Review: Red State Mars, by Travis Corcoran

Texas In Space

You can’t take the sky from me…

If you’re familiar with Corcoran’s Aristillus books, wherein successful engineers build their own “Galt’s Gulch” on the moon, only to be attacked by jealous collectivists from the Earth, you’ll recognize similar fingerprints on Red State Mars. There’s even an early Easter Egg where a Martian colonist 3-D prints a spacesuit for a dog (long story.)

From there, Corcoran blazes a new trail with this story, one that occasionally runs parallel to his lunar escapades, but overall heads in a new direction…

The Story

The main narrative takes place in 2126, and is bracketed by brief glimpses into 2176, 50 years after the events of the story. A century into the future, five American/Texan families have built domed cities on Mars and while they’re still several generations away from terraforming the planet, they’re thriving.

A while back, separatists from China did the same thing, building domes a short distance away in the same valley. Everything is chill until one day new officials arrive from China to upend the status quo and make impossible demands of the American domes. The Americans rely on trade with the Chinese for critical goods, so they can’t just sever ties, but they don’t want to roll over and surrender either.

What comes next is a soft analog of the Mexican-American War, in space, with futuristic technology and long-term ramifications for the Red Planet and Earth.

It’s a hefty book, tipping the scales at over 600 pages, but Corcoran has a very blue-collar approach to his prose which makes it read well at pace. There are times when I wished it could have been a little bit poetic, as opposed to feeling rather blunt, but that may have just padded the word count. He focuses a lot on the hard science of it all, so you get a bit of an Andy Weir treatment, but people actually punch and shoot at each other in Red State Mars.

The Characters

The American families are all hearty frontiersmen, and that brings a fair amount of testosterone and guff with it. These people don’t always get along but if they’re going to survive the tidal wave of Chinese military power, they’ll have to figure all that out. There are five families to track—Mackenzies, Newcastles, Hollinses, Atkinses, and Hyltons—and their names can run together from time to time, but Corcoran clearly keeps track of who’s who throughout the book. They’re likeable when they can be, and when they have to embrace their bastardry it’s at least understandable in the context of the story.

At the end of the day, you want them to win, and they’d be right to do so. The stakes of their survival kept me invested as the story unfolded, whether it was on the Martian surface, up in orbit, or back on Earth, as the American government figured out how to respond to the unfolding events on Mars.

The World

It’s our world, post WW3. While it exists downstream of our history, Corcoran isn’t writing analogs for our modern day. Yes, you have individualists versus collectivists to some degree, you’re just not getting “Tronald Dump” leading the Republicans and “Hamala Karris” leading the Democrats. He sets up timeless challenges in a way that feels believable.

There’s also a lot of thought put into the application of future technology. 3-D printers and “computational feedstock” as a staple resource feature heavily in the day-to-day lives of the Martian colonists, and its use as a trading commodity directly affects the story from the get-go. A.I. has only proliferated and each family uses an instance of it in their own way. The Chinese also have a future iteration of their eugenics policies and genetic modifications which, again, directly affect the story.

Politics

Corcoran is a libertarian from New Hampshire and his novels reflect that. The end.

Content Warning

The combat scenes are violent, the deaths are tragic, the profanity is abundant, and the slurs are not spared.

Who is it for?

If you ever wanted Robert Heinlein to punch you in the teeth and question your testosterone levels, Red State Mars is for you.

Why buy it

Do you want to read about Texans taking a break from barbecues and 120-yard football games to fight Chinese tyrants with their homemade rock-crawlers and low-gravity artillery? Because I do.