There are authors whose new books you want to buy as soon as they are published. For me, Natasha Pulley is one, yet I waited on The Mars House. Hard science fiction is not really a genre I follow, and this one was billed as a queer romance set on Mars. Yes, but it has woolly mammoths! and a goofy dog! and a principal male ballet dancer for the central character! This past week, I finally read a library copy—and bought my own at a local bookstore. Definitely on the reread list.
Some naysayers on-line have funny objections. One said the book was not misogynistic only because there were no women in it—this about a novel in which the human colonists on Mars have been bioengineered to have no gender. Another blogger complained that Pulley got her physics wrong—as if a novel in which Mandarin Chinese, Russian, and English are all spoken and being merged into a local patois along with computerized devices that allow communication with mammoths is really about the technicalities of gravity.
No, instead, it's another one of Pulley's wildly imaginative stories with unexpected turns, whimsical touches that make you laugh but don't turn twee, and characters you care about deeply. It has politics, linguistics, and love.
Now, about that queer romance: I loved running across an exchange between Pulley and an interviewer in which she agreed that the book follows a predictable rom-com arc: antagonists fall in love. In her acknowledgments, Pulley has called The Mars House a "bonkers" novel. In the interview (at minute 18.44), she points out the usefulness of a clichéd narrative structure: it allows a story set in an unfamiliar place with complicated action to be grounded in something the reader is familiar with. That's a point worth remembering by both readers and writers. Genres have conventions for a reason. Sure they can be used to churn out brain-deadening repetitions, but their tropes can also support wonderfully imaginative riffs.
Final note: The dust jacket shown here is the English version—a bit handsomer than the American dust jacket