So sometimes when I go to sleep, I listen to old radio programs. Stuff like “The Red Skelton Show”, “Abbot and Costello”, “The Great Gildersleeve”, etc. My favorites are “Gunsmoke” and “X Minus One”, a science fiction anthology. This is like a combination of those two. Think of the forties/fifties fascination with Mars (e.g. War of the Worlds, John Carter of Mars) believing it could hold alien life. Combine that with the “new frontier” setting of Westerns. It looks like hard science fiction, but there’s nothing hard about it. It’s got robots and spaceships. It doesn’t go into a fifty-page essay about how the oxygen reclamators work.

On the surface, it’s a weird Western. It’s “True Grit” meets “The Martian Chronicles”. But the deeper you go, it becomes science fiction horror. The only horror movie I can think of taking place on another planet is Ghosts of Mars, a terrible movie with Ice Cube and Natasha Henstridge fighting zombies. All the rest take place in space like Alien and Event Horizon. (I guess Aliens does take place on a planet, but it feels more like an isolated facility.)

For a novel, it’s short. 76,000 words. There are times where I’m reading what the main character thinks of so-and-so character, so-and-so other character, the situation she’s in. It’s like a pattern: action-analysis, action-analysis. Scene-sequel. And I’m like “DO something.” Like the author’s trying to make a word count.

It’s pretty good. Not great, not exceptional. I picked this up because both Justin McElroy and Mike Krahulik recommended it. The concept is better than the execution, but not by much. I guess this guy has mostly written short stories before this. This is his first novel, and it’s a good first novel. (Certainly better than mine was.) The guy just needs to brush up on his style to not be so “thoughtful” to make my taste.