Review: The Mars House

The Mars House by Natasha Pulley
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I admit I kinda thought this would be an interesting sci-fi romance, a sort of Red, White, and Royal Blue in space situation (I say having not read RWRB beyond checking out little snippets of it during my bookstore days when the book was first super popular). Boy oh boy oh boy was I wrong, and when I checked back against the blurb and realized that this was more akin to a romance between an oppressed minority and a racist ruler, I noped out pretty quickly.

Judging from other one star reviews for this book, I sure as hell dodged a bullet. A lot of those reviews go into serious detail about how the book is actually massively racist against Asians, especially Chinese people, and very clumsy in its attempt to depict a post-gender society, so much so that it actually manages to cause offense on that level as well. It's definitely not the first modern sci-fi novel to try to pay lip service to progressive ideals on gender - I still think about some others I've read, like Mary Robinette Kowal's The Spare Man where every character is addressed with gender neutral honorifics regardless of their actual gender, which I thought was a strange choice at best.

But a lot of one star reviews on this book say that these issues appear to be pretty common to Pulley's work in general, suggesting that she's got a habit of fetishizing gay men and Asians in particular, and that she has a lot of internalized misogyny because her female characters are almost always negative stereotypes. In this book, these same points present with an achillean romance (where the love interest is nonbinary because their culture insists on it), an attempted antiracist allegory that manages to come off like a parody of the reverse racism that leftists always say doesn't exist, and a general dearth of women characters (again, due to the strict anti-gender post-gender nature of Martian society, leading to criticism that the book is not only misogynistic but also bioessentialist and therefore transphobic.)

Like I said. Bullet dodged. Time to move on to other, better material.

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