Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 8, 1990 TAG: 9007080244
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Science fiction writers have produced thousands of stories about flights to Mars, but Terry Bisson puts a new twist on the idea. In the near future in this novel, the entertainment industry reigns supreme - NASA, for instance, is a subsidiary of Disney. And a hustling movie producer wants to use some of NASA's old hardware still floating in space for the first human flight to Mars - not to explore a strange new world, but to make a movie.
He assembles a team including a retired astronaut and woman cosmonaut to ferry a pair of movie stars to the red planet, where a cinematographer is to shoot enough images of them for a newly developed video synthesizer to recreate them doing whatever the eventual script demands. The recommissioned ship's crew also includes a doctor ("Please don't call me Bones"), who has developed a hibernation technique for humans on the long trip, and a stowaway girl.
The tale seems partly a homage to Robert Heinlein's 1950 movie, "Destination Moon," from its last-minute getaway as bureaucrats try to scuttle the flight to its climax with a fuel problem that might force one of the crew to stay behind. But this story is overlaid with humor as mergers and takeovers among the voyage's backers on Earth keep the explorers wondering for whom they are working during periodic communications with home.
Bisson, whose previous "Talking Man" involved a car junkyard dealer who turned out to be a demi-god and "Fire on the Mountain," which was an alternate world post-Civil War story, has yet to repeat himself, and here he has shown that Mars can still be the focus of a first-rate space opera.
by CNB