A billionaire wants to colonise Mars. This Millennial wants in

In the first chapter of The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells raises the Tasmanian genocide when asking readers: “Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?” Wells’ Martians turn the violence of colonialism onto the colonisers themselves.

Jordan Prosser’s second novel, Blue Giant, shares with Wells a preoccupation with Mars and colonisation. It follows Abby Horne, a Melbourne Millennial and serial hot mess who dreams about leaving Earth. This dream is enabled by Danish billionaire Tor Skovgaard (a stand-in for Elon Musk), whose MarsNow project promises that anyone can apply to become a “first settler” of Mars.

Forget essential skills like spacewalking, aerospace engineering, survival training, and mental wellbeing – Abby possesses none of them. Since MarsNow will be streamed reality-TV style, all Abby needs is a personality large enough to buy her ticket. She hinges her future on being chosen and begins training alongside Oscar, an unhappily married co-conspirator, under the supervision of her roommate and best friend, Niki.

The premise is both improbable and not. There’s certainly some prescience in Prosser’s depiction of a billionaire going mainstream with interplanetary colonisation; behold the recent fear and trembling around SpaceX’s IPO. But soon enough we suspect that something is awry, that Abby has a “tendency to get very excited by new things and invest a lot of yourself in them”, as Niki warns, and that she may not be leaving the stratosphere as soon as she hopes.

This isn’t science fiction. It shares little DNA with, say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s hard sci-fi Mars Trilogy, which speculates on the political, engineering, ecological and economic realities involved in terraforming Mars. Rather, Prosser’s Blue Giant remains earthbound, despite its ostensible reach for the stars. It’s a character study of Millennial angst wearing a spacesuit. The Mars project is just another imaginary site where Abby can project her chronic escapism. The science fiction sits firmly in service of contemporary literary realism.

As with Prosser’s psychedelic time-warped debut, Big Time, Blue Giant is foremost a romp; it’s meant to be fun. Scenes are grand-stage and cinematically visualised, characters emote, and the plot rips along. The novel initially establishes an intimate portrait of Abby’s denial and desperation; she seems forever on the verge of a mental breakdown. But the temptation for spectacle is too great, and the later stages of Blue Giant send Abby into a climactic confrontation that borrows from the Hollywood toolkit and leaves the emotional complexities trailing behind.

On sensibility, it seems Prosser wants Abby to be both our relatable, down-and-out, incorrigibly righteous Millennial anti-hero, and occasionally a target of gentle mockery. Take, for example, the following description: “Glacially white, commonly blonde and heinously straight, with few if any hereditary illnesses lying in wait, Abby had nothing outwardly apparent in her life to complain about but also nothing in it that might inspire anyone else.” Woe is Abby.

This is irony, gesturing towards Abby’s own shallowness and lack of self-awareness, which in turn appears to lampoon the dubious “clout” or legitimising force of identity markers (many of which Abby deems herself to lack). But the irony lands somewhat haughtily, as Abby’s emotional difficulties, the fount of the novel’s pathos, are weaponised against her.

Like her author, Abby has a quip for everything. Whoever she encounters must weather her tirades of arch judgment. She condemns fast fashion, trips to Machu Picchu, Boomers and generational wealth, climate change – the gamut of leftist grievances.

One thing Abby remains silent on is the ongoing colonisation of unceded Aboriginal land. It’s a shame that a novel so occupied with a new dream of colonising elsewhere omits a reckoning with this underlying thematic parallel. I wondered whether Abby’s blindness to the colonial logic underpinning her own escape mission was her most damning characterisation, intentional or otherwise. Once noticed, this absence grows into a black hole that sucks all the dazzling stars out of the sky.

Blue Giant by Jordan Prosser is published by UQP ($35).

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