Reprint: Life on Mars

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Alastair Reynolds, Cory Doctorow, Ian McDonald, John Barnes, Jonathan Strahan, Kage Baker, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nancy Kress, Nnedi Okorafor, Rachel Swirsky, Stephen Baxter

This review of Life on Mars edited by Jonathan Strahan first appeared in Bull Spec 5, Spring 2011.

It doesn’t specifically say so on the cover, but this is a YA collection. This is a category that simply did not exist when I was of an age to be the target audience, now it seems to be all pervasive. But what exactly is it? The authors aren’t exactly talking down to their audience, or, at least, I have seen works that are as complex in language, ideas and structure that are ostensively aimed at an adult audience. But the stories do seem to address their audience by the simple expedient of having a protagonist of the same age (the one exception to this rule is ‘Discovering Life’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, which also happens to be the only story that is not original to this anthology. Its presence here tends to suggest that, other than the age of the protagonist, there is no real difference between adult and young adult fiction.)