When I went to the Green Hand, I was looking for a light read that had good enough writing to get me through. My expectations were delightfully exceeded in this book! What I did;t realize when I bought it was that it was part of a 33-book sf series by Tubb. Despite this, the book does a good job introducing each character, even if they had been a part of the series for a while, so it was easy to enjoy standalone. The novel is about Dumarest et al. finding themselves on a conscious planet as they attempt to repair a broken space liner, where they are put through trials by the planet as the planet seeks to understand love. The novel, as the cover suggests, has a smutty part or two that is tasteful enough to recommend the book to a family member without it being weird. My favorite parts of the book were the action scenes, the fight choreography is concisely described and it held my attention throughout. A pretty short read too, coming in at just under 160 pages for a book with about a third the footprint of a piece of printer paper.

In my junior year of high school, in an English class focusing on the formation of senses of place in the natural world, I read Tracy K. Smith’s poem anthology, Life on Mars, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. The title is inspired by the David Bowie song of the same name, stylized as Life on Mars? The song itself paints a surreal picture of violence, confusion, injustice, and an ongoing battle between entertainment and ennui as the “girl with the mousy hair” watches a performance toeing the line between metaphor and reality.

The anthology serves as an elegy to Smith’s late father, a fan of David Bowie, who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Life on Mars serves as an homage to her father’s work as she processes the pain, confusion, and yearning of grief.  The work may be called at once transcendentalist and Afrofuturist as Smith finds paternal comfort in the vastness and potentiality of outer space. An excerpt from the poem “The Speed of Belief” reads “I didn’t want to believe/What we believe in those rooms: That we are blessed, letting go, Letting someone, anyone;/Drag open the drapes and heave us/Back into our blinding, bright lives.” In those unbelievable moments of suffocating, claustrophobic pain, the space left by her father can be used to separate her from a world that is trying to manufacture her healing.

Some poems from the anthology are easier to understand than others certainly, but if you like poetry I think that you will love this read. It is an adept fusion of poetic styles and symbolism, offering a space for healing in the potentiality of the cosmos. While drawing on the fascination that has inspired science fiction writers for the past century, her Afrofuturist lens creates an outer space that is not a frontier to be conquered and explored, but a mystic realm to which we can retreat to process and find meaning and inspiration through loss.

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