Big Red

At the beginning of this strange military SF tale, the narrator is just regaining consciousness after some severe trauma, and the novel alternates scenes showing his recovery and the interplanetary skullduggery that injured him. He is Darren Loughlin, a young, underemployed Irishman who joins the military thinking he’ll get an easy stint as a support troop. Instead he finds himself on Mars, ordered to fight insectoid native Martians and help enslave the unhappy, German-speaking human population, descendants of the Nazis who colonized Mars after WWII. The situation’s even more bizarre than that, since he’s not in his own body but one that was cloned on Mars by ruthless MARSCORP. Oh, and in the process, he and his fellow victims were sent back in time; the year is now 1975. Larkin’s no-nonsense prose works to conceal the plot’s goofiness for a while, but readers eventually realize that this novel contains enough ingenuity for three or four less frantic but more convincing ones. (May)