J O Morgan, The Martian’s Regress – review
The Martian’s Regress by J. O. Morgan imagines Earth’s utter devastation by human greed. Within the book’s loosely framing fiction, humans abandon earth to settle on Mars. They’ve undergone profound physical adaptations before they send an expedition back to their old dead planet. The frame gives broad imaginative continuity, but its looseness and the freedom with which Morgan uses different tropes of science fiction allow him to extrapolate and satirize human characteristics and behaviours in radically different ways. This gives imaginative variety, and means that individual poems happily stand alone. Parodies of such different genres as cautionary tale, myth and … Continue Reading