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What happens when your dream mission to Mars is a reality TV nightmare? This debut science-fiction romp with heart follows the tradition of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles with a dash of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
For the six lucky scientists selected by the Destination Mars! corporation, a one-way ticket to Mars―in exchange for a lifetime of research―was an absolute no-brainer. The incredible opportunity was clearly worth even the most absurdly tedious screening process. Perhaps worth following the strange protocols in a nonsensical handbook written by an eccentric billionaire. Possibly even worth their constant surveillance, the video of which is carefully edited into a ratings-bonanza back on Earth.
But it turns out that after a while even scientists can get bored of science. Tempers begin to fray; unsanctioned affairs blossom. When perfectly good equipment begins to fail, the Marsonauts are faced with a possibility that their training just cannot explain.
Irreverent, poignant, romantic, and perfectly weird, David Ebenbach's debut science-fiction outing, like a mission to Mars, is an incredible trip you will never forget.
"Ebenbach imagines the first pregnancy on Mars in this gentle, domestic sci-fi novel of a reality show gone interplanetary...funny, fresh, and winsome." - Publishers Weekly
"[D]elightfully unconventional...The story has a strong sense of whimsy, but Ebenbach also creates depth by exploring issues like engineer Stefan's feelings of estrangement and violence and Jenny's guilt over her sister's suicide years earlier. A poignant examination of what it means to be human." - Kirkus Reviews
"The poignancy of the impossible pregnancy is the Bradbury touch, the reality show framework carries fingerprints of Douglas Adams, and the handbook provides a Vonnegut-esque struggle with the paradoxes of the human condition. How to Mars is Andy Weir's The Martian (2014) infused with poetry in a superbly concise package." - Booklist
"David Ebenbach's new novel wittily dismantles the classic space adventure story. In it, the first colonists on Mars struggle not only with the technical and existential challenges of living on another world, but also with much more familiar conundrums: boredom, cabin fever, a crazy coworker, an unplanned pregnancy, corporate incompetence. Funny and wonderfully inventive, How to Mars is equal parts an absurdist cautionary tale and a warm-hearted exploration of those things, good, bad and indifferent, that make us human." - Emily Mitchell, author of Viral Stories
This information about How to Mars was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Ebenbach, the author of seven books of fiction (Miss Portland, The Guy We Didn't Invite to the Orgy, Into the Wilderness, Between Camelots), poetry (Some Unimaginable Animal, We Were the People Who Moved), and essays (The Artist's Torah), lives very happily with his family in Washington, DC, where he teaches creative writing at Georgetown University.
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