Review of “Brent and Edward Go to Mars” by Richard Jeffrey Wagner

Score: 90/100 (9.0 out of 10)

Brent and Edward Go to Mars is an immensely complex and ambitious science-fiction and space adventure novel by Dr. Richard Jeffrey Wagner, a brilliant scientist and engineer in his own right. Wagner brings his deep well of knowledge and intense passion for science, engineering, and space exploration to this book!

Dr. Wagner has a BSME from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and a PhD from USC! He actually played a part in the building of spacecraft with the Northrop Grumman Corporation. He also managed the integration and test portion of the winning proposal for the James Webb Space Telescope! This is a truly brilliant person who has walked the talk and knows a lot!

If this book has one thing about it that we would like to celebrate, it's that it encourages young people to think outside the box and to dip their feet into scientific exploration, experimentation, and innovation.

This book is JAM PACKED with new, developing, emerging, and future technologies!

The technologies showcased in this book include:

Magnetic Radiation Shielding

High-Specific Impulse Fusion Thrusters

Zero-Gravity Adaptation and Centrifugal Gravity Simulation

Intelligent Jetpacks with Control Moment Gyros

Hydrogen-Powered Air Cars

Self-Aware and Autonomous Robots

Space Hotels with Artificial Gravity and Privacy-Ensuring AI

Space Infrastructure and Lunar/Martian Colonies

We also learn about the mining of space minerals, terraforming, how a shopping center/mall in a space colony would be like, and what a sport like tennis would be like in space.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Now, that is all incredible and awesome.
Who isn't excited about cool, new technologies that could make our lives easier, more convenient, or exciting?

However, it can be a bit much. In fact, if there's one thing about this book that detracts from its enjoyability, readability, and entertainment value, it's that it's overly detailed and overly fixated on these technologies.

That's right: the one thing about this book that's the most ambitious & promising may actually be its biggest weakness.

It's hard to care about the book's characters and plot when the author seems to only want to talk about all of this great technology. Yes, the technology is cool, interesting, and exciting at first, but then it becomes distracting. It becomes more about all these props than being about any of the characters developing or the plot heading in any particular direction.

Yes, the book is building and leading us toward the promised visit to Mars. That's for certain. However, it doesn't seem to be the focus of most of this book. Most of this book seems to be about the technology and the intricacies of the scientific/engineering involved in the visit/mission. That's great and all, but it often dominates every page of this book, calling attention toward the technology and away from where the characters are actually going and what they're actually trying to accomplish.

In other words, we felt that the author was a bit too self-indulgent in their own personal interests. It might also be an example of the author being too smart, too brilliant, and knowing too much.

They wanted to talk about what they wanted to talk about. That would be great in a work of non-fiction, in which you expect to learn something, but it doesn't work too well in fiction. It severely disrupts the flow and the pacing of the book.

Could you imagine, for example, reading Little Red Riding Hood and the narrator stopped in the middle of the book to explain the Big Bad Wolf's entire anatomy and biology every five pages?

Could you imagine reading The Great Gatsby and the narrator stopped talking about Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy to teach you about the ecology of the fish, birds, and other animals in New York State?

Could you imagine reading The Hunger Games and the narrator started talking for hundreds of pages about the intricacies of Panem economics instead of letting the characters battle it out and develop?

Here's a good example: In Doctor Who, there's a lot of technical, scientific, pseudo-scientific talk and jargon thrown around, particularly surrounding the TARDIS (space/time machine) itself. However, it never becomes so excessive that it detracts from the story and the characters. It's usually just played up for laughs and gets relegated as “timey whimey stuff.” We've actually read a book about the “timey whimey stuff” in Doctor Who, and it was great! That's because it was a non-fiction book that was specifically about exploring the science and technology behind Doctor Who.

However, this is supposed to be a work of fiction. It's supposed to be entertaining.

As a writer, if you get too caught up in the weeds and try to say everything you want to say and cram everything you know into a novel, it's going to impact the reading experience. If you don't reign that in, it can negatively impact the reading experience.

We actually encounter and experience this problem quite a bit, especially with epic fantasy novels that are desperately trying to be like Tolkien with the authors describing every leaf, river, snowflake, raindrop, creek, village, bush, and branch. In other words, though we admire world-building as much as the next person, an excessive amount becomes tedious after a while. After a certain point, you start to ask: Can we just get on with it already? Can we progress with the story? Can we get to the plot and the characters?'

Can we get off this white orbiting rock and get to Mars? Can we get to this Olympus Mons tour that we've heard so much about?

Speaking of the characters, because of how fixated the book is on other stuff (we haven't even touched on the philosophical stuff yet), it seems like most of the characters get a little short-changed.

We gathered that there's Edward Collier, a curious, philosophical software engineer with a strong desire for adventure. He is passionate about exploring space. Then there's Brent, his robot valet. Brent is incredibly philosophical, and that—like the science talk—can get a bit overdone and tedious after a while.

With that said, in isolation (ignoring the space-faring plot and characters), Brent's philosophizing is actually incredibly interesting. It goes along with the major plot-thread that runs throughout the book in which the characters are constantly debating whether or not robots like Brent have rights and how those rights might differ from human beings.

We are provided with examples of slavery throughout history like Spartacus' rebellion in Ancient Rome.

There's a tug-o-war in this book between two movements: the Robot Personhood movement and the Humans First movement. Both sides have their own arguments, though this book does tend to side with robots like Brent. In a sense, the author ambitiously tackles what could be the next stage of civil rights. In 50 to 100 years, we could realistically be asking ourselves: Do robots deserve equal rights?

In 50 to 100 years, we could realistically be using technologies like the incredible ones described in this book. If Elon Musk and the author have their way, we could be going to Mars! We could be visiting the moons of Mars & Jupiter. We could be reaching new planets and possibly even other stars!

If the author does something well, it's making these innovations seems plausible, believable, and—most of all—possible.

Check it out on Amazon!