Martian Sands

by Lavie Tidhar

1941. An hour before the attack on Pearl Harbour, a man from the future materializes in President Roosevelt's office. His offer of military aid may cut the war and its pending atrocities short and alter the course of the future. The future. Welcome to Mars, where the lives of three ordinary people become entwined in one dingy smokesbar the moment an assassin opens fire. The the mysterious Bill Glimmung. But is Glimmung even real? The truth might just be found in the remote FDR Mountains, an empty place, apparently of no significance, but where digital intelligences may be about to bring to fruition a long-held dream of the stars. Mixing mystery and science fiction, the Holocaust and the Mars of both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, Martian Sands is a story of both the past and future, of hope, and love, and of finding meaning-no matter where-or when-you are.

Genres: Science Fiction, Audiobook

1 pages, MP3 CD

First published March 1, 2013

About the author

Lavie Tidhar was raised on a kibbutz in Israel. He has travelled extensively since he was a teenager, living in South Africa, the UK, Laos, and the small island nation of Vanuatu.

Tidhar began publishing with a poetry collection in Hebrew in 1998, but soon moved to fiction, becoming a prolific author of short stories early in the 21st century.

Temporal Spiders, Spatial Webs won the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury competition, sponsored by the European Space Agency, while The Night Train (2010) was a Sturgeon Award finalist.

Linked story collection HebrewPunk (2007) contains stories of Jewish pulp fantasy.

He co-wrote dark fantasy novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv. The Bookman Histories series, combining literary and historical characters with steampunk elements, includes The Bookman (2010), Camera Obscura (2011), and The Great Game (2012).

Standalone novel Osama (2011) combines pulp adventure with a sophisticated look at the impact of terrorism. It won the 2012 World Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Campbell Memorial Award, British Science Fiction Award, and a Kitschie.

His latest novels are Martian Sands and The Violent Century.

Much of Tidhar’s best work is done at novella length, including An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2010), British Fantasy Award winner Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God (2011), and Jesus & the Eightfold Path (2011).

Tidhar advocates bringing international SF to a wider audience, and has edited The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012).

He is also editor-in-chief of the World SF Blog , and in 2011 was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award for his work there.

He also edited A Dick and Jane Primer for Adults (2008); wrote Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography (2004); wrote weird picture book Going to The Moon (2012, with artist Paul McCaffery); and scripted one-shot comic Adolf Hitler’s I Dream of Ants! (2012, with artist Neil Struthers).

Tidhar lives with his wife in London.

Reviews

[Ellison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clever and well written homage to Philip K Dick. He is developing ideas here that he will use in Unholy Land. They are thoughtful ideas about the existence of Isreal and Jewish history.

[Stephen Theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Martian Sands (PS Publishing, hb, 224pp), Mars has been settled. The New Israelis are governed by a succession of simulacra, Jewish leaders of the past recreated to act as figurehead prime ministers, but their new Golda Meir isn’t sticking to her programming. “Something is fundamentally flawed with reality,” she tells Miriam Elezra, the woman who commissioned her. There are rumours of time travel experiments, rumours the reader knows to be true having already seen Bill Glimmung in the Oval Office on December 7, 1941, the day before the first death camp opens, offering weapons to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in return for preventing the Holocaust. And yet on Mars we see that Bill Glimmung is a character from the film Martian Sands, “Elvis Mandela’s second masterpiece”. Carl Stone, who built the Golda, has four arms, two extras grafted on to reflect his status as “a Martian warrior, reincarnated in an alien world”. His Revolutionary Brotherhood of Martian Warriors share Barsoomian dreams, visions supposedly sent by their emperor. The most mysterious beings on Mars are the Others, artificial intelligences sometimes ferried by compliant humans, sometimes controlling host bodies. All roads lead to a remote kibbutz in the FDR mountains, the same kibbutz to which Josh has just made the kind of manure sale that could do wonders for his career.

Fans of Philip K. Dick will spot several tips of the hat here – “The Empire Never Ended”, time out of joint, and Ubiquitous Cigarettes (Ubiks for short) – and the quirky cleverness of combining Dick’s themes with the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs might lead people to expect a light-hearted book. It often is, for example in a sequence in which intelligent bullets jostle in a gun, but the book is dedicated to the author’s grandparents, “the ones I knew, and the ones I didn’t”. Despite the risks inherent in the New Israeli attempt to change the course of history, if it were possible, would they be justified in trying? Other writers have portrayed old, decadent Earths ruled by nobles who remain after all others have left, but Tidhar explores, here and in other stories, a related but striking idea: that space could be colonised by the poor and unhappy, who might leave our relatively comfortable home planet in search of better lives. Martian Sands is the work of a serious writer who writes entertainingly, who can be funny, political, speculative, provocative and charming, all at the same time.

The author has mentioned a sequel on Twitter, though he thinks it might be too weird for publication. I’m not going to pretend I understood everything that was going on in Martian Sands, especially towards the end – it’s the kind of book that would repay a second reading, and a tutorial or two wouldn’t hurt – but I would love to read a sequel that was even weirder. Tidhar writes equally well in several genres; Cloud Permutations and Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God were, I thought, both excellent, but so dissimilar that one would be hard-pressed without title pages to identify them as the product of a single author. It seemed to me when reading Martian Sands that for Tidhar “classic science fiction” in the style of Silverberg, Brunner and Dick’s novels of the sixties is just another genre to which he can turn his hand as ably as he does all the others. In some ways that’s almost galling (“Here’s a Hugo winner I made earlier!”), but I hope he does it again.

[Konstantinos Georgokitsos · Rating 4 out of 5]

An homage to P.K. Dick and especially his book UBIK. You can almost feel the pulp paper through the e-reader screen (ha! wouldn’t PKD have liked THAT?!?). Disturbing and disorienting in its deconstruction of reality - that is obviously a euphemism for "I'm not sure if I was able to follow the plot" - it also has references to Tidhar's own work and interests. As I said, you will love it if you like PKD and/or Tidhar. I did.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Totally bizarre. Totally riveting in places. Tidhar is one of the best writers writing today, but he's also a little all over the place. If I was going pick one of his 2013 books to read, it would the brilliant VIOLENT CENTURY. This one not quite to my tastes.

[Robbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well that was fantastic. The writing was excellent and the characters well drawn and likable. The world it was set in was really interesting: a far future Mars barely tied to the Earth at all and having developed its own cultures and religions alongside the legacy cultures from Earth. It was a surprisingly complex plot given the length of the novel. And somehow it worked and didn't seem cheesy. It referenced Philip K. Dick's Ubik, which has been on my TBR list for a very long time and I suspect it may take heavy influence from because it does have a bit of a PKD feel to it. Fortunately, my library has it available and so I guess I'll be reading that next.

[Scot Wilcox · Rating 2 out of 5]

lol wut

That's my honest reaction to this book. I have no idea what happened or what's going on. It's Edgar Rice Burroughs, Harry Turtledove, Ray Bradbury, The Matrix, Wizard of Oz, and Humphrey Bogart made into a smoothie and then thrown at the wall. Like, cool, I guess? I kept reading it, hoping for some kind of ending that'd make this make sense, but nope. The prose is good, the themes are interesting, the setting is great, but the plot is a big ole pile of the aforementioned lol wut.

[Tyler · Rating 2 out of 5]

Martian Sands is set on a future terra-formed Mars and three people get mixed up in an assassination attempt. The focus is not on the science and circumstances of living on Mars, but the characters and their place in the metaphysical world.

It had a strong start, told in it's whimsical and pulp style, but just got a bit too uneven and weird towards the end, and didn't hold together too well for me. 2.5

[Brandon Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I couldn’t decide whether to give this book 3 or 5 stars. One of the criteria for 5 is that I can’t stop thinking about it. However, one criteria for 3 is that some elements feel poorly constructed and this book feels like that too. Went conservative.

[Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bunch of nods to Philip K. Dick, in style and through direct quotes. Also to Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars books.

[Charl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never really got into it, maybe it's just too far outside my wheelhouse. It was okay, and I did finish it, but I skimmed a lot.

[Shane Cole · Rating 1 out of 5]

What was the point of this? Could not finish. Drivel.

[Zivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished reading Martian Sands while spending a weekend at a Kibbuts about 4.5 km away from Kibbutz Dorot.

This is one of Lavie Tidhar's tighter books. Not just because it's relatively short, but because there is more sense to the chaos of ideas, pulp fiction and pop culture references that permeate Lavies writing style.

Despite references to events in other novels, this is a stand alone book. Though the mix of history, alt histories, dreams, fictions and realities will make your head spin.

[Andreas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Humans have settled on Mars. Strange events begin when rumors about a "time machine" start to spread. Everyone knows that such a thing is simply impossible but investigations start to find out what's really going on.

This is a weird novel that has a strong Philip K. Dick feeling. I truly loved the most of the first part, it sucked me right in had a lot of the elements I like in P.K. Dick books. At the end of part 1 the style changed. I don't know if there was a special intention by the author. There is more jumping around and a lot of repetition of words that I found very annoying.

Example:

And he missed. He, he missed!
...
The - the weakness - the fear and confusion and hurt - they were gone, and in their place was anger, not a specific anger but one aimed at - at everything, at the universe, ...

This made the 2nd third hard to enjoy although the author introduces some interesting ideas. The final part was quite perplexing and I am not sure if I have understood everything. In my opinion the book suffers from over-ambition. It looks like the characters want to break out without understanding why or for what, and they are guided (manipulated?) by outside forces. Compare this to Philip K. Dick's books like Ubik, Martian Time-Slip or A Maze of Death. His characters always felt real and the reader believed what he saw through their eyes. There was never a need to mix things up, it just happened naturally.

I guess my expectation was too high for this book, especially after the strong beginning. It would be interesting to know if the author has struggled to finish the book or if everything worked out as planned. If the latter is the case then I am afraid I am not compatible with his style.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I absolutely love the style Tidhar was shown with *Osama* and now *Martian Sands*. Pulpy without being trash. It's fast and clever. It doesn't bog down or draw out for 600 pages. In particular, I was struck by how quickly characters come to life in the book - by carefully tweaked archetypes quickly become familiar. Perhaps it is the pulp style that lets Tidhar get away with this. Like *Osama* it tackles a sensitive topic from conventional and unconventional angles - and rather than wrap the discussion in allegory, it instead transplants the actual discussion to a novel setting. I didn't find *Martian Sands* to be as profound (perhaps jarring is a better word) as *Osama* but it was just as fun (and at times confusing).

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reviewed this for the Jewish Standard at http://www.jstandard.com/content/item/mars_needs_golda/28124. In short, a delicious resurrection of Philip K Dick.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another solid outing from Mr Tidhar. Glad I picked it up when I was in London. Now I'm really looking forward to getting my copy of his new book.