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Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven
Published by Tor Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
In a future where unrestrained industrial development has despoiled the Earth, Hanville Svetz is a time traveler. His latest mission may be his strangest -- to find out what happened to the life and civilization that once existed on Mars, and prevent Earth from falling to a similar fate.
However, the time machine has a strange peculiarity -- once it travels beyond a certain point in the past, it veers from real history into fantasy. Sometimes it is the fantasy of folklore, but sometimes it is the fantasy of modern writers whose works became part of the common idea-pool.
Off Svetz goes, not to the Mars of the Viking and Pathfinder landers, but to the Mars of the writers of the first part of the twentieth century. This is a world where ancient civilizations build their slender spires by the edges of the canals that bring much-needed water from the polar ice-caps. This is the Mars where octopoids of lofty and unsympathetic intelligence build saucer-shaped craft and cast envious eyes upon Earth's bounty.
But it is also a Mars with a difference, a Mars where a slender tree forms a connection between synchronous orbit and the surface. This Hangtree may yet be able to give humanity a shortened route to the stars -- if it is what they think it is. But alien organisms often have a way of concealing nasty surprises.
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This review posted June 2, 1999
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