A hidden gem! ( )

Chinese, Eurasian, Russian and American teams have established a colony on Mars. It's built into existing lava tubes under the surface, where they grow crops with grow lights and mechanical harvesters and tenders, in the intersection of the four pods, under a sealed dome. Shortly after the opening of the story, nuclear war breaks out on Earth, with key cities destroyed, all over the planet. It's not clear who bombed who, but all the colonists are ordered back to their respective tubes, and suspicion of each other stops any cooperation. A resupply ship scheduled to land and replenish the colonists' supplies, additionally bringing another 3D printer, is reported by the computer systems to have missed rendezvous. But the protagonist has her doubts, so she takes a river out on an unauthorized trip to the landing site, and nearly dies, as the life support systems show a nearly drained battery when she has the return trip still to make. It looks like sabotage, and back in the colony, members start dying. Now the colonists start questioning who started war on Earth, and who is killing colonists on Mars? ( )

Okay, I try not to be too negative in my reviews, but this one was just…. not good. In most ways mediocre, and in a few ways truly bad.

The writing is full of cliched phrases, cultural stereotypes, and weird overexplanations. The pacing is really odd-- some plot elements are skimmed over, but the characters never seem to act with any real urgency. Cawdron often seems to be striving for something like Andy Weir’s detail-rich problem-solving sequences (no doubt the hope was fans of The Martian will be drawn in by the orange-tinted helmet glare visor and Martian landscape on the cover) but I read nothing to show he has any more command of the technicals than what could be obtained from Wikipedia. Some of the infodumps in the early parts of the book are mildly interesting, but the insistence on reusing that trick once we’re theoretically in the high-stakes endgame can be seriously off-putting.

No character in the story seems fully developed-- we get a few sentences of backstory and personality when they’re first introduced, and then everything they do is consistent with that introduction. Jianyu is relaxed and dependable. Michelle is emotional. Vlad is... Russian. (One character’s main personality trait seems to be just that he swears a lot, which is bizarrely treated as a big deal and constantly commented on, though he never gets worse than a “fuck”, rarely worse than a “damn”, and never more creative than a “what the hell?”) It’s hard to see any evidence of how anyone feels about or relates to each other, except what is relayed through bland exposition. Many of the characters and factions distrust each other at various points in the story, but never really to the extent of truly fighting, or sabotaging each other, or even ceasing communications.

In general, nothing packs an emotional punch. Moments that could be seriously creepy, tense, or atmospheric are quickly punctured and deflated by straightforward description and quick progress towards the next plot point. Most of the time our narrator, Liz, seems to neither have a handle on the situation nor really be out of her depth in an interesting way-- she just keeps trucking slipshod through the plot until we stumble into the conclusion.

Overall: the basic premise, including the big twist, are theoretically interesting, but the book pretty much entirely fails to execute on its potential.

Oh! One last thing. Please someone explain this to me-- why does being in retrograde mean they have longer communication delays with Earth? I thought that Mars being in retrograde coincided with opposition, when the two planets are relatively close... This may genuinely be something that I’m misunderstanding, so please let me know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Cawdron thinks that “opposition” means Earth is on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, not that Mars and the sun are on opposite sides of Earth. On the other hand, a character does say at one point that they’re fifty million miles from Earth, which is pretty close…. I don’t know, guys. I just don’t know.


Some quotes that really killed me:

“I’d like to, but I’m too polite-- too nice. I can’t swear like Harrison. When he swears, it sounds natural, almost as though cusswords are the norm; for me, it would be crude and forced.”

““Hit me with the spray,” Connor says. “I’ll hit you if you don’t do as you’re told,” Anna says sternly, playing on his words.”

"I wonder if the feed is still live. Live. What a concept. Life. Death. They're such abstract ideas, really."

“In a matter of a few minutes, I’ve pulled myself out of my gloom.” (Context: The gloom she was pulled out of was a result of a nuclear strike hitting her hometown on earth, several close friends dying, and a new threat on the rest of her fellow astronauts. She felt better because she thought about what soccer would be like in Mars gravity.)

“My chest heaves as a knot forms deep inside. A knife seems to plunge through my heart, twisting as it’s driven deeper.”
“He’s been dead for hours. I sob. I feel like a knife has been plunged into my heart.”
“As well meaning as he is, his words cut like a knife plunging into my heart.”
"My heart aches. Driving a knife into my waist and slowly twisting it around could not cause me any more pain than I feel." ( )

Ich denke, es ist unvermeidlich, dass Habitat von Peter Cawdron mit Andy Weirs Der Marsianer verglichen wird, hatte Andy Weir doch damit einen spannenden und mitreißenden Hard-Scifi-Roman auf den Markt geworfen.

Peter Cawdrons Habitat kann, was den Hard-Scifi-Teil angeht und die Spannung durchaus locker mithalten. Die wissenschaftlichen Details sind schon überragend und vermitteln eine glaubwürdige Vorstellung davon, wie das Leben auf dem Mars für Menschen aussehen könnte, wenn es die Menschheit in den nächsten paar Jahrzehnten schaffen sollte, einen Fuß auf unseren Nachbarplaneten zu setzen. Das Setting ist atemberaubend. Die Kolonie auf dem Mars faszinierend.

Es gibt vier Module, die um eine überkuppelte Nabe angeordnet sind, in der ein geschlossenes Ökosystem geschaffen wurde. Die 120 Wissenschaftler und Ingenieure leben und arbeiten zusammen, bis sie eines Tages eine Nachricht erreicht, dass auf der Erde ein Atomkrieg ausgebrochen ist. Schnell beginnen alte Denkmuster zu greifen und die Schuldfrage hängt über allen. Schuldzuweisungen, Verdächtigungen und Misstrauen greifen um sich.

Als Leserin erlebt man die Geschichte durch die Augen von Liz, einer Amerikanerin. Während ich es löblich finde, dass wir eine Protagonistin für diese Geschichte bekommen, so ist Liz doch genau der Punkt, in dem Habitat nicht mit Der Marsianer mithalten kann. Zu sehr wiederholen sich Liz‘ Gedanken und Beobachtungen. Zu naiv wirkt sie an manchen Stellen des Buches. Irgendwie ein bisschen zu sehr gewollt und nicht gekonnt. Die anderen Figuren nehmen kaum wirklich Gestalt an und können sich auch durch ihr Handeln kaum in den Vordergrund drängen. Zu sehr haben mich Liz‘ Ausführungen und Grübeleien davon abgelenkt.

Doch nicht nur auf der Erde herrscht Krieg. Auch auf dem Mars gibt es sehr bald Tote. Die Auflösung, was dahintersteckt, möchte ich hier nicht näher erläutern. Ich bin selbst noch hin- und hergerissen, ob ich sie gut finden oder als bereits ausgelutschtes Stilmittel abtun soll.

Durch das Nachwort weiß ich, dass Peter Cawdron hier schon einiges an Denkarbeit hat einfließen lassen, deswegen wäre es eher unfair, ihm vorzuhalten, dass schon andere diese Idee zu oft hatten. Sein Umgang damit im Rahmen der Geschichte bringt keinen direkten neuen Ansatz, aber der Twist funktioniert für die Geschichte sehr gut und ist in meinen Augen auch die einzig logische Möglichkeit.

Fazit:
Habitat ist ein guter Hard-Scifi-Roman. Für mich waren die Figuren, allen voran Liz, eigentlich seine größte Schwäche. Mir ist dabei aber auch bewusst, wie schwierig es ist, der wissenschaftlichen Genauigkeit gerecht zu werden und gleichzeitig eine spannende Geschichte mit interessanten Figuren zu erzählen. Hard-SF-Fans kommen jedenfalls voll auf ihre Kosten. Und dafür eine klare Leseempfehlung. ( )

Good characterization and seemingly-strong science (seemingly only because I'm no scientist and wouldn't know one way or the other) are done a disservice by an under-developed "villain"/conflict. The book is short, at under 250 pages, so perhaps a few more pages to allow the plot to really develop would have been helpful. ( )