For five years now it had stood defiantly on its rocky bit of upland slope, the very picture of what a cozy country tavern on Mars ought to be: squat low dome grown all over with lichen patches most picturesque, except on the weather-wall where the prevailing winds blasted it bald with an unceasing torrent of sand, so it had to be puttied constantly with red stonecast leavings to keep it whole there. Mary swapped resources with the clan, with the laborers, with even a few stealthy British Arean Company personnel for fuel and food, and an economy had been born.
***
Barsoom Day came but once a year, at least for those colonists using Earth’s calendar; there was an informal arrangement wherein the twelve Earth months, cropped here and there to balance out, were repeated twice within the Martian year. The years in which December generally fell in summer were called Australian years, and the others weren’t.
This meant that sometimes the annual gathering under Settlement Dome took place at the height of Martian summer, with a pale-blue sky smiling Outside and hardly any winds; sometimes the shrieking gales of winter almost drowned out General Director Rotherhithe’s celebratory speech, and the luckless Hauler chosen to carry a pouch of water out to the original site of the first manned landing arrived there with a lump of ice to set before the commemorative plaque instead, and himself frozen too unless he dialed his psuit’s temperature up as far as it would go.
But Haulers were for the most part durable Outside, and who especially wanted to hear General Director Rotherhithe’s speeches anyway? The cramped Martian gravity cricket match (IT versus Clerical), squeezed in under Settlement Dome, was moderately fun to watch; though nobody really played very well, the betting was energetic. Afterward all parties who were still in a mood to celebrate tramped up the Tube to the Empress for a few pints and the closing ritual of the day.
Like Burroughs, Bradbury, Benford, Bear, Bova, Brackett, and even people whose names don’t start with ‘B’ like Kim Stanley Robinson, before her, Baker has planted her authorial flag on the red planet. The Empress of Mars is straight-up majestic.
5/5 stars
The Empress of Mars tells the tale (expanded from Baker’s Hugo- and Nebula-nominated 2003 novella of the same name) of the titular (and Mars’s only) tavern. With a conversational, tongue-in-cheek omniscience, Baker shapes the intertwined lives of the Empress’s proprietor, ex-xenobotanist Mary Griffith, her three daughters and their lovers, the cook (a heretic hiding out from the neopagan Ephesian Church), and patrons of the establishment (which include those stranded on Mars after the first colonization bubble, pumped up by the British Arean Company, deflates, and subsequent arrivals) into a rollicking frontier epic. The Griffith fam and their closest neighbors, Clan Morrigan of the Celtic Federation, are believable and sympathetic, and even nemeses like BAC bureaucrats and Ephesian Church Mothers Willow and Glenda, though cruel and obnoxious, aren’t monsters (as Baker reveals in this interview, the most sinister character in the book, Nennius, is a time-traveling cyborg from her rad-sounding Company series).
What really set The Empress apart for me, though, is this: if there exists a funnier Mars novel, I haven’t read it. Baker leavens the high-tech, high-stakes frontier drama with hilarious set-pieces and asides to the reader: Mary receives a notice of excommunication, “her name printed on the front in bloodred letters in the Font of Disfavor”, Nennius walks in on the Director General of the settlement jacking off to S&M holoporn (he later hears in Mother Glenda’s voice “the subliminal crack of a whip”), an Italian actor-turned-diamond prospector projects tumbleweeds and other “Wild West” cinema tropes onto the landscape around him, lots of heavy drinking goes on, and paragraphs like this abound:
Before her was Dead Snake Field, a stretch of rock distinguished by a cairn marking the last resting place of Cochevelou’s pet ball python, which had survived the trip to Mars only to escape from its terrarium and freeze to death Outside. Initial hopes that it might be thawed and revived had been dashed when Finn, in an attempt at wit, had set the coiled icicle on his head like a hat and it had slipped off and fallen to the floor, shattering.
Yet for all its zings at corporatism and organized religion, all its silliness and clever dialogue, The Empress, like the best Mars stories (or SF for that matter), is ultimately about transformation both personal and planetary. My first time Outside with Baker left me reeling with sense-of-wonder, craving more.
When I hit up a Company novel, or one of Baker’s other stand-alone Mars stories, as I plan to do soon, I’ll let yinz know how it treats me.
The Empress of Mars is available at the Carnegie Library.
Happy reading and cuídate.
