Joe Haldeman's Marsbound

I like Joe Haldeman. He is a go-to author for me. I buy anything that he writes and I always seem to like it. Marsbound is no different. I happened to nab a hardcover of this one afternoon on a lunch break. There is a little comic/sci-fi shop down the street from where I work... I stopped in to by some little star wars models and ended up with Marsbound too!

What I liked about this book was the coverage around extended space travel. If humans do travel to Mars, it is a multi-month (or multi-year) affair... so dealing with the passage of time in that small of space requires certain psychological attributes as well as technological distractions.

What I enjoyed most was probably the thoughts about non-biological beings... and what those beings might seem like to us... silicon based... with the ability to think at the speed of light yet move physically at a speed we can't even comprehend as it is so slow. To them, we seem like fruit flies... born, living and dying in a blink of their eyes.

I plowed through this sucker in two sittings.... one on the plan got me half way through in a few hours... and another few hours I finished it out. A good sci-fi speed read.

Comments

[Matt Stratton]

I'll have to give that a try. I've liked the two Haldeman books I've read before (The Forever War and Mindbridge) and I have The Accidental Time Machine on my Kindle, but haven't read it yet.

(Sidenote - why can't I do italics on this? Grr...)

[Matt Stratton]

I finished Marsbound the other day (I also read The Accidental Time Machine a few days before). Both of those books I read on the Kindle.

I have to say, I do like Haldeman's earlier stuff better than the more recent books...both Marsbound and ATM seemed very...rushed to me at the end. He built some interesting concepts and ideas...and then seemed to hurry up and wrap it all up very quickly and I felt somewhat unsatisfied.

[Trapper Markelz]

Yeah I can see that... I mainly get into it for the ideas though... if he can introduce unique twists on existing concepts, that is often enough for me to get some enjoyment out of thinking about those concepts for a few days afterwards.