I cannot believe that Hollywood has not made a slew of adaptations of this one yet. It’s got everything that modern audiences want:
- A scifi setting. Plenty of possible effects. The book does take place on mars, you know. With rockets, a “bubble” city, spacesuits, and everything.
- A scrappy anti-hero. All he wants is work for an honest buck and make something for himself. But he’s not above becoming a dirty cop or performing acts of terrorism.
- An implausible romance. When the few few scenes featuring the woman involve her trying to kill the hero, you know deep down that there’s only one way for the situation to end. A bizarre marriage of necessity. And then maybe romance afterward.
- A cast of colorful supporting characters. Let’s see, we’ve got the fat slumlord named “mother” who happens to have a heart of gold. We’ve got a rangy sidekick who lives by his very, very strange code of personal ethics. We’ve also got a crooked mayor, an amoral police chief, and a dedicated-to-truth-and-liberty newspaper man.
Oh, yeah, and #5 – pretty much nonstop action.
Here’s the setup. Our hero gets dumped on Mars with a “yellow ticket” which means he’s been branded as a criminal and he can never go back to Earth. He has had a number of jobs (boxer, cop, newspaper reporter) in his life before Mars, all of which will come in handy in his new life. Once he hits the planet, he discovers that Mars is not awesome. It’s dirty, its mean, and everything about the big cities is corrupt. To make it worse, all he’s got to his name is $100 cash and a pocketknife.
It’s a novel, but it’s a short one (44,000 words or so). And it’s in the public domain. You can download it in your favorite ereader format or in pdf at the feedbooks link below.