Last night I read two Sirenia Digests, numbers 188 and 189, which contained parts one and two of M is for Mars, a novella Caitlin R. Kiernan wrote back in 2016. It's a nice peek into a world Caitlin has explored in other stories, a fictional, colonised Mars inhabited entirely by women due to an infectious agent in the atmosphere that affects only biological males.
M is for Mars feels a lot like the middle of a longer story. It follows a professor names Babette Flanagan who gets mixed up in some business involving a crashed ship. We learn that she fled from another town where she committed a crime of some kind but we never learn what that crime was. It's kind of an interesting Rorschach test for the reader. Some readers will be inclined to assume she didn't do anything particularly bad and that it was only tyrannical laws that got her in trouble, others will assume she's really guilty of something terrible and ought to seek atonement.
That's half of what turns out to be what you might call book-ends of blanks. The story ends without really providing the answers to tantalising prompts that come up. Like a lot of Caitlin's fiction, M is for Mars also features a lot of dialogue between characters asking each other questions and avoiding answering any of them, usually with a lot of swearing. It's good.
On another subject, lately I've been experimenting with putting my blog entries on YouTube. So far I've made videos for Snow White and Raya and the Last Dragon. Enjoy.
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