The main character is a biologist, Julia, whose husband is the pilot of the first team to leave Earth. But the winner will also have ownership of the science, the all-important prize. The winning group receives a prize of $30 billion, most of which will be needed to reimburse expenses incurred. Two private consortiums vie to become the first to send a mission to Mars and have it return with in-depth scientific reports along with samples of rocks and any other interesting artifacts. However, this is not your typical alien life and first contact story. This example can be a little slow-moving at times, but the description of life found on Mars more than makes up for any other shortcomings.

( )įiction about Mars is one of my favorite sub-genres.

I am grateful to Edward Lerner’s blog for putting me on the trail of this series. It is true that Benford’s characters do not pop off the page the way Mark Watney does, but the husband-and-wife team of Russian pilot Viktor and Australian biologist Julie are fun to follow. To his credit, Benford does not ignore inconvenient Martian facts in service of plot as Weir sometimes does. Both books pay attention to orbital mechanics and to the planetary science available at the time. Ultimately, both teams will need to work together to get home. While they work to repair it and raise enough crops to keep them alive for a longer-than-planned stay, biologist Julie discovers organic material in a lava tube. Benford’s privately funded team gets to Mars before their Chinese competitors, but they damage their return vehicle in the process. Certainly, The Martian Race and The Martian cover a lot of the same ground.

I find it hard to believe that Weir did not read Benford’s book in his late teens or early twenties. It is impossible to read Gregory Benford’s The Martian Race these days without setting it up against Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011).

The Martian Race by Gregory Benford