Colony Three Mars by Gerald M. Kilby

Colony Three Mars by Gerald M. Kilby

This completes the opening trilogy of the Colony Mars series as corporations converge on Colony One to force the secret of immortality out of Jann. Jann doesn’t believe she has the secret of immortality. She has the secret to a plague, but more on that later.

 

With years to prepare, the Colony was not ready for the arrival of the various corporations with their military hardware and insistence that the clones aren’t really human so they can do anything they want to them. This is a big problem that really didn’t have to be. For example, the colony can manufacture explosives, so why didn’t they mine the heck out of the area surrounding the colony? They could also have made primitive artillery which would have threatened the landing ships. In short, with a few basic precautions, nothing that happens in this book would have had to happen. There would still have been drama, it would just have been drama with an intelligent group of heroes. Instead, they resort to a biological weapon—the plague made by the corporation that started the Mars colonies in its efforts to find the secret of immortality. Let’s be clear, the woman who has worried nonstop about the ethics of the plague uses it as a biological weapon instead of manufacturing a few explosives that would also have won the day.

 

And of course the colonists lose control of the plague and it gets back to earth starting a sort of a lightweight zombie apocalypse. I also didn’t feel that the ultimate solution to the trilogy was particularly convincing, although it does set the stage for future books. In summary, it seems to me that these books lost steam as the trilogy advanced.