Marsbound

by Joe Haldeman

No cover — Joe Haldeman: Marsbound (2008)

English language

Published Sept. 8, 2008

ISBN:: 978-0-441-01595-5

(6 reviews)

A novel of the red planet from the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of The Accidental Time Machine and Old Twentieth. Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime—they’re going to Mars. Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against. And when she ventures out into the bleak Mars landscape alone one night, a simple accident leads her to the edge of death until she is saved by an angel—an angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad, and a message for the newly arrived human inhabitants of Mars:We were here first.

2 editions

scifijack reviewed Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

Review of 'Marsbound' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

Carmen Dula is a likable, relatable, realistic main character, and a sometimes dispassionately honest narrator. At some point, particularly since she starts the book 18 years old on the uncertain, anxious, stressed-out side of a pretty big family relocation and ends it with a graduate degree and unlikely place of prominence in human history, you would like to see her grow and change, leave the smartassery behind in favor of introspection and insight. She doesn't, and that's to the book's detriment. But the Big Idea is kind of cool, sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey meets Contact by way of Ray Bradbury, and you are engrossed enough not to find yourself bobbing up out of the story. Will read, and plan to enjoy, the sequel.