mammoths | Book Girl & Little Bear

The Mars House by Natasha Pulley

January Stirling is a principal dancer for London’s Royal Ballet until severe flooding has him looking for refuge. When offered a chance to immigrate to the Tharsis colony on Mars, he gratefully accepts. But once on Mars, his employment options are limited to heavy labor, as he is Earthstrong, and must wear a device to keep him from injuring the tall, slender, and frail naturalized citizens, except in his small apartment or while working in a factory. Unwilling to go through a risky naturalization procedure, January is stunned when Senator Aubrey Gale offers him a very unusual job.

While January is male, citizens on Mars, incubated in a uterine replicator, don’t label themselves with a gender. Religion is also not practiced on Mars, though many immigrants celebrate their traditional holidays. Gale is running for Consul, head of the Senate, and needs January to help their image. An unusual dust storm leads to a power shortage and the need to either build a new solar array, with the workers wearing heat suits, or to accept help from China in building a nuclear reactor.

Gale loves linguistics and their aides warn January that Gale will speak on the topic at great length. On Mars, a variant of Mandarin Chinese is spoken, along with some Russian and English. In my favorite part of the book, Gale shares that with technology, they can communicate with a herd of mammoths, who are enormously tall in the low Martian gravity.

The house in the title is huge, and has an indoor bonsai garden, a koi pond, some very high ceilings, and in places a glass floor. January often sees a person who may be a ghost, but who is never mentioned by anyone else. January finds Gale fascinating, even as their views on naturalization are very different, and January is still suffering a bit of culture shock.

Pulley is known for her Watchmaker novels, beginning with The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, which I remember as having elements of steampunk fantasy and time travel. I found that trilogy highly unusual, but excellent. Mars House is wondrous, charming, and unlike any other Mars books I have read.

Brenda

Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

In this engaging combination of armchair travel and popular science, author Childs gives readers a glimpse into the Americas during the last Ice Age, from about 30,000 to 11,000 years ago. In his travels across the Americas, especially Alaska, to explore key archeological sites, he travels alone or with assorted companions, including his mother, archeology students and their professor, and his two children. He kayaks in the north Florida swamps, camps overnight in below zero temps and on the way to Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert, finds mammoth footprints in the American West, and meets with scientists and Native scholars.

A number of questions are considered, not all of them answered. When and how did people arrive in the Americas? Did they walk across the Bering land bridge, and/or journey in skin boats along the coast? Did some people come from Iberia, now Portugal and Spain? What large animals did they encounter, and what did they eat? How did they travel during expanding and receding glaciers, and during sea rise? Tools and weapons were made from materials that were routinely carried for hundreds of miles, which indicated travel and trade. Mammoths and mastodons were common, then rare, and finally extinct as the climate changed. What was the significance of a mammoth hunt during different eras? Childs visits deserts, cliffs, caves, rivers, and coasts, describing how they look now, and what they probably looked like 11,000 to 25,000 years ago to early human travelers. Lots of research, amazing travels, and compelling writing make for a very appealing read. The illustrations by Sarah Gilman enhance the reading experience.

Readalikes include The Sun is a Compass by Caroline Van Hemert, Hudson Bay Bound by Natalie Warren, The High Sierra by Kim Stanley Robinson, and The River: A novel by Peter Heller.

Brenda