At this time, Mars boasts good-sized and well-established scientific research stations that are closing in on the secrets of the Martian past. Carter Carleton, 63 years old and expert on such matters, is conducting a dig at Tithonium Base, an encampment of some 200 of his fellows. His discovery of a fossilized Martian vertebra has the potential to revolutionize our understanding. (And on a personal level, his romance with Doreen McManus, transplanted moon resident and nanotech expert, might just convert Carter from an old bachelor curmudgeon.)

But circumstances on Earth appear likely to foreclose any further investigations. Back on the homeworld, Jamie is fighting for the sheer survival of the Mars project. The U.S. government, under pressure from the fundamentalists known as the New Morality, has eliminated funding. Millionaire Dex Trumball, always sympathetic, has reached the bottom of his wallet. And now the Vatican wants to send a scientist-priest, Monsignor DiNardo, to Mars to vet the whole affair for spiritual value.

Eventually, many of the Earth-based protagonists end up on Mars (Jamie and his wife Vijay make a stop on the moon first, to solicit aid from the feistily independent Selene community), where a last-ditch scenario to save humanity's bold frontier venture is thrashed out.

The way things will be on Mars

Any realistic fiction set on our crimson sister planet has to labor in the broad, powerful shadow of Kim Stanley Robinson's landmark trilogy, and, to a lesser degree, under the gaze of Ray Bradbury's work as well. Bova nods respectfully in both directions. As hard-nosed and realistic as Robinson, he nonetheless does not go into as much minute concrete verisimiltude and extrapolation as that author. And while we get a tincture of Bradbury's trademark romanticism—especially when the glyphs of the Martians eventually deliver some meaning—Bova is never sentimental or soppy.

What he delivers—in this novel and the whole series—is rather a kind of hybrid of the big mainstream panoramic drama—the kind of best-seller an Arthur Hailey or an Irving Wallace once wrote—infused with pure SF elements. His shifting cast of lightly sketched characters from all walks of life (embedded here in short, punchy chapters with alternating points of view) waltz through plots that are heavier on journalistic elements than on melodrama. For instance, there are no real villains in this novel, just people with opposing honestly held worldviews. A Martian meteor strike happens with little fanfare or consequence. And a riff like the Monsignor DiNardo one is never fully exploited for any explosive drama, certainly failing to reach the Blishian potential of its premise. The entire tone of this novel is one of level-headed, sober-sided speculative reportage, lightly en-narrated.

I suppose this authorial tone and angle of attack make for a certain ideological and programmatic sense, in that Bova seems intent on teaching us how the future should and must become, if humanity is to prosper. But along with the fact that he's jumped all around his future history unsequentially, giving to what should be some of his surprises an already-happened feel, this narrative strategy makes for a read whose foundation is big and solid, but whose superstructure is more mundane and pedestrian.

You'll probably come away from this book saying, "Yes, I can see this happening someday exactly as Bova outlines." But you won't say, "That was a truly enrapturing adventure."