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REVIEW: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

• Book Reviews
• July 15, 2023
• 1,786 views
• By Durand Welsh

Last Updated on June 26, 2024

The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud is science fiction, but science fiction of the retro kind, a wistful homage to the outlandish bygone tales of a Mars with a breathable atmosphere, stiff and clanking robots, and saucer-shaped spaceships that traverse the planets with all the ease of pulp era sci-fi. The sort of novel that should rightly have a punk suffix tacked on somewhere in its genre label, only there’s nothing that easily applies. Bradbury-punk, perhaps?

The Strange is narrated by Annabelle Crisp, who tells her story from the vantage of an old woman looking back on her youthful escapades. This lends the story a poignancy and nostalgia that permeates the whole narrative. It’s a reminiscing, and it infuses the tale with an elegiac tone. Underpinning the whole fabric of the story is the idea of loss, whether it’s one’s parents, one’s childhood, or the entirety of civilisation itself.

The Strange is set in an alternate history where people were landing on Mars during the American Civil War, flying saucers are the preferred mode of interplanetary transport, and you can do things like fire an H.G. Wells-style commuter cannon safely at the moon.

The protagonist of this story is young Annabelle Crisp, plucky, rebellious and armed with a cutting wit. She and her father run a diner in New Galveston, one of two human settlements on the Red Planet. For some years, Mars has been cut off from Earth following The Silence, the abrupt ceasing of all radio communications with the home planet, and Annabelle’s mother took the last shuttle back before the Silence unexpectedly manifested. All Annabelle has to remember her mother by is a recording stored in the diner’s backroom.

The one working spaceship sits just outside town, a flying saucer called the Eurydice, that the pilot, a somewhat directionless and melancholy fellow named Joe Reilly, refuses to fly back to Earth on account of it being a one-way trip and the saucer not being big enough for everyone. Joe’s burdened by this responsibility, and lives the life of an outcast on the edge of town alongside his precious saucer.

The only other mapped settlement on Mars is the haunted Dig Town, where the Martian substance known as The Strange is mined. The Strange has begun to have unsettling effects on the miners, lending their eyes a unearthly cast and perhaps also tampering with their minds. The people of New Galveston tolerate the Dig Town miners, who bring coin and custom, but it’s an uneasy relationship, with tension on both sides.

Following the Silence, though, those societal cracks have gradually deepened within New Galveston. The lifelines to Earth severed, and shortages of goods beginning to become apparent, townsfolk have begun to suspect Annabelle’s father of hoarding precious supplies and sundries in the diner’s storeroom. And these shortages and suspicions are not confined to New Galveston.

The whole human investiture in Mars is struggling. Dig Town, too, is beginning to rot from the inside, a process perhaps accelerated by the influence of that alien mineral called the Strange.

When the diner is robbed by desperate cultists from the Peabody Crater, out past Dig Town, a chain of events is set off that culminates in Annabelle going forth with her robot dishwasher, Watson, and Joe Reilly, to recover her mother’s stolen recording. The journey will take her first to Dig Town, infested with the side-effects of the Strange, and then further, out into the haunted deserts, and all the way to Peabody Crater, where it’s rumoured that the first man on Mars, Chauncey Peabody, landed in 1864 after fleeing conscription in the Confederate States of America during the Civil War.

You can’t help but like Annabelle. At times she’s selfish and downright mean, but there’s the sense that these are childhood faults, the sorts of faults to be learned from and that we were all guilty of at one time or another. For example, she might deliver some outrageous threat towards Joe with all the vehemence of childish rage, but at the same time, she’s a girl who’s lost her mother, and so such outbursts can be forgiven.

She’s not a simple character, and is both likeable and unlikeable, depending on her mood and the situation. Likewise, Joe has his good points and bad points, and downtrodden though he is, there’s also the feeling that it’s not an entirely unearned lot that has come his way. Ballingrud’s a class writer. His characters have edges, the same as real people.

While it’s Annabelle’s story, it’s also the story of the end of a civilisation. Here we have a proud colonisation effort, the crowning glory of humankind, that has ultimately been reduced to people squabbling over food and necessities. It’s about the end of childhood, the end of civilisation, and small wonder that it is a story filled with ghosts.

Ghosts are evident in the voice recording of Annabelle’s mother, the ghosts the Strange creates out in the Martian wilderness, and the less literal ghosts of human civilisation, as exemplified in the grounded saucer of the Eurydice. In mythology, Eurydice is the wife of Orpheus, whom Orpheus tries unsuccessfully to retrieve from the Underworld. Ghosts and loss, and more ghosts again.

Having made much of this being a story about loss, I should also state it’s not bleak or nihilistic. We always remember that this is a story told by an Annabelle who has grown old – extravagantly old, as he puts it – and so we’re always aware that there is hope to be found. It’s about loss, but also about growing and transforming, because what is the loss of childhood except the opportunity to grow into something more.

I’ve never read a bad story by Nathan Ballingrud, and the Strange is an impressive debut novel. It’s a fast, pleasurable read, with a small cast of characters and a richly imagined alternative-universe future. Definitely recommended.

Read The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

Durand Welsh

Durand Welsh lives in Sydney, Australia, where he’ll read anything with a spaceship or a sword on the front cover. He always enjoys a good action-filled romp, and given his gimpy knee and lack of private healthcare, it’s probably best for everyone that these only occur in his imagination. His dream is to one day grow a beard, preferably his own.

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The Strange

Nathan ballingrud.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2023

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Ambiguity and Humanity in “The Strange”

• Our review of Nathan Ballingrud's debut novel, "The Strange"

Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange is set on Mars in the early 20th century—not a scientifically accurate Mars, but one more like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles or earlier planetary romance, with a breathable atmosphere and signs of earlier civilizations. Colonized by Americans, among others, this is a distinctly frontier-like Mars, with most of the main characters of Texan extraction. Set shortly after a mysterious Silence has fallen over Earth—a complete stop in all messages and ships from the home planet—the novel is narrated by Annabelle Crisp, a young girl at the time of these events. When bandits steal the last recording of her mother’s voice, Annabelle embarks on a quest for justice: accompanied by her faithful kitchen robot and a rough cast of gunslingers and spaceship pilots, she soon finds herself in the thick of the strange transformations gripping Mars.

It’s impossible to talk about The Strange without comparison to Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles . Bradbury’s fixup novel has a mix of “classic” speculation, bucolic small-town details, and a kind of wistful nostalgia that frequently goes sideways into ghost-story territory. It’s a blend of specific tonal qualities one rarely encounters in science fiction, despite Bradbury’s fame and influence. Some of Lavie Tidhar’s work, such as Central Station and Neom , is in a similar vein, but I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone capture the feeling of Bradbury’s Mars the way Ballingrud does: juxtaposing innocence and cynicism, wonder and fear and banality.

With its well-defined narrator and plot, though, The Strange is quite a bit more concrete. And, with the story’s texture and form—the character names, the physical detail, the spare and ruthless prose—Ballingrud is also rooting this novel firmly in the tradition of the classic western. With its air of barely-deferred desperation, the way that its small-town civility is revealed as a fragile bulwark against mob instincts and violent individualism, and its fixation on revenge and its consequences, though, The Strange should not be mistaken for a cartoonish cowboy story. It’s more in the mode of Once Upon A Time In The West or True Grit , with Annabelle’s slightly myopic moral force particularly evoking the latter.

If you’re familiar with Ballingrud’s short work, it will not surprise you that this Western Bradbury Mars (which, now that I write it, sounds rather like a hotel) is shot through with unsettling horror. (If you’re not familiar with his short work, get your hands on North American Lake Monsters as soon as possible: it’s a remarkable, masterful collection.) Like the western, Ballingrud’s Mars is haunted by the threat of lawless violence; like Bradbury’s, it’s also haunted by the ghosts of previous inhabitants. The Strange , however, actually digs into that haunting quality. Literally: “the Strange” is an element that humans are mining on Mars, a sort of mineralized dream with supernatural properties. It’s what allows their Engines—a varied bunch of retro-futuristic robots—to function, it seems to cause bizarre maladies among the people who mine it, and it’s heavily-implied to be involved in whatever catastrophe silenced Earth.

This plays out in a wild set of hallucinatory and disturbing images, themselves set against the flailing violence of isolated and desperate people. Hulking war machines, half-fused to half-dead figures, hunt smugglers in the Martian desert; subterranean revenants take over a mining town through some kind of fungal sacrament; a spacesuit inhabited by a moth-infested skeleton tends a garden of ghostly flowers. Ballingrud excels at a kind of minimalist inventiveness, suffusing The Strange with just enough detail to be effective, and relying heavily on a slow-mounting ambience and the implication, rather than explication, of consequence. His sparing use of capitalized terms to sneak in their background importance—the Strange, the Silence—is a particularly deft touch, one that could easily go awry if overused, and manages to quietly convey both their potentially horrific magnitude and the way that Annabelle uncritically accepts them as givens.

Despite the novel’s many creepy and vivid scenes, Annabelle’s parochial upbringing and singular focus seem to shield her from many of the story’s stranger moments, with the result that the most deeply weird aspects of the book are more implied for the reader than felt by its protagonist. It’s the one part of The Strange where the cracks show in that fusion of Bradbury, the western, and Ballingrud’s brand of horror: the horror elements feel like the most original and interesting threads, but they seem somewhat desiccated by their subordination to the novel’s plot and Annabelle’s mindset.

Liminal Wanderings in Mike Fu’s “Masquerade”

Still, this is a delightful novel, an excellent and unexpected balance of inspirations and innovations. The specific homage to Bradbury’s atmosphere is remarkable enough, but this is more than a pastiche: memorable plot and characters, flashes of weird horror that aren’t there so much to scare you as to gesture at a larger and wilder universe, and repeatedly grounded with moments of gritty reality.

FICTION The Strange By Nathan Ballingrud Gallery / Saga Press Published March 21, 2023

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Locus Online

The Magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field

Sean Dowie Reviews The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud’s debut novel The Strange takes place in a version of the 1930s where humans have inhabited Mars. It opens with teenager Anabelle and her father Sam working in their diner, living in a Martian town that is surrounded by arid nothingness, an isolation that is mirrored in the characters’ loneliness. When their diner is robbed by a group of men led by the sinister Silas, the robbers take a recording of Ana­belle’s mother, who is Earthbound and cannot be contacted because of a mysterious phe­nomenon called The Silence. Pressure rises over the following days, and things spiral out of control when Sam is arrested for defending himself against miners, killing one of them. Anabelle and her docile Kitchen Engine/dishwasher/robot Watson then go on a journey with a gruff, ragtag group of acquaintances to find the recording in hopes that its audio will help keep both herself and Sam psychologi­cally afloat and stable. But Mars isn’t a simple planet. There are many machinations from forces human, robotic, and things beyond either of those.

Gone are the times when Martian people shuttled back and forth from Mars to Earth. There might still be civilization on Earth, but there’s no way to know, and the only person with a ship and the skills to reach out is in a debilitating malaise. Meanwhile, a Martian substance called The Strange has an unde­fined purpose. One thing is certain about it, however: it affects the psychological makeup of those exposed to it. The personalities of people, and even robots, have become dis­torted – their once familiar personalities now ranging between the known and the aberrant. Our narrator Anabelle soon finds out that even those not infected by The Strange might be more affected than she had thought–her expectations of people are wholly different from who they now are. The Strange proposes the terrifying thought that our messages are al­ways interpreted through a filter of malice and selfishness not readily apparent until people are at a point where they have nothing to lose. Here communications are always relayed to a source we don’t truly know, Silence or not, Mars or Earth, because people often put up a front primed to break down under pressure or greedy opportunity. And in The Strange , pres­sure rises, and opportunities are offered to the umpteenth degree. The result is an unmasking that spotlights each of Anabelle’s neighbors as they either take Annabelle’s vulnerability as an opportunity to help or to prey upon her, pillaging her supplies in the process.

The Strange wouldn’t be half as good without Ballingrud’s extraordinary charac­terization. Whether it’s Anabelle’s tenacity and immaturity as she goes through tribula­tions that would make most people falter in search of a recording that everyone around her thinks she overvalues. Or the calculated contradictions of Silas’s approachability and his self-serving attitude as he shifts from level-headed magnanimity to level-headed malevolence, modulating his personality to achieve his goals. Or Joe’s glimmers of love in overwhelming desolation–both in his sur­roundings and internality, soothing his pain with alcohol, wasted in a wasteland. My favor­ite character, however, is Sally, who starts out as an enigmatic antagonist but becomes coarsely caring, like a warm sandpaper blanket. These characters and more interact with each other to parcel out appropriately paced reveals and unearth things about each other in an impres­sively structured, endlessly engaging narrative.

Aspects of The Strange seem to be in­spired by classic science fiction: Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars spring to mind. It also takes inspiration from Westerns like True Grit , which feels apt. Underpinning it at times is a powerful darkness that is familiar from Ballingrud’s short fiction. But whatever inspired it, The Strange manages to find unique twists to the Martian subgenre, along with turning some outdated, unflattering social politics into something palatable. The novel’s descriptions of racial and Queer dy­namics feel authentic to that time. Ballingrud manages to show us that time with a modern voice, self-aware of the bile associated with such a viewpoint without using the authorial voice to break the fourth wall and subvert immersion. But diversity is touched on only briefly. To its credit, it never feels crass and exploitative, yet never feels thorough. I was left wanting more in that regard.

In The Strange , Ballingrud manages to tell a story that inhabits the spirit of old-school SF and Westerns while making something of his own. The Strange carefully avoids the outdated sensibilities of the time in which it is set, while having rollicking narrative drive, engagement, philosophy, and unpredictability. But by inhabiting a beast as divisive in these times as old-school science fiction, you risk becoming affected by the thing you’ve entered. Poetic prose, thrilling storytelling, and excel­lent characterization – which all feel fresh and alive here – run the risk of mirroring the worst of the past. That happens in a few very, very slight instances here. Nevertheless, Ballingrud transitions from being the author of some of my favorite short fiction to writing a debut science fiction novel as well as I or any of his readers could’ve hoped. This splendid story should most definitely please fans of the genre and perhaps convert naysayers along the way. The narrative might be uneven, but I enjoyed it immensely.

This review and more like it in the February 2023 issue of Locus .

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.

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The Strange: book review

Author: Nathan Ballingrud

Genre: Science Fiction, Space Western

Publisher: Titan Books

Year: March 2023

The Strange is definitely… strange . A science fiction space western set in New Galveston on Mars, it is adventurous and imaginative, but I think it was slightly lacking in the Sci-Fi parts. Here is the blurb:

“Anabelle Crisp is fourteen when the Silence arrives, severing all communication between Earth and her new home on Mars. One evening, while she and her father are closing their diner in the colony of New Galveston, they are robbed at gunpoint.

Among the stolen items is a recording of her absent mother’s voice. Driven by righteous fury and desperation to lift her father’s broken spirits, Anabelle sets out to confront the thieves and bring back the sole vestige of her mother. Accompanied by her loyal robot, an outcast pilot and a hardened outlaw, Anabelle must travel through derelict mining towns where a mineral called the Strange has transformed its residents in bizarre ways, across the Martian desert and to the shadowy Peabody Crater where she will discover that New Galveston, once a safe haven, is nothing more than a guttering candle in a dark world.”

So yes, the protagonist is Anabelle Crisp, a 14-year-old girl who bosses around grown-up men and women, and though I liked her determination and bravery, her naivety and childlike behaviour made the whole gang seem rather unrealistic. I mean, she is very young, so of course her spirit would still be very rebellious, but why did she have to gang up with grown-up men and why did they just blindly follow her orders? I just couldn’t believe that such a bond, a relationship like theirs, could be real.

Despite this downside, it is an enjoyable little read and combines elements of horror (it has one of the most chilling scenes I have read in a book) with fantasy. I also liked the beautiful and evocative descriptions of Mars. I wish there were more of them, more of the way they lived on Mars. How exactly did they colonise it, what were the challenges and the differences compared to life on Earth? The worldbuilding was good, so was the plot, but I would have found them to be way more interesting if they included a bit more of Mars, of that otherworldly element. Nevertheless, there are still great adventures, some fantastic scenery descriptions, haunted dunes and space western scenes unravelling in your mind while reading. Your imagination will thank you for reading this book!

All in all, it is definitely a coming-of-age story, as Anabelle has had to deal with some pretty difficult situations, adding to them a move to Mars at such a young age! She continues to experience the hardships of adult life, and tries her best not to have a meltdown or a nervous breakdown. As with each and every one of us, who’s ever been through the tumultuous teenage years of their lives, we can see that she’s annoying at times, and she’s vulnerable at others, she’s stubborn but also considerate, she has moments of immense fear but also of extreme bravery. She’s trying to navigate all the challenges life throws at her while surviving on Mars. If we just keep in mind that she’s a teenager who’s been through stuff that most kids haven’t even imagined, I think we can cut her some slack and forgive her all the moments when she’s not acting appropriately for her fragile age—she’s had no choice but to grow up quickly!

There are some really interesting characters. I slowly became fond of the drunken pilot, Joe. He has a love-hate relationship with Anabelle, and you’re never completely sure how you feel towards him. The Kitchen Engine/Dishwasher, Watson, is one of the most adorable robots, you can’t not love him, and his loyalty is heartbreaking! Sally Milkwood is Anabelle’s enemy, and it’s interesting to see how their relationship evolved. I thought the author did a great job with the character development throughout the entire story, which was difficult to achieve, given that it is just 315 pages long.

You can decide for yourself, but I definitely recommend this book, if you’re looking for a fresh perspective on Sci-Fi adventures!

In case you need me… #owlbeereading!

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Review: THE STRANGE, by Nathan Ballingrud

1931, New  Galveston , Mars: Fourteen-year-old Anabelle Crisp sets off through the wastelands of the Strange to find Silas Mundt’s gang who have stolen her mother’s voice, destroyed her father, and left her solely with a need for vengeance. Since Anabelle’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked. At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s  The Martian Chronicles  and the harder realities of frontier life in Charles Portis  True Grit , Ballingrud’s novel is haunting in its evocation of Anabelle’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars.

I recently read an interview with Ballingrud where he described this book as The Martian Chronicles crossed with True Grit , and it’s a very accurate comparison. I picked up this book solely based on the buzz, and had no idea what it was about, or anything. I actually tend to enjoy going into a book cold. But sometimes, I do feel a bit off kilter, having not read anything beforehand about the book. That was the case here, when it opened up, and there were a couple of mentions that I thought… well, that doesn’t sound like it’s realistic …until I clued in that we were on Mars, but 90 years ago. And Mars had been visited for something like 60 years prior to that. Okay, cool. Offbeat, but I can get behind it. I’m not really a fan of westerns, for the most part, but I actually really enjoy when someone takes that genre, and slathers another genre over it, in this case, some science fiction, but also a healthy dollop of horror as well.

The SF was fine. It was enough to suspend disbelief that we’d somehow made it to Mars back in the 1800s. But I did enjoy the horror aspect of…well, the Strange in The Strange …quite a bit. The fact that it can work its way into both the engines (the robots with a lot of personality in the novel), as well as the humans was far more effective than the other novel I read recently that explored a similar theme, T. Kingfisher’s What Moves The Dead . More effective, I believe, because Ballingrud was less concerned with explaining it too much, and more concerned with making it creepy.

And yes, it got creepy. And to be honest, I really enjoyed the ride. Ballingrud does an excellent job of dropping you right into the hard-bitten world of Mars, now cut off from contact with Earth. He also does a good job of paying homage to a lot of the influences on the novel, but most especially Ray Bradbury, Charles Portis, and Larry McMurtry. The only reason I wouldn’t give The Strange a perfect score is because I felt the story touched on some interesting things (that I won’t spoil here, but they start showing up halfway through and, once we get to know more about the effects of the Strange, they come more and more toward the end) that didn’t really get fully explored, that I think would have given the ending a bit more of a point. I know I said earlier that I enjoyed the more non-explanative aspects of the book, and I stand by that. It’s more, hey, you gave us a glimpse of this, but I wanted a better look . Which is good, because Ballingrud was piquing my interest throughout. And finally, I just felt that the ending sort of…happened, with not a lot of agency or understanding by the characters. Might just be me, as everyone else seems to dig it. But I guess I just wanted a bit more of a point to it all. But for all of that, it’s still an excellent, entertaining read.

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The Strange

Nathan ballingrud. saga, $27.99 (304p) isbn 978-1-5344-4995-4.

Reviewed on: 12/14/2022

Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror

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Book Review: The Strange

Debut Novel by Nathan Ballingrud Review by Sadie Hartmann

Book: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

Release Date: March 21, 2023

Genre: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Western, Alternative History, Horror

Subgenre/Themes: Family, young female protagonists, revenge, coming-of-age, grief and loss, quest or mission, robots and AI, friendship, community and colonies

Writing Style: Very character-driven, compelling, accessible narrative, strong voice

Establishing time and place is important. This is an alternate history story that takes place during the 1930s, in and around a colony stranded on Mars. So, it’s good to know this is not futuristic just because it is set in space and the technology has afforded mankind a life on Mars. The people and the vibe is still very much from a past era, which lends itself perfectly to the Western flavor. So expect a 1930s-era True Grit, coming-of-age, Weird Western set on Mars. Plenty of horror elements, too.

My Reading Experience

This book reads like a movie. It’s effortlessly cinematic. Ballingrud is a master wordsmith, crafting a complex alternate history packaged in a way the reader can just sit back and enjoy.

Typically, I get frustrated by the laborious mechanics of science fiction. The science part can sometimes bog down the story or distract me from investing in the characters. Ballingrud takes a cue from Bradbury by downplaying technical aspects and focusing more on human interactions. This doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of questions racing through my mind. I was still wondering how and why, but the story answered all my questions in time. There aren’t big, annoying info-dumps, or long passages of exposition. The characters, primarily the lead, fourteen-year-old Annabelle Crisp, drives the story with one, clear objective: Something valuable was stolen from her family, her father is in jail as a result, and she will take back what is rightfully theirs, no matter the cost.

The Strange is an amazing journey filled with so much emotion, suspense, and just a general feeling of awe. Ballingrud’s imagination just explodes on the page.

I especially loved Watson, the robot. I’m a sucker for a young kid with a sidekick—a horse, a fog, a robot, whatever, I’m here for it.

Final Recommendation

I was already a huge Nathan Ballingrud fan. His short stories send me! Now, after reading his debut novel, I can confidently say he is an insta-buy author. Everything he releases will have a home on my bookshelves.

True Grit by Charles Portis, The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, Edge of Dark Water by Joe R. Lansdale

The Strange is currently available for purchase wherever books are sold.

Nathan Ballingrud

Author of The Strange

Sadie Hartmann

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Book Review: THE STRANGE by Nathan Ballingrud

Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite authors, so it should come as no big surprise that I absolutely LOVED his debut novel, The Strange . I've been anxiously waiting for this book since he first announced he was working on it, and when it finally arrived in my hands, I wanted to tear right into it then and there. And I totally could have. But upon reading the first chapter, I realized The Strange is a novel that deserves to be savored; it deserves to be read slowly, in a manner that allows you to truly bask in the story, the prose, and the emotions behind it all. That's not to say this isn't a rip-roaring book: The Strange is, at its heart, an adventure novel, and a pulpy one at that. But this is an adventure novel about loss, grief, revenge, bravery, and kindness; a pulp sci-fi-meets-alternative history-meets-Western novel about familial bonds, stewardship of the earth, community, justice, and hope. One thing that struck me most about The Strange was how utterly original it feels - even as it is paradoxically familiar: There are definitely shades of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles , and True Grit , even Dune . But that's where Ballingrud's talent comes into play - yes, this may feel a little familiar, but it is all done in a way that is new, original, that is wholly Ballingrud. The horror elements readers familiar with Ballingrud's short fiction have come to expect are here on display as well, giving his version of Mars such a (forgive the pun) strange and alien atmosphere, one that I've never experienced before in all the science fiction I've read. And perhaps that's the true power of Ballingrud's incredible first novel: In The Strange , he takes the familiar and moulds it into something completely new and truly wonder-full.

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