EXILES, by Mason Coile
The first three humans sent to establish a settlement on Mars are having a rough day. After a long voyage, Officer Dana Gold and her two colleagues awaken above the distant planet and are immediately plunged into crisis: The advance team of worker robots who built Citadel, humanity’s first base on the planet, aren’t responding to communications. After a crash landing and an uncertain trek across the Martian desert, the trio arrive to find the base damaged, one of its wings destroyed and uninhabitable. More pressing: The humans have mere minutes of oxygen left in their suits, and the door to the remaining sections of the base is locked. And that’s just the first 30 pages of “Exiles,” by Mason Coile.
Two of the bots, which “resemble scrapyard skeletons with whirring tendons and skinny metal bones the width of drinking straws,” are inside, but not behaving as expected. In their isolation, they’ve adopted names and genders and developed the ability to form complex emotional bonds, make decisions and ask philosophical questions. The humans want to know what happened to the lab, but the answer isn’t so simple. One bot insists that the damage was caused by another bot, who “lost his mind” and fled into the desert, but the third, Shay, tells Gold she’s seen something outside Citadel, something huge that stalks the base, scratching at the exterior. Either these simple assembly bots have learned to dissemble, or they’re not alone on Mars — which is a problem, because this is a one-way trip. There’s no return home for the humans or the bots.
The draw of “Exiles” is the plot, which is pacey and taut. The story strikes a savvy balance between the cold, hard protocol that’s been drilled into Gold and her compatriots and the raw animal terror they experience as soon as they set foot on Mars. This slim novel fires off a series of thrilling set pieces at a relentless cadence, one nightmare after another. Throughout, Coile’s prose is evocative and chilling. Consider Gold’s reflection on the Martian landscape: “Mars shows itself as a dream colored in the palette of nausea. A sinister dimension, with unthinkable beings waiting behind every tank and buggy and comms dish in view.”
Mason Coile is a pen name of the thriller writer Andrew Pyper, who passed away earlier this year. Like Coile’s previous book “William,” “Exiles” is concerned with the emotional lives of mechanical beings. Accordingly, the bots here are well-drawn, uncanny and compelling. But what of our human lead? Gold is a mixed success. I don’t necessarily pick up action-driven stories looking for deeply nuanced character studies, but so little of this lean novel is devoted to Gold’s personality and motivations that she teeters between enigmatic and underexplored. That said, the revelation of the tragic personal history that drove her to Mars in the first place (a trope that’s practically de rigueur in this type of story) still shocked me enough to send my eyebrows toward my hairline.
Coile wields genre conventions with a practiced and confident hand — “Exiles” has the breathless pace of a thriller, the creeping dread of horror and the robots and alien landscapes of science fiction. He’s particularly good at exploring how the mind plays tricks and conjures outlandish possibilities under extreme stress, and uses that skill to maintain the ambiguity of what’s really happening outside the base, teasing out the tension until the final pages. Even if “Exiles” isn’t reinventing the extraterrestrial thriller, it’s still a standout example of the form: satisfying, entertaining and emphatically human.
EXILES | By Mason Coile | Putnam | 205 pp. | $28
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