The Halo Trilogy: What if humans did settle on Mars?
New scenery, same problems.
Back in 2016, CNBC published a roundup of “8 iconic billionaires who plan to conquer outer space.” Perhaps unsurprisingly given the source, the piece cast privatized space exploration as a good thing, or at least nothing with problematic undertones.
Kathleen McFall and Clark Hays’ The Halo Trilogy, which concluded this year and which I just finished, takes a different perspective, asking not which billionaires want to go to space, but what they’ll do when they get there. The trilogy’s answer: Billionaires just gonna keep on billionairin’.
In 2187, Mars has become the Cayman Islands and Earth has become a Dumpster fire. Our guide through this dystopia is Crucial Larsen, a hard-boiled former law enforcement officer who informs us that the rain now is always acidic and the food now consists of manufactured nutrients pressed into sheets. At least we have Halo, a digital network that’s become the opiate of the masses. It also records everyone’s every word and move.
Halo is controlled by the progeny of the aforementioned billionaires, known collectively as the Five Families. They repose in luxury on the Red Planet, allowing only selected specimens of the rest of their species to join them as part of the serving class. Among the chosen is Crucial’s sister, Essential. When she vanishes, quite utterly — even Halo doesn’t know where she is — he knows something is up. He must return to Mars, a place he detests, to track down his lone remaining family member.
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I grew up seeing Mars from the perspective of Ray Bradbury, who depicted it in “The Martian Chronicles” as a land of dark, golden-eyed beings. He wrote in sepia tones that glamorized the planet as a place simultaneously home to ancient whisperings and infinite potential.
In McFall and Hays’ rendering, Mars is a place where the past and the future both go to die. There’s only the present, which the Five Families are determined to maintain at all costs. They’ve scraped Earth off their expensive boots for good.
They’ve forgotten that within every authoritarian regime, there’s a resistance. Crucial couldn’t be a more unlikely resistance figure; he just wants to be left alone to dream in his virtual desert and to nurse his broken heart. But the Halo Trilogy wouldn’t be a proper hero’s journey if he started out as a hero.
McFall and Hays do a lot of enthusiastic world-building. They play with all the tropes, too: a love triangle, a human-android buddy story, animals gone extinct and then brought back, humans mutated by climate change, a long-lost family secret, technology ranging from galaxy-traveling ships to blood-borne devices, a nemesis who just won’t give up and go away.
Mars makes a convenient screen onto which to project the thoughts we’re having about Earth. Bradbury, that 20th-century optimist, saw a planet of enchantment. McFall and Hays, from their 21st-century viewpoint, have a more jaded take.