to Teri, or so we’re told by the shrink, but we only find out as he watches video after video in a drunken stupor. He likes Teri a lot and wants to help her, but worries she may be beyond help now.
Teri has been hoping she would pass a test to let her become certified as a “Full Adult,” meaning she would have opportunities young people and people who don’t pass that test have. Her father wants her to remain in school and continue her education. It’s a bone of contention between them. She is also engaged to another ecospector who is a total loser and who, when she gets together with him at an ecospector annual “Gather,” she finds has gotten married behind her back.
Meanwhile, Teri and her dad think they have hit on the “scorehole” of all scoreholes, one that will make them rich beyond their wildest dreams. Meanwhile, memes keep bombarding Mars and the planetary defenses do their best to kill them before they do any damage.
She and her dad have some kids along with them, friends of the family, out in the wilderness at this scorehole when her dad suddenly dies, leaving her in charge. But communications are suddenly cut out and they can’t contact or be contacted by anyone on the planet. What to do?
There’s a certain phrase one must say out loud in order to allow this meme to invade your mind and take over. One of the children uses the acronym for it over and over, thus making it impossible for the others not to think about that phrase. It’s frightening.
The ending is nearly predictable, but is also at the same time a bit of a shock, because things are much, much worse than the reader realizes. The conclusion of the book leaves you with some small hope, and it better, since this is part of a series, but the damage was too great for me to ignore. It’s frankly a bit open-ended.
One of the things that irritated me about this book is typical of Barnes. He uses other languages in his books. In one I just finished, he used Portuguese, or some variation of it. I don’t know what he uses in this book. It, too, could be Portuguese. It could be anything. Many of the words and phrases are simply made up and he never translates these in his books, assuming for some stupid reason, that the reader can figure it out on their own. At times, you can. At others, you can’t. After reading the whole book, I feel like I think “rooing” is a mode of transportation on Mars, but I still have no damn picture in my mind of what the hell it actually is! And this annoys the hell out of me. So, one star off for that. It’s too pervasive to skip. Otherwise, the plot is pretty good, the character development above average, the tension feels real, the dialogue, what you can understand of it, seems nearly decent. Not a bad book. I like Barnes, even though he has flaws. Four stars. Recommended.
The only reason I'm not giving this a 5-star rating is because I'm not sure I'll come back and re-read it at some later date. (Only re-readables get the highest rating from me.) But if I do wind up re-reading it (and there's a better than average chance of this), then I'll raise my rating.