"Mars" by Ben Bova (1992)

I'm not entirely sure whether Ben Bova or his "Grand Tour" books qualify as "lesser-known" or "underrated," as they do seem to have quite a few fans within the SF community. But I will say that "Mars" by Bova does seem to receive less attention, at least, than similar titles like Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy (winner of two Hugos for best novel) or Andy Wier's "The Martian" (which is fantastic, but far too popular to review on this page).

If you're not familiar with them, Bova's "Grand Tour" series focuses on the future history of humanity's expansion into space. You can read them in chronological order, from early efforts to colonize the moon and create space stations to the expansion further out into the solar system, or in publishing order, or as standalones. There is a book, or sometimes a brief series, for each planet in the solar system, as well as some for moons and other bodies, to the tune of almost thirty novels so far. And yes, there is one called "Uranus," and don't pretend you weren't going to ask.

"Mars" seems to be a popular starting point for new "Grand Tour" readers like myself. It reads well as a standalone, though there are at present two sequels, "Return to Mars" and "Mars Life." While at first it looked like it might be very similar to Robinson's "Red Mars," I found the differences striking.

"Red Mars" is popular with readers of Hard SF who are most interested in scientific realism. It's almost a Mars colonization textbook, with a style to match. Bova takes an opposite approach. He discusses the science, and he understands the science, but his story is really about the people involved. For me that's what makes a truly compelling story in any genre, including science fiction.

Yes, some astronauts and scientists land on Mars. Yes, they explore and there's plenty of science involved. And they discover some things and it's all very sense-of-wondery. But in fact, surprisingly little of the not-insubstantial thickness of this book is spent in the present timeline of the Mars explorers. The majority of the book is flashbacks, which are used primarily for character development.

Now, if you look at reviews, most of the people who don't like "Mars" complain either that too much time is spent (wasted?) on character development (these will be the fans of "Red Mars"), or that the character development just isn't very good. I think there's an argument for the latter, especially if you don't finish the book. For one thing, in keeping with grand SF tradition, the female characters are mostly underdeveloped (literarily, not physically, of course), and a number of them seem to exist only to have sex with the male characters. But they do have advanced science degrees, mind you! And they will happily put the things that the men discover under microscopes and look at them. The other problem seems to be common to a lot of early '90s SF books. They want to embrace diversity, so they insert a bunch of characters from different cultural backgrounds, but then each character comes across as more of a Wikipedia page of basic facts about their culture than as a person. Many of the characters in "Mars" were looking this way to me at first. The Russians were very Russian and did very Russian things, the Americans were very American, the Chinese were very Chinese, the Japanese were rarely seen (I don't think Bova knew what Japanese people are supposed to be like), and the American Indian main character could have been shedding a solitary tear in an environmental public service announcement. But after everyone got their flashback time so we could learn a bit more about them, and went through their character arcs as they discovered the mysteries of the red planet, they started to unfold into three-dimensional individuals and to surprise themselves and the reader, and the result was quite impressive.

All in all, I found "Mars" to be an entertaining and quite realistic vision of a near-future first mission to Mars, with a good balance of mystery and payoff, and would recommend it to SF readers who want to dig further into the psychological aspects of mankind's expansion into space. I'm looking forward to reading "Return to Mars."

And no, there's no "Return to Uranus." Stop it.

Read this one if: You like exploring human beings as much as other worlds

Consider skipping if: You just want the sciencey bits, or you'll be turned off by a bit of cultural and gender stereotyping

Mars: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Canada, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble