A lot of people seem to be comparing this to the 'Canterbury Tales', but having recently devoured Dan Simmons's 'Hyperion', I'll trawl that out instead. This is about a bunch of diverse people who meet on a mission on another planet, in turn telling the stories that brought them there into this company. The most obvious difference is the length, both in the individual stories and the book as a whole. This is a novella and each story isn't given a substantial page count. However, all of them combine to endow the relatively simple story with some serious emotional weight.

Given that the one thing I wanted that 'The Rainseekers' doesn't provide is more of all of that, it's weird to point out that it's incredibly deliberate from the very outset. It kicks off with a sprawling, meandering sentence, then sums it up with a short and sweet second to nail the point home. "We would be the first people to feel it rain on Mars." Yeah, that ought to be a special moment and I'd suggest that the biggest success this book has is that it is when it finally comes. After all, there's a distinct lack of options in how this could end. Realistically, there's only one that wouldn't count as a letdown, so there's absolutely no surprise when it arrives, but it takes a good writer to make no surprise mean something.

Our focal point, the only character we're introduced to in the back cover blurb, is Sakunja Salazar, a former holo-influencer who escaped her life and ended up finding a new voice as a journalist on Mars. Chapter seven is utterly fantastic, easily my favourite here, whether it's in how it's written or where it takes us. This really isn't her story, because it belongs to more than one person, but it is hers for a moment and it's a precious one indeed. Otherwise, she's the mechanism for the other stories to emerge. The next most successful aspect is in how outrageously diverse they are.

There are forty-six adventurous souls travelling west across Mars's equatorial plain, believing the clouds on the horizon will bring rain and, in a time when the human race has clearly been living on the red planet for quite some time gradually terraforming it to make it liveable, the question she asks them all is a simple one: what brought them there. Her first subject is Ghleanna Watanabe, a lady forty years older than her, whose Nigerian great-great-grandfather, Solyom Onnoghen, long ago, may have started this story by inventing the technology needed to build orbital mirrors that now melt the planet's ice. And we move forward from there.

I used "outrageously" earlier as a qualifier on "diverse" and that's because we meet people like Jivanka Tanaka-Halevi, whose mother was a Japanese bioscientist but whose father was a Hasidic Jew. That's a heck of a mix, even before we factor in their meeting on Mars. He escaped heritage through Red Footsteps, only to die of blood cancer ten days after landing on another planet. That proved long enough to conceive her and she has her father's ashes with her on this journey.

There are other characters, of course, and I'll let you discover them for yourself. Some are exactly what you expect, but many aren't. These stories can begin in poverty, abuse and despair, as much as optimistic scientific innovation. Of course, while we learn a lot about the broader story through these smaller stories of earlier times, we also have a contemporary story that's taking these folk, hopefully, to the destiny they seek. Perhaps there's more of this material than there ought to be, just as there are too few stories for Salazar to collect. Perhaps it's also a little too old school sci-fi adventure too, though that's a good way to thin the herd, as it were.

Maybe this isn't quite the novel I think I want to read, it's a pretty damn good novella as it stands. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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