And when the crisis comes, it's exciting, and terribly sad, and even scarier than I had first expected. So it's a scary book, as we learn to like Teri more and more, while we just know that she's going to get hurt real real bad. Also we learn bits and pieces about the psychologist's feelings, which give us hints about the disaster which has clearly occurred. In the background lurk details about the future history up to this point, especially the takeover of ecologically ravaged Earth by a 'meme' called 'One True', or 'Resuna', which more or less has turned Earth's population into a hive mind. And Teri is starting to worry about her boyfriend.Īll the above is cute stuff, and interleaved with neat SFnal details about the terraforming of Mars. As they travel, they plan to make one more attempt at a big 'scorehole'. Her father wants her to go back to school for one more year, because he's not convinced that ecospecting will remain a good living. Teri is hoping that she will be certified a 'Full Adult' at the Gather, and be free to marry her boyfriend.

The interviews tell of Teri and her father travelling across the lightly terraformed planet to a 'Gather' of the 'rounditachis', people who live more or less in the open on Mars, working to help advance the terraforming. It's also clear that he likes her a lot, and is really torn up by what has happened, and worried that he may have to treat her again, for some mysterious reason that takes a long time to become clear. It's clear from the start that something terrible happened, and indeed that the psychologist was forced to erase Teri-Mel's memory. It is very well structured, presented as a psychologist listening to a series of interviews he did with Teri-Mel Murray, a young woman on Mars who was working with her father as an 'ecospector'. And it features one of the scariest SFnal ideas since Vernor Vinge's 'Focus' (in A Deepness in the Sky).

It's scary at times, sweet at times, it presents a fascinating social structure, and some excellent SFnal speculation about terraforming Mars. The Sky So Big and Black is a first-rate novel, clearly a Hugo contender in my view.

The Sky So Big and Black by John Barnes