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Mars Confidential
Mars Confidential
Here is history's biggest news scoop! Those intrepid reporters Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, whose best-selling exposes of life's seamy side from New York to Medicine Hat have made them famous, here strip away the veil of millions of miles to bring you the lowdown on our sister planet. It is an amazing account of vice and violence, of virtues and victims, told in vivid, jet-speed style.Here you'll learn why Mars is called the Red Planet, the part the Mafia plays in her undoing, the rape and rapine that has made this heavenly body the cesspool of the Universe. In other words, this is Mars—Confidential!
Book Excerpt
and cocaine have not the slightest visible effect on them.
Poppies grow everywhere, huge russet poppies, ten times as large as those on Earth and 100 times as deadly. It is these poppies which have colored the planet red. Martians are strictly vegetarian: they bake, fry and stew these flowers and weeds and eat them raw with a goo made from fungus and called szchmortz which passes for a salad dressing.
Though the Martians were absolutely impervious to the narcotic qualities of the aforementioned flora, they got higher than Mars on small doses of sugar.
So the Mafia was in business. The Martians sniffed granulated sugar, which they called snow. They ate cube sugar, which they called "hard stuff", and they injected molasses syrup into their veins with hypos and called this "mainliners."
There was nothing they would not do for a pinch of sugar. Gold, platinum and diamonds, narcotics by the acre--these were to be had in generous exchange for sugar--which was selling on Earth at
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The review by Sardo Weems sums this one up pretty good. There are no redeeming qualities to this story. An attempt to describe the mob's operations on Mars with heavy jargon and childish humor does not a story make.
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The story is an attempt to fabricate a Walter Winchell type of article exposing the seamy underbelly of Martian society while using Damon Runyon's type of language. It might have passed as cute when it was written, but is very, very dated.
There are no characters or plot to speak of, just a telegraphic flow of jargon, none of it very amusing.
There are no characters or plot to speak of, just a telegraphic flow of jargon, none of it very amusing.
09/29/2012
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