Farewell, Earth's bliss

"Rights and wrongs are irrelevant."

This was a page-turner for me! The astute attention given to half a dozen main characters by Compton is what made it a smashing stand out. Not only are incredible obstacles of life on a penal planet that is nearly devoid of life wondrously awful to ponder, but the adaptations and changes of the new arrivals' psychology gives this an extended depth I've not often seen in my sci fi reading.

There are no human rights, no democracy, only regulations and enforcement. Everything has been redefined. Your crimes on Earth might have gotten you sent to Mars but forget those. This small society had to re-invent itself and is unapologetically fine-tuned for survival.

One of the characters has been reading an show more omnibus of Dickens's classic novels that some one had brought with them. She has read it once and is about to start over. It is a pleasure she describes as "magnificently irrelevant," which I found poignant. Earth life is so distant.

This novel is an example of my favorite kind of writing. Compton struck the perfect balance: he said what he had to say, said it well, and stopped when he was done.

(What a boon it is to have discovered OpenLibrary.org. Reading scanned books reconciles my desire for the old-fashioned look and experience of a printed book with the wonders of digital access.) show less

Mars has become a new Botany Bay, and convicts are transported there at regular intervals. Life is brutal on Mars – although not as brutal as it would have been had Compton’s Mars been anything like the real Mars – as the latest group of transportees discover on arrival. I consider Compton one of the best science fiction writers the UK has produced. His prose is astonishingly good. But his best work was published in the 1970s and 1980s, and those books are very much of their time – to an extent, in fact, that it becomes part of their appeal. Farewell, Earth’s Bliss was Compton’s second sf novel – he had previously written crime fiction as Guy Compton, and continued for a few more years after his first sf novel. I’ve no show more idea why he decided to change genre. Perhaps he thought it would be easier to sell novels – although he doesn’t seem to have been discovered by the US until 1969, when his third sf novel, The Silent Multitude, was published in the first Ace SF Special series. Anyway, Farewell, Earth’s Bliss owes much to Rex Gordon’s No Man Friday, at least in terms of its depiction of the Red Planet. The characters are well-drawn but a deeply unpleasant bunch. And there’s a low level everyday racism – although one viewpoint character is black, and his narrative is handled sensitively – that does not sit well with modern readers. But, in common with other novels by Compton, it’s hard to see where the story is going. He was never one for plotting – perhaps that’s why he swapped from crime to science fiction, he couldn’t plot and could disguise that lack in sf – and Farewell, Earth’s Bliss is fairly typical in that regard. It reads like a series of character studies, something Compton did really well, although they work better when they’re in service to a barebones plot, which this novel lacks. It is a rare writer who impresses you with every book in their oeuvre, especially the early ones. Compton remains, to my mind, one of the best prose writers science fiction has produced, but that does not mean every book he wrote was amazingly good. show less

24 convicts are exiled on an automated ship for a one-way trip to Mars. Along the way, new names are adopted and they do not discuss their crimes. Once on Mars, they're faced with the harsh reality of the environment as well as the harsh reality of the Settlement.

The narrative focuses on nine main characters, each with a unique perspective of their new life in the Settlement. The reality of starting over isn't as appealing as it sounds as their assimilation plays out in unexpected ways. The ending was heartbreaking, but understandable.

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I’m sure the story of unwanted people that are sent to a distant island or so has been told lots of times in regular fiction too, but science fiction obviously offers a bit more possibilities than some version of Australia. In 1967 Robert Silverberg published Hawksbill Station – a novel I have yet to read, and he uses time travel as the method of exile. In the 1980ies Julian May takes that same idea for The Many-Coloured Land and makes an entire series out of it – one I loved as a teenager.

Stories about communities in isolation being abundant, the question then is whether Compton uses his Mars setting effectively – to wit, distinctively. The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is a bit more nuanced, as Farewell, show more Earth’s Bliss is social science fiction, no hard sci-fi or space laser stuff.

That’s easily explained by the fact that Compton simply was not interested in science fiction as such, and has read none of his peers’ stuff, as he expressed in a fairly long 2019 interview with Darrell Schweitzer on Black Gate:

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Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It show less