We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Mars House by Natasha Pulley, a queer science fiction novel about a marriage of convenience between a Mars politician and an Earth refugee—out from Bloomsbury on March 19.
In the wake of an environmental catastrophe, January, once a principal in London’s Royal Ballet, has become a refugee in Tharsis, the terraformed colony on Mars. There, January’s life is dictated by his status as an Earthstronger-a person whose body is not adjusted to lower gravity and so poses a danger to those born on, or naturalized to, Mars. January’s job choices, housing, and even transportation are dictated by this second-class status, and now a xenophobic politician named Aubrey Gale is running on a platform that would make it all worse: Gale wants all Earthstrongers to naturalize, a process that is always disabling and sometimes deadly.
When Gale chooses January for an on-the-spot press junket interview that goes horribly awry, January’s life is thrown into chaos, but Gale’s political fortunes are damaged, too. Gale proposes a solution to both their problems: a five year made-for-the-press marriage that would secure January’s future without naturalization and ensure Gale’s political success. But when January accepts the offer, he discovers that Gale is not at all like they appear in the press. They’re kind, compassionate, and much more difficult to hate than January would prefer. As their romantic relationship develops, the political situation worsens, and January discovers Gale has an enemy, someone willing to destroy all of Tharsis to make them pay-and January may be the only person standing in the way.
January didn’t sleep much, not because he was worried about the flood, but because nobody had any saline solution and he had to throw away his lenses. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get home half blind. He lived in Hackney, which was over the far side of the city, and he hated the idea of asking anyone to help him get there. Most of the company were just like Terry; still children really, and though everyone was incredibly kind, it was asking too much.
He jolted awake because somewhere close by on the canal, a lonely flood siren was going off, but muffled; he had a feeling that the angry lady who ran the coffee shop on the corner had stuffed a tea-towel in it.
He got up carefully. Everyone was asleep on the floor, bundled up in nests of blankets and cushions stolen from the nice seats in the auditorium. He skirted the edge of the room, not at all able to tell if he was about to step on a person or just a suggestively shaped ball of bedding. When he got to the window, he had to stare for a long time to put together what he was seeing, blurred as it all was.
The canal water was right below the window. Covent Garden had flooded up to the second floor, and all around it, people were sitting on roofs.1
It was still raining. Opposite, a man he usually only ever saw dressed in a suit, getting cross into a phone at the café, was sitting on a fold-up chair under a bivouac, cooking something on a gas stove.
A puffin was sitting on the windowsill, looking just as interested to have found a January as January was to have found a puffin. Puffins were always much tinier than he imagined, and the markings on their faces made them look sad, but this one seemed cheerful. It had some fish. It must not have minded people, because it waddled across to sit by his arm. He was wearing black; maybe it thought he was just a giant puffin.
In a bright orange canoe, just opposite him on the canal, Always Angry Lady from the café lifted a hand. He only knew it was her because she always wore the same yellow head scarf.
January waved. “Hi. Anything on the news?”
“Horrible disaster, emergency services in crisis, everyone at Westminster’s fucked off to fucking Manchester,” she said.
“Right. Where are you off to?” he asked, in case it was a sensible idea everyone here could copy.
“See if I can get a boat out to Peterborough.”
He didn’t know anyone in Peterborough. With a lurch, he realized that he didn’t know anyone anywhere but here. His mum’s vineyard in Cornwall had been sold to a French family with a poodle and triplets. They knew him by sight, because her grave was on the edge of the land and he visited it sometimes, but that was it.
“Good luck,” he said.
“Fuck it all,” she said, and paddled off.
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The Mars House
He jumped when, somewhere over the rooftops, something exploded. It was a deep bang that juddered the skeleton of the building. The puffin jumped too, and whirred away.
The conductor touched his shoulder. “Internet’s gone,” she said. “I think we need to get out and find out what’s going on. And some food. There’s twenty-five people here.”
“How?”
She pointed downwards. There was a lost rowing boat bumping against the wall. After a murmured discussion with the director, they climbed down into it, January to row and the conductor to navigate.
Without much hope, they tried supermarkets first. Everything was flooded. The front doors were underwater. They had to give up. Instead, they concluded that what was needed was to find some people who might know what was going on or where you could get help.
As always, there were beacon lights punching up to the storm clouds above St Paul’s Cathedral, and hologram signs to say that you could find shelter there if you had nowhere else. It would have news screens too. The two of them hesitated, because it was a long way to row, but it was downriver and the current would carry them toward the cathedral, at least.
By the time they guided the little boat up to the great bulk of the cathedral, January’s hands were raw, even where he had wrapped his sleeves over them. Away from the silt of the Thames, the water here was very, very clear, and blue; he could see right down to the ancient steps, thirty feet below the hull.
Plenty of other people had had the same idea, and the way in was crowded—the vast doors formed a bottleneck as people had to slow down to duck under the arch of the portico—but it was eerily quiet. The only voices came from the high screens projecting the news down into the gloom of the aisle, and the thousands of little boats floating there. The muted light from the stained glass windows patterned people and water in colours. January and the conductor eased their boat into a space close to a statue of a saint which, when it had been set there, must have been twenty feet above the ground. Now, the water rippled around the hem of its robe.
The news was being projected around the inside of the great dome. Although there were speakers everywhere, it was hard to hear; the echoes were so severe it all sounded as though everything was being said twice, half a second apart.
The conductor, who had been standing up to direct him, sat down next to him now on the bench. In the boat next to theirs, an exhausted-looking man lifted his tiny daughter out to sit at the saint’s feet.
“… emergency restrictions banning all travel. Flooding is widespread beyond the capital, presenting a significant danger to life. The national rail network has suspended services across the south and southeast. The Prime Minister, who was evacuated to Manchester late last night, has pledged emergency aid to the capital as soon as possible.”
As soon as possible didn’t sound very soon.
On the way back to the theatre, the two of them broke into the top floor of a camping shop and stole gas stoves, torches, batteries, and everything else they could think of that might be useful. They found a supermarket on the upper floor of a shopping centre too, open and crowded, shelves emptying fast. He waited in the boat while the conductor hurried in, tense, because he had watched someone tip a girl out of her boat into the water to steal it two minutes before. Perhaps he looked big enough to be trouble, or perhaps there were just better boats around, but nobody tried anything. The sky was grey and quiet. Very quiet. There were no helicopters.
After a week, it was impossible to get enough food, and they rationed. Then they rationed more. Down the street, a lady who’d had the presence of mind to take a fishing rod onto the roof with her caught salmon and brought some around to everyone she could, but it wasn’t much. January had never been so hungry.
They spray-painted SOS—25 PEOPLE onto the roof, and all along the street, people did the same.
In fits and starts, most of the dancers tried to leave, just in case they still had a home to go to, but everyone came back pale and shocked, with stories of whole streets underwater. January tried too, only to find that the entire canal where he lived was sealed off, the water littered with dead sea birds. There were exposed electrical lines under there somewhere, a ragged emergency worker explained. It was a miracle he hadn’t been at home.
On the morning of the fifteenth day, he wondered for the first time if they might actually die here, if it had been stupid to wait so long, if they should all have found boats and rowed as far as they could while they still had the energy and the supplies.
The helicopter came two hours after that.
The crew spoke only Mandarin, and nobody in the company did apart from school-level stuff, but they managed to be reassuring all the same. The director put all the youngest kids on the first round, then was hustled onto the second herself. January was among the last. He was so exhausted by then that he could hardly hold on to the harness on the way up. At the top, the deck was already full of other rescued people, some of them ebullient and some, like him, numb with relief. He couldn’t make them out well. He still couldn’t see properly, and he was beginning to realize that he was going to be stuck like that for a while now. It didn’t matter any more. He let his head bump against the wall, listening to the roar of the engine. He had no idea where they were going, but as they veered away, he found he didn’t care, and when they landed at an airfield where people in orange jackets were handing out food parcels and blankets, he was so happy to see dry ground that he almost didn’t understand when a translator came around with a clipboard and asked if he would like to seek asylum in Tharsis.
“Where’s that?” he managed. He opened the food parcel, in which there was a wonderful, inexplicable packet of marshmallows. They tasted so good that it was hard to think. He offered the translator one. He had been looking around for the rest of the company, but he couldn’t see anyone. Other people were saying that the helicopters were taking different loads of people to different camps to try and even out numbers.
“Mars,” the man said gently, shaking his head at the marshmallow offer. “The Chinese colony? They’re funding this centre. Ships are coming, for refugees.”
Ships are coming. January hadn’t realized how used he was to the certainty that no one was coming, and no one ever would come, because they never did. To hear that they were—he didn’t even know what that swell of feeling was. Not relief, because relief implied somehow that you’d been aware of feeling bad before, and not even gratitude, because you were grateful when someone passed you the salt or when they remembered your birthday. That wasn’t what you felt when someone you had never met sent ships from another world.
Not far away, another translator was trying to dissuade a big family from travelling to Saudi Arabia. The coast guard there, she was saying, were turning back refugee boats. People were drowning. And don’t even think about trying to get a visa. They say they’re making visas available, but that means they’ll let about five people in and call it a day. No, it doesn’t matter if your mother’s already there. They don’t care. Half the world wants to get to Dubai. Unless you’re a rocket scientist, forget it.
January blinked hard and realized he’d lost the thread of what his translator was saying. His hearing had tuned out.
“Say again, sorry?” he said. It was bizarre, the fog in his head. He could only just peer through it at passing thoughts. Most of them were to do with marshmallows.
“We can get you going with the paperwork now,” the translator repeated, as if it were all normal. “They’ve made it very straightforward.”
January swallowed. “I can just—go? Just like that?”
“Just like that, honey,” the man said. “It’s disaster relief. And Tharsis always needs immigrants. It’s a big move, but honestly, no legal hurdles here. They really do want people. You won’t sit in some miserable camp for months, and there’s no restrictions on refugees working. There are restrictions on what Earthstrong people can do, but even so. There’s more work than they’ve got people to do it. Basic stuff, but—it’s work.”
“Earthstrong…?”
“The gravity there is only a third of ours. It can be pretty dangerous to let you just walk around when you’ve come straight from here.” The man hesitated. “Been a bit of a kerfuffle about it lately, but it’s still better than Saudi or China.”
It was the first time that January really understood that normal life was over. He had thought he might die, but he hadn’t thought about what would happen if he lived. London wasn’t going to recover. There would be no more theatre. There was probably no getting to other countries either; the floods must have displaced millions of people, which would mean millions pouring towards international borders. Those borders were already slamming shut.
The simple, stupid truth was that all he wanted to do was go where there was food and heat. He was aching less with hunger than a kind of shock that it was so easy for everything to just collapse, for life to go from boring visits to the café and wondering if it was extravagant to get hot chocolate instead of coffee, to—this. He felt like he would agree to anything just to make it stop, even though he hadn’t even had that bad a time and it hadn’t lasted very long, and actually he was fine.
He didn’t know the first thing about Tharsis, but he did know he didn’t have it in him to try and get to Riyadh or Lagos or Beijing. He wasn’t made of hard enough stuff for that.
And the famous thing about Mars was that there was no water.
That sounded pretty bloody marvellous.
“Yes please,” he said. “I’d like to go.”
Excerpted from The Mars House, copyright © 2024 by Natasha Pulley.
- To foreigners, it seemed stupid for England to have a capital city that spent most of its time sinking, but the fact was that most of London—when it was built—was only ever about four metres above the level of the Thames. The lofty hills of Bloomsbury and Mayfair (a whole thirty-eight metres above sea level) still had to have canals. Unfortunately those canals also tended to flood the moment they saw some rain, which was usually, much to the ire of the people who owned the increasingly devalued town houses, and much to the joy of the local octopus population, who then gained access to some pretty exciting wine cellars. ↩︎
