One of a number of stories in the collection that looks to the Chinese as the people who will get us further into space. Baxter follows two driven men, Wei Binglin, and Bill Kendrick as their paths cross on the red planet. The latter might well have appeared in an earlier Baxter story or two, as he has backstory to his character, and Baxter does have his characters popping up here and their. Baxter looks at how Mars might bootstrap itself up from it’s humble origins with limited resources, and the role of ambition and drive to take us out into space, and the costs…
