Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

“Mars is ghost country.” (Annabelle Crisp)

An alternative history can be the launch pad for a ripping adventure yarn. The tradition is old and may seem played out, but, as a counter to that feeling, one of my favorite novels of the last decade is Paul Park’s underappreciated All Those Vanished Engines (Tor, 2014). Park’s book tells a slanted history of the US Civil War and its aftermath in which every detail, the entire universe honestly, is similar but not quite the same as the real version we know. The northern states have a Queen. There are tunneling machines that use technology not available in the 1860s. The resolution of the war is the antithesis of Lincoln’s aims. For me, there is an uncanny quality to a speculative alternative history done well. Part of the work for the reader is a butterfly-effect-style extrapolation of consequences, opening possibilities for things to happen other than the way they did.

Reading Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange, one immediately thinks of another story like this, which is Ray Bradbury’s 1950 novel The Martian Chronicles. Bradbury’s book is a series of stories connected by their common situation and theme: the exploration and settlement of Mars. It’s a connection Ballingrud wears on his sleeve. In his Acknowledgements section, he thanks many people and says, “Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the writers whose influence is all over these pages. The Strange is a love letter to Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Frank Herbert.” His agent was asked to sell the novel as “The Martian Chronicles meets True Grit.” The comparison is an apt one with some qualifications I’ll get to below.

His heroine Annabelle Crisp lives on Mars. She is thirteen years old when the story begins. Like Mattie Ross from Charles Portis’ True Grit, she speaks directly. The Strange is broken into 3 sections, and the section titles are in her voice. Part One: What Happened to Me. Part Two: What I Did About It. Part Three: The Consequences Thereof. She and her father live in the Mars town called New Galveston. It is something like an old West locale mixed with a mid-20th C. American small town. Her father runs the greasy spoon Mother Earth Diner. Since the planet’s settlement, ships have gone back and forth from Earth carrying needful things and people. When Annabelle’s maternal grandmother becomes gravely ill back on Earth, Annabelle’s mother makes a trip back (solo) and leaves her husband and daughter behind. After she leaves, an event known as The Silence occurs, leaving all communication with Earth cut. No ships return. Her mother’s absence is devastating. Her father becomes a lost soul. Their only consolation is a set of recordings they have of her that are stored in a cylinder that can be played by Watson, their robotic kitchen engine who works in the diner and by comic relief steals many scenes.

Ballingrud quickly gets the situation established with an easygoing, descriptive style. Here is an example of his scene-setting.

What I remember most about being a girl during the first year of the silence was the terrible presence of the saucer. I could see it from my bedroom window in our little hab, and I would stare at it sometimes in the evening, as the sky opened up to the stars, drawing out crowds of earthgazers. The saucer rested in a declivity just beyond the border of the town. Its dome rose above the low metal roofs of the habs like a squat silver hill, reflecting the light of the setting sun. Sometimes Mr. Reilly, its pilot, would go inside and fire up the engines–just to keep them in working order, he’d say. When he did that, the lights around its circumference would ignite in bright blue radiance. The light reflected from the sides of the habs, making New Galveston look like a handful of blue diamonds dropped in the desert. (Page 15).

Annabelle goes on the road towards danger when the beloved cylinder with her mother’s voice is stolen during a hold-up at the Mother Earth Diner. Like True Grit’s Mattie Ross who goes out seeking her father’s murderer, Annabelle rushes forth with all the fire of an avenging angel. She is explicit about this in her plain, forceful style.

The truth was I had no desire to barter or plead. It was my ambition to descend upon their camp like an angel from hell, burning them all down to the soles of their shoes. I had no idea how I’d do it, but I was determined to leave that place a smoking ruin. (Page 106).

Annabelle has not seen much of Mars beyond New Galveston before she sets out. There are other towns, she knows, and maybe remoter settlements, but she learns more about them, and the book slowly unspools Martian history for the reader in exposition that is well-paced and never simply dumped like a bucket of sand. She’s meets an intriguing cast of helpers along the way. There is always tension since Annabelle does not respect adults as a default. The respect when given is hard won. I laughed at some of the phrases she uses to talk about adults. Some are in the comic vein of Charles Portis’ style.

I was in no mood for the prevarications of the adult world. (page 58)

Or

Adults were meddlesome people, and I wouldn’t be able to walk ten yards before somebody would want to know my business. (page 50).

Comedy is not Ballingrud’s strength as a writer. Here is why I think the comparison to True Grit rings a little false. Portis was a once-in-a-generation comic genius, and as much as the story of Annabelle Crisp resembles that of Maddie Ross (if we’re talking about plot structure), the prose in The Strange does not do the same things as its predecessor. The strengths of The Strange are in the weird imagery of sci-fi horror.

The novel gets its title from an ore called the Strange (it’s capitalized in the book). The ore is mined for its particular usefulness.

The Strange–that miracle ore–was hacked from the Martian rock and sent back to Earth, where it was processed into a substance that we could add to our Engines, giving them personalities–the illusion of intelligence. (Page 32).

The Strange impacts the people who work the mines in Dig Town. It turns their eyes green. It also gets into their minds. As some characters speculate, it is as if Mars is alive through this miracle element and spreads its consciousness out through the human settlers and the robots it infects. Every aspect of Annabelle’s journey after she leaves New Galveston is impacted by the effects of this mysterious substance. She and her quest companions see ghosts in the desert. Ballingrud has fun with these manifestations and lets his style run.

Something like a centipede as long as a wagon train undulated over the peaks, turning over itself, looping in great, sweeping circles. It looked for all the world as though it were in a state of joy, as though it were cavorting like a filly in a field. Its body was black. Long, cruel-looking spines ran along its back, coruscating with flickering colors arcing between them like electrical charges. It moved in complete silence, running over the dunes with as much ease as I might tread a wooden floor. (Page 139).

Later, as Annabelle begins to sense what might be going on, after hearing the speculation of others who have spent more time around the Strange, she offers a succinct theory.

If Silas and the Moths were right–if Mars was itself a sleeping mind, stirring to consciousness through our presence, grasping for understanding through our Engines and even our own bodies–then these apparitions were just figments of that memory, and walking across this world was like walking through the cobwebbed hallways of an ancient brain. (Page 219).

The plot of the novel is satisfying. It offers several reversals and surprises that a review should not spoil. The atmosphere and the tone, anyhow, are ultimately the joys of this fun novel. If you like Ray Bradbury or Treasure Island, you’ll find a similar yarn here. And though it takes place on Mars and runs like a Western, this is a ghost story. Annabelle would agree. Here she is near the end of the novel (Page 236).

I was struck by an image of Mars as a vast haunted house, its interminable tunnels infested with ghosts, the very rock of which it was made deranged by malignant intent. We’d made our little stations here, planted our foolish flag, and sent fragments of that evil rock back to Earth to fuel the Engines there–quaint Kitchen Engines like Watson making dinners, big work Engines building cities, delicate vanity Engines serving us tea in our homes so we could pretend we were little kings and queens. Feeding our obsessive need to tread where we were not wanted and turn the world in service to us. We’d sent this phantasmal rock to Earth, and the Silence fell over the world.