by Mason Coile
First published 2025
The colony ship touches down and the base is already broken. Walls damaged, systems in disarray, and the three robots sent ahead to build humanity's first Mars settlement have gone somewhere unexpected. They have given themselves names. They have formed allegiances. They have developed beliefs that disturb the crew on sight. The astronauts begin interrogating the machines one by one, piecing together what happened in the months the robots spent alone on the red planet. But one of the three cannot be found. Somewhere out in the barren Martian landscape, a machine is missing. As the crew works through each robot's account, the stories start to press back. The line between the astronauts and the machines they are questioning grows harder to hold. These humans carry their own fears, their own fractures. To find the truth about what destroyed the base, they will have to look at themselves just as hard as they look at the robots. Mason Coile sets this locked-room mystery under a sky with no breathable air, where every answer costs something and the wrong conclusion costs everything.
Genres: science-fiction, mystery, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, introspective, philosophical, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: locked-room-mystery, man-versus-machine, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Mars
224 pages · Hardcover · G.P. Putnam's Sons