One Way by S.J. Morden

Published by Orbit on April 10, 2018

Like The Martian, One Way is about an effort to survive on Mars when things go wrong. Unlike The Martian, all but one of the people on Mars in One Way are prisoners. They have practical skills apart from crime, but they aren’t engineers so they can’t “science the shit” out of their problems. And unlike The Martian, there are several of them, so some characters can die on Mars and the story can continue. S.J. Morden also throws in a mystery plot that takes off at about the novel’s midway point, making One Way something more than a survival novel.

An inmate named Frank Kittridge, serving a sentence too long to survive, is given the option to take his construction skills to Mars. With several other prisoners, he’s trained and rocketed off to space to build a habitat that will be occupied by astronauts and scientists who will arrive later. California has privatized some of its prisons, and the corporation that has the building contract on Mars also owns a private prison, so prison labor is pretty easy to find.

Despite all the cheerleading for the privatization of space exploration, Morden imagines that profit-motivated enterprises will work as they always have, cutting corners and maximizing profits at the expense of human safety. That’s particularly true, Morden posits, when the human workers are prisoners and thus disposable.

The private contractors hired by NASA to build a base on Mars have not been entirely forthright with NASA about the their cost-saving strategies. When Frank and the gang reach Mars, they discover that things haven’t gone according to plan (at least as they understood the plan), because the layers of redundancy that NASA would use to assure safety were deemed too costly by the corporation that sent the prisoners to Mars. And anyway, the corporation has its own employee supervising the prisoners who intends to sort things out for the corporation’s benefit before the astronauts arrive.

During the first two thirds of One Way, the prisoners train and travel to Mars and deal with adversity as they assemble a habitat and worry about producing food and water and oxygen and heat. In its later stages, the plot evolves from a Martian survival story to a Martian mystery novel. Frank learns that someone is driving the buggies at night. Then he learns that containers have been dropped on Mars that the prisoners weren’t told about. Then prisoners begin to die in ways that may or may not be accidental. It falls to Frank to find the clues and solve the mystery.

Morden tells a smart, lively story in One Way, although the story holds few surprises, which diminishes its value as a mystery. Characters have enough personality to distinguish them from each other, and important characters have enough personality to make them seem real. The scenes that take place on Mars seem credible and are vividly described. While I thought the story was working its way to a predictable ending, I was surpised to find that the story isn’t resolved. The ending isn’t exactly a cliffhanger, but there is at least one more novel on the way, and readers who want to know how the story concludes will need to read it. I enjoyed One Way (as a science fiction adventure story more than a science fiction mystery) so I have no objection to reading the next novel, but potential readers should know that One Way does not stand alone.

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