Voyage To The Red Planet

There aren't that many funny novels about Mars, but this is one of them. A satire on contemporary America and particularly on Hollywood, a spoof of many old fashioned sf novels, and a space adventure described with careful verisimilitude and genuine excitement combine unexpectedly but effectively in this story.America is in decline, so the ship that was once meant to take the first explorers to Mars has been mothballed. Then a maverick movie producer decides that making the voyage, with the original crew, would produce a wonderful film. So the now aged explorers are gathered together, along with a midget cinematographer and a glamorous Russian cosmonaut, and set off on the voyage of a lifetime.Bisson is a rarety in science fiction, an author able to produce a gripping adventure story that is also very funny. There arent any other Mars novels quite like this one.