Pre-colonial fiction

Pre-colonial fiction, as defined by the android Pris Stratton, consists of stories written before space travel but about space travel, based entirely on imagination rather than experience. The genre often got details wrong—for instance, depicting Venus as a jungle paradise with huge monsters and women in gleaming breastplates—but its value lay not in accuracy but in the escape it provided. On Mars, where life was conceived for habitation only within the last billion years and the terrible old age of the stones pressed on every settler, pre-colonial fiction became a vital psychological necessity. Pris herself lived for the synthetic painkiller silenizine until Horst Hartman, a stamp dealer, got her interested in these old books and magazines, which offered a vision of cities, huge industrial enterprises, and successful colonization—everything Mars ought to be but was not.

Smuggling and Value

The genre's scarcity on Mars created a lucrative smuggling economy. Pris explained that a fortune could be made in smuggling pre-colonial fiction—old magazines, books, and films—to Mars, where the craze had never caught on Earth itself. The supply chain was brazen: smugglers stole the material from libraries on Earth and shot it by autorocket to Mars. Colonists would be out at night, stumbling across the open space, and suddenly see a flare—a cracked-open rocket with pre-colonial fiction magazines spilling out everywhere. The smuggler would read them before selling them, as the material was too precious to pass up unread. When John Isidore asked if Pris had brought any of this reading material back with her to Earth, she explained that it was worthless here because the craze never caught on, and in any case there was plenty already in Earth's libraries—the very source from which the smugglers stole.

Psychological Function

The genre's appeal was not merely escapist but compensatory. Pris described reading about cities and huge industrial enterprises, and really successful colonization, and then imagining what Mars might have been like—with canals crisscrossing the planet and beings from other stars with infinite wisdom, and stories about Earth set in their own time and even later, where there was no radioactive dust. When Isidore suggested this might make a colonist feel worse, Pris curtly denied it. The fiction did not exacerbate despair; it alleviated it. The genre thus functioned as a form of psychological survival, a mental bridge to a world that never existed but that made the actual world bearable. The fact that the material was stolen from Earth's libraries and shot across space by rocket underscored the desperation of the demand: colonists were willing to break laws and risk everything for the chance to read about a life that was not their own.

Narrative Significance

Pre-colonial fiction appears in the novel as a marker of the cultural and emotional gulf between Earth and Mars. On Earth, where the radioactive dust had killed most animals and driven the population to near-extinction, the genre was a forgotten curiosity; on Mars, it was a lifeline. The contrast highlights the failure of the U.N.'s colonization program, which promised emigrants a free android servant and a new life but delivered only loneliness, barren rock, and the need for drugs like silenizine. The genre also serves as a point of connection between Pris and John Isidore, a "chickenhead" who cannot emigrate because of his genetic damage. When he asks if she brought any pre-colonial fiction back, she explains why she did not, and he offers to go to a library to get some for her—a gesture of empathy that the androids, despite their superior intelligence, cannot fully reciprocate. The genre thus becomes a symbol of the human capacity for imaginative hope, a capacity that the androids, for all their intellectual gifts, seem to lack.