Escape to Mars

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Flight to Mars is a 2007 published science fiction - novel of the Austrian writer Herbert W. Franke .

action

In the 23rd century, a crew of eight flies to the planet Mars . There she is supposed to visit a Mars station built 200 years earlier by the Chinese (and soon abandoned) and recover the insignia of the last Chinese imperial dynasty allegedly stowed there. The entire expedition is filmed with television cameras to provide the material for a reality show .

In the course of the novel, Franke tells the history of the mission and its participants by means of flashbacks: After an East-West conflict (only hinted at), a world government with an artificial intelligence nicknamed "Barbie Brain" at its head, which governs dictatorially . Criminals, as well as those who criticize the regime and people with genetic defects, are considered to be “non-conformists” and are subjected to various therapies (such as surgical interventions in the brain). With the exception of two people, all participants in the mission had a negative impact on the regime.

After a few minor incidents, the crew managed to get within a few kilometers of the Mars station with their Mars rover, but ran over a mine and had to cover the rest of the march on foot. A little later, Ramses, the self-appointed leader of the expedition, reveals the purpose of the mission: An asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, and in the absence of any means of rendering it harmless, Ramses decided to evacuate a few people to Mars.

For one night stay in inflatable tents almost all participants are in excess of swarm intelligence operative robots overpowered and taken to said station. Only two people remain (Alf and Sylvie), who use a trick to gain access to the station.

Events roll over at the station: The treasure to be recovered is not imperial insignia, but several tons of the precious metal palladium , which the Chinese mined on Mars. Said asteroid bursts into pieces before the feared impact , but some of them hit the earth. Ramses wants as much of the palladium as possible and Linette (whom he intends to marry) to bring back to earth. He doesn't care about anything else. He murders three of his colleagues, but is brought down by the robots himself.

Suddenly it is noticeable that Ramses has started the countdown to the start of the spaceship, and so the remaining four space travelers have to rush to the ship under great time pressure to leave Mars again.

style

Herbert W. Franke's straightforward style, his penchant for psychological problems and the overly human, and of course his extensive experience as a cave explorer, which can be found in the descriptions of the surface of Mars, are also evident in this novel. Unlike Stephen Baxter, for example, Franke does not expect readers to have long descriptions of technical devices and other things. Only the first and last pages of the book are held in a strikingly pathetic and solemn tone.

Mentioned technology

  • As in many science fiction works, the astronauts are put into a kind of artificial hibernation ( suspended animation ) for the duration of the flight to Mars in order to save resources such as breathing air, food and drinking water and the negative effects of weightlessness on the reduce human body.
  • A flashback tells how Sylvie uses a brain-computer interface during her medical studies that uses electrical stimulation to transmit computer data directly to the brain.
  • The robots that kidnap parts of the crew are partly made of organic material, resemble gigantic grasshoppers and move around hopping.
  • The spaceship with which the eight people landed on Mars is automatically transformed into a kind of armored car with caterpillars that the crew uses to move around Mars.
  • For emergencies (if the Mars mobile fails), inflatable two-man tents with integrated heating are carried along, as they appear in the novel Titan by Stephen Baxter.

literature