Martians, A Creature

Fiction. Dave Kress draws us into the tale of Ray "Gnat" Smith from a variety of perspectives: sometimes we read Gnat's first-person accounts, sometimes we find his discarded rants; occasionally, Gnat is simply a face in someone else's crowd, or his exploits related by a pack of narrators, some kind, others openly hostile. But Martians doesn't suggest that these perspectives add to each other or to our knowledge of Gnat; rather it asks readers to consider them as multiple subtractions: without identity, knowledge, or ethics, just what are humans and what kind of world do they inhabit? World travelers alien in their own skin? Accidents of a nature they themselves have constructed? Familiar and weird at the same time, Martians asks its readers to remove the linchpin holding together the ordinary--and then to stand back.