Author: Joseph R. Lewis, who has written several books, one of them is the Heirs of Mars.Description: Let me quote Joseph (from his site):
Asher Radescu was the last human to come to Mars, but he didn’t find the romance and adventure he craved. Instead, he lives in a truck delivering supplies to frontier habs and secretly builds neural clones to keep civilization from collapsing. When an android bounty hunter discovers that Asher is one of the people responsible for the dangerous cloning technology, the entire population of Mars is threatened with annihilation. With the help of underground cloners, resurrected colonists, android defectors, and one gorgeous racing celebrity, Asher must end the first war on Mars before the violence consumes them all.
My opinion:
The science-fiction is always about what if. Heirs of Mars has three what ifs.
- What if there was a colony on Mars, people trying to survive in the grim living conditions?
- What if clones would be possible to create? Not the grow-from-human-cell type, but the transfer-human-personality-to-artificial-body type.
- What if it would be possible to give human spirit to machines?
Actually there is a fourth point to this:
- What if these all come together in Mars?
Each of these ideas are worth to write a book about, and their mixture adds another layer to the story. There are several conflicts of interest, which make the book more interesting. The population is dropping, and the only solution seems to be the cloning. The androids want to kill the cloners, because cloning technology threatens their existence. The clones are not like human copies, but more like plastic dolls, so not every colonist likes them. The clones' personality is created in similar way than the androids', so they are not so far from each other. Oh, and some androids sympathize with the humans.
Complicated? It is not so when reading the book.
The characters are rich, well drawn, I could easily empathize with them. Besides the human emotions, I found interesting to see inside of the dilemmas of clones and androids.
There is a lot of action, which makes the book a page turner.
There are two small issues I need to mention. In the beginning I was a little bit confused about who is who and who does what, but later it became clear. And I expected a higher level crisis at the end of the book instead of more, relatively smaller ones during it. (Maybe it's just me, affected by Hollywood scenes.)
Format / Typo issues: nothing worth to mention.
My rating: I give it four stars. I give five stars to books which leave me amazed, considering the story and how they are written. The Heirs of Mars almost made it. Definitely worth the money.
