Mars

Exiles

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by Mason Coile
First sentence: “The beeping won’t stop.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: September 16, 2025
Review copy thrust on me by a co-worker who loved it. Spoiler: he was right.
Content: There is swearing, including multiple f-bombs, and two very grisly murders. It will be in the Science Fiction/Fantasy section of the bookstore.

It’s the near future, and humanity has decided to colonize Mars. They’ve sent some bots ahead to build a base, and three humans – Beck, Kang, and Gold – have been chosen to start a base there. But, when they come out of suspended animation (it’s a long seven-month trip, why stay awake?), the bots that were supposed to greet them aren’t responding. That’s the first clue that something… unusual… has happened. As the humans get to the base, they find parts of it destroyed, and some irregularities with the bots. And, as the mystery unfolds, they realize that the problem is larger than they could have ever imagined.

Oh, wow, this was intense. It’s being billed as gothic horror in space, but I felt like it was less horror and just good, straight-up science fiction. It’s a tight book, coming in at just over 200 pages, and it’s pretty flawless. The twists were genuinely surprising (well, I’m also not the closest reader), and it’s a clever look at what might happen on Mars (spoiler: it’s not good). Anyone who loved Murderbot will love this one as well.

Remarkably well done. (Maybe I should read William?)

Last Day on Mars

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by Kevin Emerson
First sentence: “Many hundreds of light-years from the solar system you call home, inside a spindly crystal structure floating at the edge of a great nebula shaped like an eye, a yellow light began to blink.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There are some intense life-threatening situations and several deaths. It’s in the middle grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Imagine this: in the distant future, the sun starts to expand, eventually getting so big that it makes living on earth impossible. Thankfully, humans have had a bit of time to prepare, so they decamp to Mars, where they find a planet in a distant solar system that should support life, and work to create a terraforming system. But, now, the sun’s expansion has sped up, and Red Line — the deadline to leaving — has arrived.

I’m going to interject here that I was a bit suspect about this one. It starts with aliens, and it leaves a lot explained at first, but trust me: stick with this one. I read it in one sitting, once I got into it, and it was an incredibly intense experience. I could NOT put this one down.

It nominally follows Liam  and Phoebe the kids (not siblings) of the last scientists left on Mars. They’re on the terraforming team, and want to get a couple last experiments in before Red Line. Except what starts out as boring gets really interesting really fast when things start going wrong. And after Liam and Phoebe discover proof of alien life.  It’s up to them — for some very intense but plausible reasons — to get off the planet and to join the spaceship headed for the new planet. But things don’t go as planned.

This is a first in a series, and I’m totally on board with Liam and Phoebe and their adventures. So very good.