Frederik Pohl and Thomas T Thomas, "Mars Plus" (1994)

Frederik Pohl’s Man Plus (1976) is a minor classic of hard SF: set in the then-near future of the 1990s, it’s about the colonisation of Mars, but proposes that instead of terraforming the planet to make it hospitable to us, we should adapt and cyborgize our human bodies to make them fit for Mars as it is. The protagonist Roger Torraway is an astronaut slowly modified over the course of the story into a transhuman cyborg who can gambol happily through the extreme cold and near vacuum (1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure) of the Red Planet. These external alterations change his personality, which is one point of the book, although Pohl also chucks in a twist at the end: it turns out that humanity’s computers have become sentient and are promoting human colonisation of the galaxy to ensure the spread of computers and so preserve what Pohl, wincingly, calls their ‘race’.

Two decades later Pohl collaborated with the symmetrically-named Thomas T. Thomas to write a sequel: Mars Plus (1994). It’s not very good.

The sequel picks up from the computers-have-come-alive twist at the end of Man Plus, or it sort-of does. For it turns out that even after half a century of further developments, humanity hasn’t realised that ‘the cyber’ has become self-aware. Symptoms of sentience in the computer network read to the people living on Mars only as ‘system bugs and errors’. The novel’s 1994 idiom is creakily off-key where computing is concerned:

sometimes the cyber you were working on crashed its system through no traceable fault in the code … some said the grid was infected with the mother of all viruses, one so insidious that nobody had ever seen it, so rabbit-fast at replication that nobody had ever cornered.’ [26]

Rabbit-fast! Th-th-that’s A.I., folks. (We’re told that the Martian ‘cybers’ operate in the almost-inconceivable ‘teraflop range’—I mean, my son's PlayStation5 console operates at more than 10 teraflops, but I guess that seemed like a impressive number, computing-wise, in the mid-90s.)

Man Plus’s Torraway, more machine than man now, appears as a minor character in Mars Plus, but most of the sequel’s story is given over to Demeter Coghlan, a blonde, green-eyed, curvaceous Earth-woman sent to Mars to do some spying, or something, who gets caught-up in a local revolution. She undertakes some eyes-of-the-reader, look-at-the-worldbuilding wandering around, and she has a lot of badly-written sex. How badly written, you ask? Let's see.

‘Suddenly she felt his hands snaking around her from behind. They travelled up the length of her body from knees to breast cupping and probing as they went.’ [92] Nothing like a man cupping your knees from behind to turn a girl on, I suppose.

‘His lips were on her neck again, hot and slick. His domed, pink member slid up towards her face as she sank back on the bed with the points of her shoulders against the padding that had rucked up against the wall.’ Sexy! Though the next morning Demeter, looking back, is not so sure: ‘it had not been good, healthy sex. More like a fumbling rape that had gone uncontested. It was not clear to Demeter which of them was the rapist.’ [97] Wait, it was not clear?

Frankly it’s almost impressive how solidly unsexy Pohl/Thomas’s strenuous faux-lubriciousness is, throughout ‘… Jory working his hips up and down, pressing the bony arch of his pelvis into her convenient hollowness’ [129]. Convenient hollowness. ‘The woman had long, black hair that went across her shoulders, down her back and tucked under her rump’ [77] Under her rump, you say? What, poking out the front, like a sporran? 

Wait: what?

What are dresses like in the future, you ask? ‘Demeter wore a tube dress of sheer nylon the color of a raspberry Popsicle. It hung from her nipples to a mere four centimeters below her crotch’ [187] Hung from her nipples. That’s practical couture, right there.

Anyway, we get a Cook’s Tour of future-Mars, which throws up some strange details (‘“Nobody speaks Finnish anymore.” He shrugged loosely. “Russian’s easier to pronounce, and English’s got simpler spelling rules.”’ [79]). The economy is hyper-capitalist, law-enforcement almost non existent and there’s a distinct wild-west vibe, although at the same time folk are too much polite for proper Deadwood-style swearing (‘“Oh, poop!”’ [89]). The book also contains some eye-popping anti-Asian racism: ‘Two sallow Asian faces, one fat, one thin, both with the sorts of eyes that were used to squinting down the sights of a rifle when the game went on two legs instead of four’ [57]; ‘his skin was much yellower, less healthy looking … she glanced around surreptitiously for the servant, Chang Qwok-Do … [he was] probably back in the kitchen arranging to barbeque a dog or something’ [118]). Ouch.

So, overall: no, not good. The plot meanders and drifts. There’s a big denouement when Torraway pops up again and goes mad, or seems to.

But look, never mind all that. One particular detail of the worldbuilding snagged my attention, and it’s this: instead of a space elevator, people enter and leave Mars via a ‘space fountain’. How does that work? Well: ‘on the equator near Tharsis Montes, a linear accelerator stood upright at the bottom of a well dug deep under the Martian surface’:

The accelerator shot a series of ferrite hoops, each a metre in diameter and weighing almost a kilogram apiece, straight up into the sky. Moving at some tens of kilometers per second this fountain of objects created a tremendous kinetic energy. At the upper end of their flight, the hoop-stream entered an electromagnetic torus that functioned like the pulley wheel in a sheave block: bending the stream back on itself to descend at gravitationally increasing speeds towards the planet’s surface. There the stream entered another torus which passed it across to the accelerator again, completing a closed loop of flying rings. The system resembled a chainsaw held together by the forces of inertia and magnetism. [11-12]

We’re told that building this mega-device had consumed ‘whole quads of electricity, enough to drive the industrial sector of a fair-sized moon’, but once it was up and running, and the upper-torus was in synchronous orbit, ‘it required only minor additions of maintenance energy to stabilize the stream … to replace the miniscule amounts of kinetic energy that the freight handlers bled off in the form of electricity.’ OK: but how do people ride this alarmingly chainsaw-ish structure, up and down? Grab a hoop, as it’s passing at tens of kms a second, and hope it doesn’t rip your arm out of its shoulder socket? (Obviously not that but—how? Pohl/Thomas don’t say. Am I missing something obvious?)