The eleventh tale in the anthology is “Martian Heart,” penned by American SF author John Barnes. It’s a touching hard science love story about an old man, Cap, who recalls his younger days prospecting on a frontier Mars with his now-deceased wife, Sam. Here is one of the more romantic passages:
Sam was different. Everybody I knew was thinking about the next party or at most the next week or the next boy or girl, but Sam thought about everything. I know it’s a stupid example, but once back in LA, she came into our squat and found me fucking with the fusion box, just to mess with it. “That supplies all our power for music, light, heat, net, and everything, and you can’t fix it if you break it, and it’s not broke, so, Cap, what the fuck are you doing?”
Interestingly, Barnes explains in the “Author’s Note” how a poem by Robert W. Service about cremation [presumably “The Cremation of Sam McGee” (1907)] inspired part of the plot of “Martian Heart.”
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