A lot of book reviews out there give you a brief summary of the story and a quick good, bad, and ugly snippet of what the book is all about. Well with The Marsco Dissident by James Zarzana, an English Professor here at SMSU, you will be hard pressed to find the bad and the ugly in this story.
It starts off with a young Lt. Tessa walking through what some would call a ghetto in our world. Zarzana does something really good with the beginning of the story—he doesn’t confuse the reader.
Lots of Science Fiction writers today either do a shotgun approach to introduce the reader to new technology in their world, where they just throw a bunch of different ideas at you with very little explanation. Some writers take so much time explaining a technology that it detracts from the story and you forget what it is your reading, a novel or a textbook. But Zarazana truly does something good here: he lets the characters explain the technology through their actions. You learn what finger discs do simply by watching Tessa access a computer, you learn that a MAG LEV is by watching her go on one.
The best example of this is when he goes into detail about the last war, where Prims armed with Enfield’s destroyed entire armies. He describes the how easy it is use a Enfield not by saying it is easy but by showing you it is easy, by showing how an untrained group of Prims only armed with shoulder rifles can take out entire armies. This is something that isn’t done nearly enough in modern Science fiction.
However, the best part of the story is the characters. Even if obscure ones like Rom that only last a few pages, when they are explained they are addressed with a level you would only expect to see in someone who has dozens of novels under their belt. Zarzana takes minor characters and turns them into real people. He doesn’t devote his attention to just a few characters and only mention the other ones, again going back to Rom, he spends an entire chapter just having the boy annoy two Marsco officers just to build the characters more. His plot fills the characters and when he works on them he is also progressing the plot. He never seems to spend entire paragraphs statically describing the charter, and then continue on with the plot like nothing was happening.
Professor Zarzana has found a perfect balance of what really makes a great science fiction novel. Plot, Characters, technology. None of three overshadow the others and they all seem to effortlessly happen at the same time. It truly is Nebulas and Hugo worthy. So if you haven’t cracked open, or I should say, turned on from your amazon app, you need to. It isn’t just a story meant for sci-fi genre; anyone could pick this book up and connect with the story inside.
