Review: Project Eclipse by Robert Tillsley

A corporation terraforming Mars effs around, finds out in a masterfully written slow burn of a novel

As a big fan of pulp and Robert E. Howard in particular, I’m generally an impatient sort of reader. Get me to the action: splash alien vistas, forlorn abandoned crypts and savage godless lands across and establish the hook on the first page or shortly thereafter if you want me to give the story a chance. Slow burns and so-called “fridge moments” are the types of things I’m ill-suited for (you can thank that masturbatory doorstopper House of Leaves for that). It has to be a talented writer indeed that can keep me just interested enough to stay invested to see what eventually gets uncovered.

And Robert Tillsley knows how to pace tension like few others can.

The Story

Mankind’s foot has firmly set upon Mars. While there aren’t domed cities quite yet, its terraforming is just underway, with colonies of workers, scientists and engineers living and working long hours in dangerous environments with things breaking all the time.

Bill Hayden works as a surveyor, spending his days very slowly traversing the planet in his rover and sifting through mind-numbing amounts of data logs and repairing whatever instruments whenever they happen to be broken, which is all the time. It’s a well paying, secure gig, if a little boring, but he likes it that way, compared to his past as a spook. It’s a past that he’s happy to leave on Earth.

That is until a call comes over his comm that a mayday signal has gone out from his coworker Charlie’s rover. A dust storm is preventing security from investigating, and he’s closest. At the bottom of a crater, he finds an abandoned rover, and no sign of his buddy Charlie. Seeing the mouth of a nearby low-ceilinged cave, he reluctantly searches it, discovering his coworker’s brutally mutilated corpse.

Bill discovering the body naturally gets people talking. Part of him is eager to let it all die down and finish up his contract. But strangeness is cropping up all over the colony; building sites that were surveyed and found stable having sinkholes appear when building crews arrive. Mundane geographical data logs seem just out of sorts enough to make one wonder if something’s being covered up. And Security is extremely touchy about anyone getting close to the BILT4 compound, where scientists are closely guarding a recently discovered black pod, the discovery of which they’re trying to keep secret.

But agency habits die hard, and soon Bill starts digging for answers to questions he can’t stop asking himself. It isn’t long until he discovers his profit-driven corporate betters are messing with something they can’t contain.

The Characters

Tillsley’s characters are exquisitely believably written. Our protagonist Bill Hayden is very much a working stiff who’s just trying to keep his head down and avoid attention so he can get paid. He uses his old spy training more to convey befuddled innocence to stay out of trouble from his managers than anything else. He begins to tug at strings, ponder hypotheticals, and analyze data, more in the hopes of putting his own nagging doubts to bed than anything else. He is dogged, reluctantly but inexorably driven towards the ever growing possibility of endangering the quiet life he worked so hard attain. The warnings of his friends don’t stop him. Orders barked from security forces don’t stop him. Thinly veiled threats from corporate don’t stop him. He is the archetype of the crusading detective, one of my all time favorite hero tropes, and someone you can’t help but want to tag along with through to his case’s end.

The colony is run and financed by an ungodly morass of corporations in an uneasy alliance to bolster their stocks and further their bottom lines. Everyone is out to be the one to make some groundbreaking discovery or be the first to find something worth patenting. This corporate ruthlessness is no better embodied than in Jane Wagner, one of the executives whose company scientists have discovered the aforementioned black pod. When trouble arises, she’s quick to arrive with plenty of handshakes, false compassion and ready to deflect blame. Her head of security, Karlo Ware is a protective bulldog who zeroes in on Bill’s nosing around, but eventually is forced into allyship when the terrible presence lurking beneath the planet’s surface makes itself known. Jane Trax is a tough maintenance engineer who’s not afraid to call out corporate’s indifference to the colony’s human lives after scores of people go missing when it’s attacked in the dead of night. The three, along with a few lesser characters, form the core of the human effort to survive against an enemy that can strike at will from almost any direction.

The dialogue, while having a distinctly Australian tinge, is superb. Bill switches almost effortlessly between calculating analyst micro-parsing minute details to confused a office worker asking for directions when he’s found conducting a little casual espionage in a building he shouldn’t have access to. Wagner’s polished corporate speak rolls off her forked tongue with ease. Karlo, a man torn between duty to his own post and helping Wagner uncover what’s really afoot, argues with Bill while simultaneously struggling with the reality that they need to help each other. Jealous scientists and engineers, all battling for everything from site access to promised funding to discovery credit, snipe, haggle and backstab with stoic and measured precision. The expertly written dialogue, and the intense human drama it all conveys, make the comparably slow pace of the first half dozen or so chapters entertaining to go through as it sets up the terrible, blood-sprayed inciting incident around chapter seven or so.

The World

Mars is a barren and hostile beast that does not take the hubristic attempts of man to conquer it without a terrible fight. Conditions for life even within the colonies are fragile and constantly on the edge of a knife, be it thanks to battering winds in a nearly all-carbon dioxide environment or depraved corporate indifference. You feel that any thing happening at any point, no matter how benign, can go unforeseeably haywire and cause the entire fragile ecosystem to implode at any moment, even before the threat against the colony is revealed. Then the setting turns from savage wasteland to primordial inescapable hunting ground. Tillsley writes tension you can feel in your chest as you read it.

Politics

None, unless you think “gigacorporations existing 140 million miles from the merest hint of any judicial consequences for their actions is a bad” is any kind of a political statement. This is sci-fi survival action/horror first and foremost.

Content Warning

Humanity disturbs things with big claws and teeth that don’t want them there. Be warned. The violence isn’t spared, but is far from stomach-churning.

Who is it for?

If you’re into First Contact Gone Horribly Wrong, this is definitely up your alley, but Tillsley peppers in enough techno-engineering speak to satisfy any fan of Michael Chrichton, enough sly and subtle spycraft to satisfy any fan of John le Carre, and enough bug-on human violence to satisfy any fan of Starship Troopers.

Why buy it?

Project Eclipse is equal parts mystery, survival horror and action novel. The character development is top-notch. Tillsley’s ability to hook a hater of the revered slow burn speaks to his ability as a writer. No matter what’s happening in this book, you will be entertained.