I was in the mood to read some science fiction. I was in the mood to read some new science fiction. And I wanted to sample what was in one of the latest issues of a science fiction magazine. Basically, I wanted to see where science fiction was at this moment. The first magazine I tried was the November 2023 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction and the first story I read was “The Ghosts of Mars,” a novella by Dominica Phetteplace. The spiritually minded say, “Seek and ye shall find.” That I did.

I love science fiction about Mars, and I love stories about robots, and since “The Ghost of Mars” has both, it might be one of the reasons why I loved this story. But it also might be because “The Ghost of Mars” is quirky, charming, and different. It vibrates with science fictional excitement, the kind I used to find as a teen — but that was an exceedingly long time ago. However, it is also different from the kind of science fiction I used to read. It represents the sensibilities and desires of today’s young people. Plus, it throws in more science fictional ideas per paragraph than anything I’ve read in a long time.

It takes a while to learn this first-person story is told by Paz, a sixteen-year-old girl who has been left on Mars by herself. Most of the other colonists have died or left, but Paz can’t leave because to travel back to Earth would kill her. She was born on Mars, and with deformities that make her fragile. Her mother, and the few remaining colonists who have raised Paz, have cancer and are rushing back to Earth for treatment. They all hope to return, so they haven’t completely abandoned Paz. And besides, she has a horde of robots at her command.

Phetteplace begins with a mystery and embeds several more into “The Ghost of Mars” as the story unfolds. Unexplainable events occur which some of the colonists have jokingly explained with spooky ghost stories. Paz was raised by astronaut scientists and is very logical and intelligent. But along the way, she’s heard about religion and other supernatural explanations that taint her thinking.

Mars appears to be jinxed, which inspired paranoia in all the colonists, but each colonist had their own flavor of irrational thinking depending on their upbringing on Earth. Back on Earth, the news gets constantly worse. We live in terrible times, and I’ve often wondered how young science fiction writers will deal with them fictionally. Phetteplace showed me.

There’s a lot of things about life on Earth that suck now, and it comes through in “The Ghost of Mars.” Phetteplace’s story is both satire and political commentary, as well as aspirational of the old dreams of science fiction. She knows that colonizing Mars is a bad idea but like most science fiction fans want to do it anyway.

“The Ghosts of Mars” reflects Heinlein’s save yourself by-your-bootstraps philosophy, but also Clarke’s appeal to higher alien power, and good old mysticism, transcendence, and even religion. “The Ghosts of Mars” really is everything but a kitchen sink story when it comes to ideas. Being all over the place should have been a negative, but since the protagonist is a sixteen-year-old it’s realistic, and a plus.

There are so many ideas being thrown out in “The Ghost of Mars” that I thought about making a scorecard. I don’t want to mention them all because it’s part of the fun, but “The Ghost of Mars” is the kind of story Galaxy Magazine ran back in the 1950s that tried to explain everything with science fictional crapology. And that’s not a ding, but a praise. This story is the kind of story that Jack Isidore would have loved in Philip K. Dick’s Confession of a Crap Artist, my favorite PKD novel.

James Wallace Harris, 11/13/23