A Slice of Mars - BookWyrm

eBook, 527 pages

English language

Published Jan. 11, 2023

ISBN:: 979-8-215-59345-5

(2 reviews)

Mars is a strange place these days. Corporate overlords, capitalism, and even aging are things of the past on a planet increasingly brimming with biodiversity - yet pizzerias are in short supply!

Siblings Hett and San set out to change that. But a roboticist and a bureaucrat can't run a restaurant alone, so they bring on some help - a bioengineer, a communications scientist, and an unlikely grad student from Earth. Together, this gang of geeks will brave the fires of small business.

But work is just a small part of life. People are complicated. Different brains, different wounds, different values, and one questionably tame wildcat will all collide as they try to grow and succeed together. What comes out of the oven, in the end, is anyone's guess.

1 edition

chayote reviewed A Slice of Mars by Guerric Haché

Review of 'A Slice of Mars' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A Slice of Mars is a fantastically enjoyable slice-of-life story following a group of people who come together to try to open a pizza shop on Mars.

The Martian society shown here contains many interesting and creative ideas for how society might look if it was allowed to grow beyond our expectations of “how things work”. From the mycelium walls and ecological projects, to the domes, the Martian lifecycle, governmental representation, and the cultural snippets, Mars as we see it here feels full of life and history and optimism and it’s honestly delightful. This is a society that is imperfect, but always doing its best to keep improving for all its people.

I found the cast of characters easy to love and root for, and their interpersonal relationships and challenges added the right amount of tension to an otherwise very cosy, low-stakes story. Their willingness and efforts to find solutions …

A Slice of Mars is a fantastically enjoyable slice-of-life story following a group of people who come together to try to open a pizza shop on Mars.

The Martian society shown here contains many interesting and creative ideas for how society might look if it was allowed to grow beyond our expectations of “how things work”. From the mycelium walls and ecological projects, to the domes, the Martian lifecycle, governmental representation, and the cultural snippets, Mars as we see it here feels full of life and history and optimism and it’s honestly delightful. This is a society that is imperfect, but always doing its best to keep improving for all its people.

I found the cast of characters easy to love and root for, and their interpersonal relationships and challenges added the right amount of tension to an otherwise very cosy, low-stakes story. Their willingness and efforts to find solutions and communicate and treat one another with kindness and understanding brought to mind Becky Chambers’ characters.

Recommended to fans of slice-of-life sci-fi, science nerds who like imaginative worldbuilding, and readers who are drawn to characters just doing their best.

Guerric Haché reviewed A Slice of Mars by Guerric Haché

Review of 'A Slice of Mars' on 'Goodreads'

No rating

I wrote this!

After finishing the Digitesque hexalogy in 2019, I took stock of my work so far and thought about what I wanted to improve on as a writer, and how to plan my next project to target those improvements. I decided I wanted to write something focused squarely on the interpersonal dynamics of a group of several people, without even an overarching plot. Something purely about people living a life in a community, getting along and getting on each other's nerves.

And I also wanted to write about the future in a way that, while not utopian, was cautiously optimistic. I wanted to see what it might be like to live in a society where society was making a collective effort to build a better world; and a society far enough removed in time from ours that its norms, concerns, models, and worldview don't mesh very well with …

I wrote this!

After finishing the Digitesque hexalogy in 2019, I took stock of my work so far and thought about what I wanted to improve on as a writer, and how to plan my next project to target those improvements. I decided I wanted to write something focused squarely on the interpersonal dynamics of a group of several people, without even an overarching plot. Something purely about people living a life in a community, getting along and getting on each other's nerves.

And I also wanted to write about the future in a way that, while not utopian, was cautiously optimistic. I wanted to see what it might be like to live in a society where society was making a collective effort to build a better world; and a society far enough removed in time from ours that its norms, concerns, models, and worldview don't mesh very well with ours.

And as I was planning this book out, the Covid pandemic hit, and I started cooking a whole lot. So of course it became about food, too.

After finishing the first draft in late 2020, I took a detour into some different writing projects in 2021, then returned in 2022 to re-write this and edit it up, and here we are now. I'm quite happy with where this landed, overall. It's felt like a great way of challenging myself to learn new skills as a writer, and it was also just plain fun. I hope you enjoy it too!

Subjects

Science Fiction