Satoshi Ogawa's 'The Queen of Mars'
Riki Kawanabe, one of the main characters, is a biologist affiliated with the Whale Corporation on Mars. His words at a press conference, where he claims to have discovered a new life form on Mars, are quite memorable.
“If you mean ‘when I found a consistency error in the ejection pod at the bottom of the valley,’ I thought, ‘So what?’”
“‘So what?’ What do you mean?”
“I mean, I came all the way to Mars, risked my life to go to the bottom of a valley to fix a trivial error caused by a trivial object, and I wondered what the point of finding something like this was.”
The phrase 'So what?' expresses Kawanabe's state of mind after being dragged into a press conference that was contrary to the facts. It sticks in the memory like the line 'So it goes' from Kurt Vonnegut's 'Slaughterhouse-Five.' I feel that while he is being swept along by fate, he is showing a small amount of resistance.
The story also gradually reveals why Riki Kawanabe came to Mars from Earth, and his past.
The person who held that fake press conference was Luke Madison, CEO of the Whale Corporation. He is a man who made his fortune on Earth and came to Mars in search of even more infinite wealth. In that sense, he is depicted as a person with a hidden side, whose true intentions are unclear, unlike Riki Kawanabe.
When migration to Mars first began, it was a place of dreams with wealth buried underground, but that does not seem to be the case in the era of the story. It is so far from Earth that the reality is that people cannot earn as much as they thought and are barely scraping by. Dreams are fading away, and more and more people are returning to Earth from Mars. The world depicted seems to be what lies beyond the bursting of the AI bubble currently inflating on Earth.
Madison, unable to give up on his dreams for Mars, plots for Mars to become independent from Earth. He uses the new life form as bait to advance independence under the most favorable conditions possible—all through his grand bluff. The story follows how the characters get caught up in that bluff.
And the 'Queen of Mars' in the title must be Lily E1102. Since she was born and raised on Mars, it seems she has an identification number after her name. On the surface, all humans are Earthlings, and if there is a life form on Mars, that is a Martian. In reality, Lily feels that there is discrimination even among humans: between Earthlings, Mars-born Earthlings, and true Martians.
Lily is the biggest victim of the turmoil surrounding the Martians' independence from Earth. She becomes a target for the independence faction because her mother was the former Mars branch manager of the ISDA, an organization that supports Martian immigrants, and because she is blind due to an equipment maintenance error by the ISDA on Mars. The core of the story is how she becomes a symbol of independence while letting herself be carried along by the flow of fate.
Kawanabe and Lily, while feeling antipathy toward Madison's bluff, are swept along by fate. Kawanabe breaks with his past, and Lily abandons the hope of returning to Earth. The climax of the story is when the two change their mindset slightly and become active as the head and deputy head of the Mars cheering squad.
With Satoshi Ogawa's slightly cynical prose and the ending where the two try to live positively, it was a unique yet refreshing and rewarding novel to read.