This collection of all of Kage Baker’s short stories set on Mars reads wonderfully together. Colonization with corporations and what can go wrong, new religions sprouting up in a new land and people wanting more than just work every day, they want arts and entertainment. Stories of a what might happen if we go to Mars. A great collection and shorter than what we deserved due to the loss of the writer way too soon.

There are a lot of Mars books out there, and of course Mars is very much in and out of the news as a real-world target for further exploration. The most recent books, though, seem to emphasize hard science and the techno aspects of exploration, with scant attention to characters and little of the "heart" that characterized the "Martian Chronicles" approach to Mars. This collection is attractive, engaging, and entertaining because it does have more of a character and wonder driven touch, which of course is a Kage Baker signature in all of her work, especially more obscure books like "The Hotel Under the Sand".

I was shocked and pleased when I saw that there was a new Kage Baker I could read. I miss the days when I could look forward to one of her new stories about the Company! This collection of short stories feels very different from those, in content and in mood, but they are the same in that there are strong characters doing interesting things in unusual situations. I highly recommend this. Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this.

Solid story telling with a nice variety of stories that include interesting characters, plots, and settings. Recommended.

Thanks very much for the free copy for review!!

I received a free copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I grew up reading stories about The Company, and though these were stories separate from that series, (except a quick peek) they have the same wonderful way of writing and the storytelling I loved about the author’s work when I was younger. This is a great way to see new content in one collection that may not have been found easily otherwise- and a great way to get me to reread all the previous stories all over again.

Large Baker's untimely death was a huge loss to the SF community. Her stories and novels featured compelling characters, highly readable prose, inventive plotting, and wit and pathos in equal measure. These varied tales of life on a British colonized Mars, related to her more famous Company time travel tales, deliver in all these dimensions. Her stories deliver a punch and are always entertaining. Well worth it for the new reader or the old fan rediscovering Baker's charm.

This book is a compilation of short stories and novellas written by the magnificent Kage Baker, who was taken from us too soon. Kage wrote a series of interconnected books about The Company, immortal time traveling cyborgs who go on undercover missions for the mysterious Dr. Zeus company. There's very little about these cyborgs in this particular book except for the first story.

This volume is concerned with the future colonization of Mars. It features the dry humor and understanding of human foibles that are trademarks of Baker's writing. I had read one or two of these before but I'd never come across them organized in this particular way. You can see that Baker is thinking of the Martian Chronicles when she wrote this- there's an interesting retro feel to this future science fiction. And although Baker covers the disparate groups of people colonizing Mars, the generation of heat and air, and how transportation works, the heart of the book is the characters as always with her. I might have sorted the stories slightly differently, but that's a small thing.

Mars is an old world, one that has been mapped by science fiction writers for over a century. The late Nebula and Locus Award winning writer Kage Baker was among the most skilled cartographers to render the Red Planet as full of life and love, hope and heroism.

Gathered together here for the first time are all of Baker’s Mars stories, beginning with “The Empress of Mars,” for which she won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. It was in this story that Baker first laid out her vision of our neighboring planet, with its patchwork quilt of societies based in part on the history of the British Empire. Here are Celts and colonialists side by side with adventuring Haulers who bring ice from the poles and missionaries who bring the message of their goddess from Luna.

These tales are all part of an imaginatively worked out near future, where raucous frontier people intermingle with devoted terraformers in an uneasy mix overseen by Areco, Baker’s version of the British East India Company. Turn by turn, each story sets its protagonists the task of understanding and altering a world that resists change.

In “The Empress of Mars,” a woman gathers her family—her children along with outcast Eccentrics—and turns an unexpected windfall into the founding of a place they can be proud to call their own. “Plotters and Shooters” recounts a series of incidents in an orbital defense station involving characters who may be delightfully familiar. In “Maelstrom,” one of the Eccentrics remakes himself into a theatrical impresario, founding a theater that serves as “a cathedral to pure weirdness.” Finally, in “Attlee and the Long Walk,” a young child of the agricultural tunnels takes a journey through both her physical and emotional worlds, making unexpected discoveries in both.

This is a collection of science fiction stories by a new aithor to me. I tend to not really e joy short story collections, but in this case the stories were long enough to actually have enough world building and character development to hold my interest. If you're a science fiction fan like me, then this could be a good place to start of you want to try out Kage Baker :)