By Stuart Nulman for Curtains Up!
For his 23rd book, prolific best selling novelist Robert J. Sawyer decided to combine the literary genre that he is best associated with – science fiction – with the genre that he enjoys reading a lot – hardboiled detective mysteries – and the end result was “Red Planet Blues”.
“Science fiction and mystery are both about appraising the rational thought process, in which you puzzle out what is going on; it’s a much more natural pairing,” said Sawyer, during an interview back in April following his appearance at Paragraphe Books’ popular Books and Breakfast series. “Red Planet Blues tries very hard to be a mystery novel as it is a science fiction novel.”
The novel takes place on the planet Mars while it’s in the midst of the greed and frenzy of the Great Martian Fossil Rush. Alex Lomax, the sole private eye serving the Martian frontier town of New Klondike that sprung up during the rush, is hired to solve the cold case murder of the rush’s original prospectors, Simon Weingarten and Denny O’Reilly. While investigating the case, Lomax comes across relentless lawlessness, and the fine line between the “artificials” and the “biologicals”, where individual DNA and identity are just as a hot commodity as those much sought after Martian fossils.
An admirer of mystery novelist Dashiell Hammett – who wrote “The Maltese Falcon” – Sawyer really wanted to capture the essence of classic noir fiction of the 30s, 40s ad 50s, which he regards as a uniquely North American genre of fiction. But he didn’t want his lead protagonist Alex Lomax as a futuristic reflection of such classic hardboiled gumshoes as Sam Spade or Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. “Alex Lomax is not your classic tough guy private eye who doesn’t care about anyone or anything. He has a little bit of a softer edge. In fact, he is more like the Canadian version of the hardboiled detective,” admits Sawyer.
Sawyer got the idea of setting “Red Planet Blues” during a fierce rush for a highly sought precious commodity while he spent three months as a writer-in-residence at the former homestead of the late Canadian author Pierre Berton, which is located in Dawson City in the Yukon Territory. “Pierre Berton personally encouraged me to apply for the Berton House Residence program. He always saw the logic of having science fiction writers in the north, because the final frontier for Canada is our high Arctic region,” he said.
During his three months there, in which he also explored the homes of legendary Klondike writers Jack London and Robert W. Service, and witnessed the summer rush of tourists to Dawson City to enjoy the recreations of the 1898 gold rush became an immersive experience for him. “I started to think about the days of the gold rush and about something that similarly might drive people, such as the fur trade,” admits Sawyer. “I thought it might be plausible that if we go to Mars, we’ll find fossils there. And if those fossils really did exist, they would be extraordinarily valuable and collectible, and you might get another stampede of people as a result. It all seemed quite natural to me as an extension of my time in the Yukon.”
“It would be the wild west all over again, in which the people at the margins of rules and regulations who will make a go of it searching for fossils on Mars,” he added.
With “Red Planet Blues”, Sawyer hopes that by combining two classic genres of fiction, he would be able to attract more readers, especially readers who are new and unfamiliar to science fiction and might later enjoy reading more novels with a futuristic bent to them. And for those aspiring novelists who want to follow in his footsteps (not to mention those of Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov)? Sawyer offers this bit of advice: be clearly identifiable as a writer and put together a pure science fiction novel.
“It’s much easier at this stage of my writing career to do something that crosses boundaries and mixes things up than it is early in your career. Save the books that are hard to categorize for later in your career because people are going to look for early comparisons,” he said. “Don’t sit down to write a real hard nuts –and-bolts science fiction novel that’s full of engineering and pure physics. In your heart, you want to write a rollicking fantasy novel. Your first novel will set the template for what people expect from you subsequently. So choose well for what you’re going to do for that first book and as the years go on, you will be committing more and more latitude.”
And with “Red Planet Blues”, Sawyer crosses those boundaries and commits those latitudes with a great deal of success. With plenty of gutsy hardboiled prose and scientific technology and logic that doesn’t confuse the reader, Sawyer shows that by liberally salting aspects of hardboiled detective fiction within the premise of a science fiction tale, it can result in a literary hybrid that makes the lawless streets of New Klondike, Mars a fascinating trip that will please devoted science fiction readers, and create new converts to the nearly 200-year-old literary genre.
