Exiles
By Mason Cole
Penguin Random House
The three astronauts on the mission to be the first humans on Mars don’t even get to the surface before the trouble starts. They enter the Martian atmosphere wrong, half crash-land in a spot not quite where they’re supposed to be. It’s a stroke of luck that they make it to their base before the oxygen in their tanks runs out.
The base is there because robots were sent to Mars first to build it, to get ready for the humans. But something’s wrong with the base. Something’s even more wrong with the robots. And, it turns out, the humans aren’t doing so great either.
Exiles, by Mason Coile — a pen name of Andrew Pyper, an acclaimed and bestselling Canadian author who died in January at the age of 56 from cancer — deftly weaves together science-fiction and psychological horror to tell the story of a first mission to Mars that goes south fast. The unease begins with the astronauts themselves, who are aware that they’re on something of a slow-motion suicide mission. As Dana Gold, who serves as the story’s narrator, puts it at the outset, “we’re going to Mars and never coming back. If all goes according to plan, the three of us … will be the first humans to live and die on a planet other than Earth. A history-making triumph for some, a bleak honor for others.”
Gold goes on to confess that she’s not entirely sure why she signed up for the mission. “I know it doesn’t make sense, to come this far without a good reason,” she narrates. “Which is why I haven’t shared it with anyone — my crewmates or Mission Leader or the battery of psych quizmasters testing our resolve. Sometimes I think I’ve come all the way out here to find out.”
Her crewmates, Blake and Kang, have equally inscrutable reasons. Gold muses at one point that Blake may have joined because he’s angry at the universe for taking his wife away from him too soon, but Blake himself says that’s not so, and offers no further explanation. Kang, meanwhile, doesn’t operate with quite enough self-awareness to have a great reason. “He’s just another tough guy,” Gold relates, “a man who thinks his inability to refuse a dare is the same thing as fearlessness.”
The sense of disconnection among the crew is mirrored in the situation they face. The base, called Citadel, was supposed to be functioning fully upon their arrival. Instead, it bears signs of having been under attack. The two robots at the base, Shay and Wes, have vacillating stories as to who the attacker is. It could be the third robot, Alex, who has gone rogue. It could be an alien life form. The evidence is too scanty to support either story. Compounding the distrust, the robots seem to have gone off their protocols. They have given themselves names and genders, two things that robots aren’t supposed to be able to do. And it’s possible that they are concocting stories — fantasizing? lying? who’s to say?
Coile sets up the playing pieces for his plot fast, and puts them in motion with great dexterity. In the ways he makes the pieces collide — the details of which shouldn’t be spoiled — Coile follows in the tradition of plenty of horror, thriller, and science fiction writers before him who use a workout of a plot to explore big themes incisively, movingly, and unpretentiously.
An early theme settles on AI. Part of the public discourse about it right now centers on the unpredictability in its development and how it will be used, now that it’s been out in the world for a while. Coile fast-forwards to the end of a certain line of thinking about it, which then dovetails into a larger theme about what happens when you place any thinking creatures, organic or inorganic, in an extreme situation. The more extreme it is, Coile suggests, the more we’re forced to adapt, improvise, and create, for better or for worse — and the more the secrets nobody wants to tell eventually emerge.
Exiles has the fleet, complex plot that a science-fiction thriller demands, full of gaspable moments, twists and turns, and hair-raising situations, with the parts in between often laced with sharp humor — making for an entertaining read. Coile also takes full advantage of the fact that we’re seeing the story through the eyes and thoughts of one of its characters. The situation on and around the Martin base, in which the astronauts must work through lies, confusion, and some shocking violence to get to the truth, has its mirror in Dana Gold’s journey into herself. At the beginning of the book, Gold says she doesn’t have a good reason for going to Mars. As the extremity of the situation forces her to confront her past, we discover there is indeed a reason. Was she lying to herself about it? Was she hiding it from us, the readers? It’s an open question.
Again, without my giving anything away, in pursuing the questions in Exiles, Coile isn’t afraid to get a little hallucinatory, leading to some of its finest, most harrowing moments (centering on our narrator’s past) and a profoundly satisfying surprise (centered very much on the surface of Mars) that feels like the most open question of all.
That Exiles turned out to be a posthumous publication lends an additional weight. The author’s wife Heidi wrote in a post on the Andrew Pyper/Mason Coile website what he “hoped the book would evoke: the vastness of distance, the courage of exploration, the unease of the unknown.” Those ideas “spoke to the story and, I think, to something personal too. A sense of heading into the far reaches — alone.” In dealing with the end, with our mortality, we don’t get to know what the answer is. But sometimes we get to decide how we face the question.
