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Outpost Mars

by Cyril Judd and C.M. Kornbluth and Judith Merril

Cover artist: Richard Powers

Publisher: Dell

Pub year: 1952

Cover price: 25¢

 

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Book detail for Outpost Mars

Cover tagline

"This is definitive science-fiction"
—Theodore Sturgeon

Back cover text

Mars Was No Paradise

But to Dr. Tony Hellman, it meant a second chance for man — and to Hugo Brenner it meant a world to plunder.

Tony was the leading member of Sun Lake Colony, a band of frontier-extending Earth people — intrepid space pioneers. Brenner was the planet's most powerful magnate, an operator whose vast wealth was based on Earthmen's tragic addiction to the vicious drug, marcaine.

When Brenner accused the Sun Lakers of stealing a hundred kilograms of the Martian drug, the colony was threatened with extermination unless the thief was found and the marcaine returned. Tony and his fellow colonists saw their second chance fading. Brenner's success would mean the end of their better world.

Could the struggling colony survive the assaults of entrenched greed and persecution?

The answer makes an absorbing science-fiction novel, one that has depth as well as action, human warmth as well as suspense and excitement.

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Interior text

Dr. Tony Hellman could have been the hard-working young physician down the street in any American town — delivering babies, prescribing for bellyache, removing appendixes....

On the planet Mars, he did all those things, and more. He had to cope with weird fungi and strange viruses, treat ultra-violet damaged eyes and dehydrated tissues.

On top of that he led the earth-born pioneers of Mars' Sun Lake Colony in their fight to make a brave new world that would leave behind the stupidities, hostilities, and frustrations of the old.

It was hardly a soft berth, but it was Tony's life, and he vowed he'd make the better world stick....