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Even the strongest literary conventions, however, don't last forever. In Dan Simmons' much-praised recasting of the Iliad in his 2003 book Ilium, for instance, Mars is no more than some convenient nearby real estate on which to set part of the story. Kim Stanley Robinson's even more widely praised Mars Trilogy—Red Mars in 1992, Green Mars in 1993, and Blue Mars in 1996—treats the planet little better. These are superbly imagined accounts of the politics and science of colonizing another planet, and yet, there's almost an arbitrary quality about the planet Robinson chooses. The Mars Trilogy is astonishingly realistic, which is why the books won every science-fiction prize going when they first appeared, but they seem to lack any sense of the imaginative tradition that developed in the decades after Schiaparelli peered into his telescope. Where are the tall, thin, poetic aliens, dying as their planet dries? Where are their golden eyes and mystical powers? Where are their beautiful princesses? Where are their lost canals?
Give Joe Haldeman credit for this much: He's willing to swing back for a look at those old conventions. Not the canals or the princesses; there's a limit to how much old-fashionedness a story can stand these days. But in his latest science-fiction adventure, Marsbound, Haldeman gives us a straightforward, coming-of-age Martian story, right out of the good, old Robert Heinlein playbook.
Haldeman is that uncomfortable kind of author who never quite managed to cross over from success to actual influence. Born in 1943, he achieved considerable acclaim for the 1975 story The Forever War, his answer to Heinlein's pro-military Starship Troopers. Too much acclaim, perhaps. The book was read, at the time, as a profound commentary on the Vietnam War, though it wasn't particularly deep, and the praise may have inspired him to such over-inflated balloons as The Hemingway Hoax in 1990 and Forever Free in 1999. In more recent years, he's returned to Heinlein's form of young-adult novels with The Accidental Time Machine last year and Marsbound this year.
If The Accidental Time Machine was a recasting of Heinlein's 1957 time-travel story The Door into Summer, then Marsbound is a recasting of Heinlein's even-earlier Red Planet. Sure, the protagonist is a girl instead of a boy, but the book is structured around the same problem of growing up—together with the same problem of a young person forced early into heavy responsibility, and the same problem of an angry administrator who hates the protagonist for some hidden reason. Marsbound borrows from the later, sex-crazed Heinlein novels for a few of its more cringe-making scenes—does the 65-year-old Haldeman really think his lubricious musings explain the sex drives of 18-year-old girls?—but overall the book works well enough.
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