Joe Haldeman_Marsbound Trilogy (Sci-Fi)

A novel of the red planet from the Hugo and Nebula Award winning author of The Accidental Time Machine and Old Twentieth. Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, they're going to Mars. Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against. And when she ventures out into the bleak Mars landscape alone one night, a simple accident leads her to the edge of death until she is saved by an angel, an angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad, and a message for the newly arrived human inhabitants of Mars: We were here first.



After the shocking first contact between humans and alien life on Mars, Carmen Dula and her husband board a tiny, long-range craft with five other humans and two Martians. They travel to a distant solar system that is home to the "Others" - an enigmatic, powerful, and possibly immortal race. Once there, they manage to find enough common purpose to forge a delicate truce between human, Martian, and Other. By the time Carmen and her party are sent back to Earth, fifty years have passed - and the Earthlings have not been idle. They have built a massive flotilla of warships to defend Earth against the Others' expected aggression. But the Others have more power than any could imagine. And they will brook no insolence from the upstart human race...



The Others disposed of Earth’s spaceship fleet as easily as swatting a fly. They blew up the Moon, letting the resulting cloud of rocks and gravel go into orbit. Then, for good measure, they turned off all the power, leaving Earth with nine billion hungry people competing for dwindling resources.

Now Carmen Dula, the first human to encounter Martians and then the mysterious alien Others, and her colleagues struggle to find a way—using nineteenth-century technology—to reclaim the future that has been stolen from them.