{4.5\/5} “Rent tended to be cheap out on the rim, despite being the only place where you could get uninterrupted views of the vast Martian plain — people preferred to live near the center, if they could afford it, so that they could see something human instead of the vast unchanging monotony of the world that had crushed their dreams.”<\/p>\n
Red Planet Blues<\/strong> by Robert J. Sawyer, published in 2013<\/p>\n Alex Lomax is a detective on Mars. Cassandra Wilkins hires him to find her missing husband Joshua. Both Cassandra and her husband had recently transferred their consciousnesses into new artificial bodies. Alex finds Joshua’s body — it looks like he committed suicide. But then he discovers that Joshua never transferred his consciousness into that body — so where is he?<\/p>\n This novel is an expansion of Sawyer’s story “Identity Theft.”<\/p>\n It may not have quite as many big ideas as some of his books, but it’s highly enjoyable.<\/p>\n Sawyer hypothesizes that if there were fossils on Mars there would be a fossil rush — like a gold rush in the old days. The book is about the people who are looking for fossils, and the other people who live in the domed city on Mars.<\/p>\n