In short, staccato chapters Bova swaps between individuals on Mars, with their rivalries and manoeuvres; with the remaining backers on Earth and an increasingly independent Moon base; the politicians who juggle the funds; and the officials of the New Morality movement who manipulate the politicians. A few individuals, like the Jesuit archaeologist who wangles his way to Mars, cross between religion and science, though, like Monsignor DiNardo, only to cause problems they have not foreseen. Meanwhile, the archaeological dig beneath the Martian surface goes deeper, for a long time finding nothing, and at the potential risk to all other experiments being performed, by taking away staff resources that might make the planet more habitable.

Surely Bova, in his clashes between science and religion, and between individual and collective responsibility, is not unique? He is, though, one of the first to treat them in such an atmosphere of scientific realism; something he has continued to do since he wrote MARS in the early nineties. On the other hand, even ignoring figures such as the New Morality leaders who have figuratively lobotomised themselves, individuals supposedly at the heights of their powers show surprising shallowness of thought: DiNardo, the Jesuit, is overwhelmed by the thought of a race which God allowed to be wiped out, as if no one has considered it before, when the same concept drives, for instance, the most memorable section of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (“’So careful of the type?’ but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, `A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go’” leading to the famous lines about nature red in tooth and claw). Those, written even before Darwin published ORIGIN OF SPECIES, seem horribly relevant and contrasting, and not just because the cliff houses of the Martians are the centre of the discoveries. I wished MARS LIFE could go as far, in its own way, as that Victorian vision.