January Stirling was one of the principal dancers of London’s Royal Ballet. Now he’s a climate refugee bound for Tharsis, the notorious terraformed colony on Mars. It’s a utopia for the naturalised population. For January, as a dangerous Earthstronger whose body is unadjusted to the weaker Martian gravity, it’s a life sentence to hard labour and ferocious discrimination. But he will live. Aubrey Gale, energy trillionaire and hereditary senator, is running for election on a hardline platform to protect the native population from dangerous immigrants. The path to equality is simple, requiring all Earthstrongers who choose to come to Mars to undergo the disabling and sometimes fatal process of surgical naturalisation. Which is no life at all. When a disastrous media encounter plunges Aubrey and January’s lives into chaos, the solution is a five-year made-for-reality-TV marriage that could secure January’s future and ensure Aubrey’s political success but it soon becomes clear that thousands of lives hang in the balance, and nothing is as it seems.
