RUNAWAY HUMANITY

An ailing human scientist on a Mars colony faces mental and physical horrors during an expedition to her supposedly desolate home planet in Valentine’s SF novel.

In 2030, Earth’s atmosphere is eroding, which leads to mass extinctions. The surviving remnant of humanity travels on spaceships to Mars, where they gradually dig into the red soil to escape deadly Martian radiation and maintain stifling, subterranean colonies. Married doctors Shelby and Drake Hilton are among the heroic pioneers of the Mars Administration of Space and Extraterrestrial Research. Now withered in their 60s in the 2060s, the still-prominent couple are ordered by MASER president Alex Wilson on what seems like a suicide mission: return to the supposedly dead Earth to investigate why long-range scans indicate microbial life in the biosphere. Not even Shelby’s terminal ovarian-cancer diagnosis stops Wilson from forcing her to make the trip, and Shelby later realizes that she and another female scientist onboard have long been betrayed and abused by men. Earth, it turns out, is exhibiting more animal/plant/mutant life than MASER told the crew, but things do not improve for Shelby, who experiences horrific trials. Valentine, in his author bio, describes himself as a “drag queen superstar author” and “the face of the marriage between the serious, introspective nature of writing, and the campy, flamboyant nature of drag.” This novel’s narrative tone is dead serious rather than campy, even during climactic moments of prose delirium. Still, there are elevated emotions in this work, which features bondage, sexual assault, murder conspiracies, and other horrific acts committed by disgusting men (human and nonhuman) against women and against the Earth; there’s even a rather cryptic reference to Donald Trump and his Mar-a-Lago resort. The story features a hyper-acceleration of climate-change anxiety, even in an age of numerous “cli-fi” works; also, untypically for SF, the story focuses on older characters, which is an intriguing commentary on the genre in itself.

An often-gruesome speculative yarn in which male malevolence predominates.