A Rebels History Of Mars by Nadia Afifi, Kesha’s Initial aim was to kill Barrett Jewell the founder of a future town called Nebatea City because she blamed him for her mother‘s death. Before Kessa knows it she not only doesn’t want to kill him but will help him carry out his future plans. Azad is a doctor in Nabatea city and the woman he will know is Nina is brought in with all her insides melting and spewing black sludge but before she dies she tells him “you look just like her!“ he knows she can only be talking about one person and that is his twin sister Ledo. Who left the city long ago and someone he thought dead. Circumstances and even stranger events will lead him to a crew under Captain Zell’ this is where he learns about Barry a machine that can take imprint of the past and run it in real time like a movie. The crew or historians because in the world Azad lives in there is no freedom and they are told to look to the future and not the past. The crew wants to find out the real story of an ancient city on Mars but Azad’s only goal is to find his sister. during their search however they will find so much more. i’m not gonna lie there were some nuances in the story I did not understand but the overall meat and bones of the book was compelling and oh so interesting. I loved Tessa and felt so bad for her throughout most of the book although when it comes to Azad there were many decisions he made I found dubious and not in his best interest but won’t say because it will give spoilers away and I am not trying to do that. If you are in to space dramas especially those involving archaeological digs both with objects and visible then you will absolutely enjoy the story it is a time travel per se type story but as the time travel is done far in the future it doesn’t feel time traveling the way most time travel stories do but it was so good you really will just let that go. this is a wonderful read and one I definitely recommend. #NetGalley, #TheBlindReviewer, #MyHonestReview, #FlameTreeBooks, #NadiafAifi,#ARebel’sHistoryOfMars,

I’m a fan of Nadia Afifi’s writing; she’s the author of The Sentient (Bookshop link), The Emergent, The Transcendent, and she was in the recent Palestinian SF collection, Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction, edited by Sonia Sulaiman.
A Rebel’s History of Mars is about, as it says on the tin, the history of a future Mars and rebellion, written from two POVs in two time periods: that of Kezza, an aerial performer in the circus on Mars (bread and circuses anyone), and Azad, a thousand years later on a planet called Nabatea. The novel starts off really well: Azad is on doctor duty (not like we know, as medmechs do all the work) when a patient comes in and essentially liquefies before him. As she dies, she says to him, “You look just like her.” It turns out that Azad has a missing twin, Ledo, that he thought long dead. This incident sends him across space in search of her. What he finds along the way is a bunch of historians and the mystery of an old class conspiracy that created the society he now lives in on Nabatea.
So many cool ideas—like this stratified future society with the superhuman Vitruvians who can do as they wish and travel across space and all kinds of fun stuff, while regular Nabateans are the riff-raff that do all the work (slightly confusing in a society where robots do a lot of the hard stuff, but I guess plausible as humans will find any reason to create a hierarchy). And in the novel’s past, a Mars with domed corporate cities, where workers owe their very lives to the companies that run things—fertile ground for rebellion.
Being a fan, this one both thrilled and somewhat disappointed me. There’s a fair bit of “magic” in this novel—by which I mean unexplained things in the world-building, and incidences of deus ex machina. It’s possible Afifi wanted to focus mostly on the character arcs; and of course no author needs to explain every little thing that’s going on… But those niggling things make this novel’s world feel unfinished. On the other hand, Afifi extrapolates common societal problems into the future really well: This novel considers the what if of humans taking their determination to rule over each other (supremacist ideas) into the future, and out into space. It’s also a novel about megalomania and unfettered power, and the destruction it always brings to ordinary lives. And while A Rebel’s History ends on a note of hope (yay, genetic engineering for everyone because we all want to be superhuman innit*), the ending rings a little hollow—and, again, deus ex machina.
Still, a rollicking good read about class and humans still humaning even when they’ve become interplanetary, which, you know, fits.
Many thanks to Flame Tree Press and NetGalley for early DRC access.
* I’m not a fan of transhumanist ideas that suggest we will be happier if we’re more physically perfect and less human, so that didn’t please me.

Review soon to be published at Concatenation.

A Rebel's History of Mars (2025) Nadia Afifi, Flame Tree Press, £20 / Can$34.95 / US$26.95, hrdbk, 297pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58945-2
A Rebel’s History of Mars is a fresh take on some old science fictional ideas.

The story runs along two timelines. The first involves Azad, a doctor on the planet of Nabatea in approximately the year 4612. There humans like Azad and Vitruvians live a peaceful coexistence on the whole, although there is a strict societal hierarchy and a degree of racism between the Nabateans and the Vitruvians.. Their environment seems somewhat Arabian or Saharan to me – all desert dust, sandstorms and tents. (The name Nabatea was inspired by the city of Petra in Jordan.)

The second plotline is set in 2195, 1209 years before Nabatea was settled. Kezza Sayer is an aerialist who works in the Circus in the Calypso Corporate Campus on Mars. Her agility and muscles mean that she is capable of impressive feats of display, and has developed a reputation as a skilled performer.

Unbeknown to most, Kezza hates the conditions she works in, but is fuelled by revenge and sticks with it in the hope of killing Barrett Juul, the corporate businessman who killed her parents. He is charming, erudite and popular: a civilisationist, seemingly determined to improve the Martian’s lot.

There’s a bit of timey-wimey technological magic through the use of ‘Barry’, a machine created by the archaeologists to look at observed events through time. This allows them to follow what happens to Kezza when she meets Juul, and the resultant consequences. What they discover impacts them in the future as well as rewrites some of the legends of the past.

These apparently different timelines find themselves increasingly intertwined. Azad finds himself leaving Nabatea in the company of a group of historians, determined to work out how the Nabateans got to where they are and what happened to the colonies on Mars as a result.

It’s an unusual, if intriguing mix. The circus athlete element was a little unnecessary but gave us the idea that the city of Calypso is like in the science fiction of the old days, a corporate frontier town, a place where people are living basic lives, in an atmosphere with less atmosphere and a less gravity than on Earth - elements which Kezza finds useful in the plot. There are parts where the story touched upon old-school stories of planetary discovery and knowledge, whilst giving them a contemporary spin. I was in turns reminded a little of the James Bond film Octopussy, Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao, C L Moore’s Shambleau and Greg Bear’s Moving Mars, not to mention a few others.

If you stop to think about it, all those elements suggest that the plot shouldn’t work, that there are too many unusual elements mixed together to form a consistent story. And yet it does. Add to this two very different, yet equally likeable characters, in the form of Kezza and Azad, and these seemingly disparate elements do come together by the end.

Things take unexpected turns in the narrative, and whilst they were often unexpected, the main key notes were not. The story is focussed on character, so you do not get too many background details of Mars or Nabatea, although there are enough to give you the gist without spoiling the flow of the story. There’s a lot of plates being spun here but this debut author manages to keep all things turning nicely.

A Rebel’s History of Mars was an engaging read from a promising new author (to me, anyway.) I wasn’t quite sure what to expect – I try not to know too much about things before I start a review book – but I was pleasantly surprised.


Mark Yon

I found this atmospheric and I enjoyed the unravelling mysteries in the past and present. I think it did a good job showing how societies create and reinforce their origin myths, especially when those myths uphold existing hierarchies.

This wasn't a long book, but I did find it slow to get through, so the pacing wasn't ideal for me. I also thought there were opportunities to streamline the past and present narratives, as sometimes we were learning the same information twice.

All in all, this is solid, very readable sci-fi. I'll be looking out for whatever Nadia Afifi writes next.

A Rebel’s History of Mars is told in two timelines: the "past", via Kezza on Mars, in 2195, and then over a thousand years later via Azad, starting on a distant planet colonized by the folks from Mars. Pretty cool, right? Kezza's story begins as she's trapped on Mars, making mere peanuts as an aerialist in the circus. Azad is just living a mundane life, but when he finds a clue that may lead him to his missing sister, he jumps at the chance to join the crew, basically upending his whole life. In his pursuit of his sister, he begins to find that quite a few aspects of his life were not exactly what they seemed.

And so our story takes us back to the place (and time) where it all began, and gives us insight into how Azad's world came to be, and what lead to the "superhuman" race of people who now occupy the "elite" class of the new world. Obviously, the themes are on point, a tale as old as time: the haves versus the have nots. I loved the secrets and mysteries that are unfurled in the dual timelines, and I really felt connected to Kezza's storyline especially. The tech was very cool too, and I loved how there were actually very cool, very futuristic gadgets involved. My only real issue with the story was that the pacing felt a bit slow at times, and then during the exciting bits perhaps a little too fast. That, and I wasn't quite as connected with Azad as I was Kezza, but I did enjoy Azad and the folks he ends up with much more as the story went on.

Bottom Line: Rich people just think they're superior, no matter what solar system you find yourself in.

Did not care for this one. It's already been overwritten in my brain by Joe Mungo Reed's [book:Terrestrial History|213395554] in the "time travel-inflected parallel stories involving Mars and interplanetary colonization" space, which I didn't even like THAT much but is still better. This book asks you to care about some mystery about the origins of the beyond-Mars colonization project that I never found all that mysterious or worth caring about, which unfortunately fatally undermines the whole project of the story.

A Rebel's History of Mars follows two different characters in two different timelines. In the 21st century, Kezza works as an aerialist for a meager salary on one of two Mars colonies. When she attempts to assinate the man she blames for ruining her life, she instead finds herself embroiled in his plans to found a new colony on the newly discovered planet of Nabatea. One thousand years in the future, Azad finds himself stuck in the routine controlled life of Nabatea until a chance encounter gives him hope that his long lost twin sister is still alive. He joins a ragtag group of explorers and historians in order to find her and ends up finding much more in the process.

I absolutely love reading stories with multiple timelines and Afifi makes great use of it here. Kezza and Azad both show how ordinary people can chance the course of history when forced into extraordinary circumstances. How can you not love a woman who wants to start a revolution or a man just trying to find the last of his family?

I found the character of Juul to be incredibly fascinating as he is the architect of the Nabatea colony. He asks the question of whether or not human's need heirarchies and the us vs. them mentality to succeed as a species. And he seems to think that the answer is yes to the point of wanting to introduce a new yet false means of segregation into the colony which leads to frustrating ramifications in Azad's timeline. It was fascinating look into humanity and the nature of individulaity.

That being said, the biggest flaw of this book would be the pacing. I felt that conversly plot beats were rushed and yet the story progression felt oddly slow. Due to the dual timelines, the reader has a good idea of what is going to happen to Kezza at the end and I'm not sure the set up was well done enough to compensate for that fact. Unfortunately, the ending was little anticlimactic and used some deus ex machina to resolve the future conflict. I feel the book could have been improved with an extra 50 pages to provide more detail to the ending of Kezza's story as well as giving a satisfactory conclusion to Azad's.

Overall, A Rebel's History of Mars is a solid scifi book with interesting ideas that doesn't quite live up to its potential.


Reviews going live on Goodreads, Storygraph and Fable on 7/21 and Tiktok on 7/22.

Past and present collide as historians from the future investigate the formation of their planet and the new species of human that was created along the way there.

There are some interesting ideas and plot moments however there is a lot of redundancy when one part of the story is watching what the past did with new technology that lets them see what anyone has witnessed via quantum mechanics. I don't know it would have helped to have had parts in the past and then in the future versus alternating chapters. There is also less drama in the past actions if you know certain things had to have happened for the future to turn out the way it did.

This was an entertaining sci fi adventure, told in dual timelines, about a Martian aerialist turned revolutionary and a young man searching for his sister. I liked the story and world building though at time story pacing felt a bit slow. All in all a good read! Looking forward to more by this author. Thank you to NetGalley and Flame Tree Press for the chance to read and review this book!

This was such an unexpected read! I was ready for a sci-fi on Mars, but this is so much more and I can’t wait to read other books by this author! How the author managed to mix together science fiction, societal and political concerns, all wrapped up in a mystery with a dual timeline is very clever and I couldn’t get enough of it!

I fell in love with Kezza’s character, but also all the rest of the main characters to be fair as they’re so authentic and well written. The story itself is also very fascinating as the author lures the reader in with a mystery and various quests across time and space. On one side Azad suddenly leaves everything behind to find his twin sister, whilst at the same time a crew of historians is trying to find out the truth about the abandonment of Mars so many years ago and the consequent birth of Nabatea.

Needless to say, as humans are humans no matter the timeline we’re in, hidden truths are revealed and history repeats itself. This theme I found to be food for thought and there are a lot of parallelisms with events currently happening, which is always scary.

This story definitely draws you in and traps you with the beautiful writing, world building and the intriguing plot, with the added bonus of a bunch of great characters to side with!
I highly recommend it for those wanting a stimulating plot with underlying socio-political threads.

Thanks Flame Tree Press and NetGalley for a copy and this is my honest opinion.

Keeza wants to kill the man she blames for how her life is on Mars. Azad who live on Nabatea a thousand years in the future joins a ship of historians to find out what happened on Mars. Told in the two timelines that comes together in the end. Good characters and a well plotted sci-fi I thoroughly enjoyed. Thanks to Flame Tree Press and Netgalley for this review copy.

A Rebel’s History of Mars alternates between two POV characters living a thousand years apart. Azad, living in the space colony of Nabatea, escapes his highly controlled life when evidence of his long lost sister arises and he has the chance to join a ship of historians researching humanity’s past journey from Mars to what became Nabatea. A thousand years in the past, Kezza, a circus performer living in a corporate-operated Mars colony, gets swept up in ‘civilizationist’ Barett Juul’s plans to design and start a new society different from the exploitative ‘tiered’ model of the Martian cities. Each soon learns that more is going on than they realized.

This novel has so much of what I look for in a sci-fi novel: multiple POVs that feel distinctive, an exciting plot consistently paced, a few clever twists I did not 100% see coming, and solid worldbuilding that is simultaneously dystopian and wholly believable (with the exception of perhaps some of the scientific components); there are clear ethical and political implications to consider in the narrative and I appreciate the nuance with which they’re presented. I will definitely read more from Afifi.

Thank you to Flame Tree Press, NetGalley, & the author for providing me with an ARC to review.

Content warnings: violence, murder, sexual harassment, classism, racism, gun violence, mass shooting, medical content, medical trauma, pandemic/epidemic, blood, terminal illness, cancer, forcible confinement, death, death of a parent, grief

Entertaining, engaging, and enigmatic this is a fun read! I’m bummed I had to read it on my phone, but I will be purchasing a print copy ASAP as this is sci-fi at its best.

Really easy to get into, it doesn’t feel like other sci-fi I’ve read where you have to learn a whole new language to understand what’s happening in the book. You just jump right in and enjoy the ride.
While some of the science (viruses, gene splicing, medical accuracy) leave something to be desired especially if you have a biology/science background, if you suspend belief and let yourself get into it the themes it is a colorful and rich story with virtuous intent.
Speaking of themes, this story explores topics of autonomy, racism, classism, corporate control, nature vs nurture, and what it means to be human.
I highly recommend this book!

Thank you to NetGalley and Nadia Afifi for allowing me to read an eARC of this book, all opinions in this review are my own.

**I was provided with an ARC through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**

I absolutely loved Nadia Afifi’s short story The Generation Chip in Thyme Travellers so was really excited to read something longer from her and A Rebel’s History of Mars did not disappointed in the slightest!

It is a story two fold with a dual timeline. One taking place in a distant future following a young medic on the planet Nabatea. When an injured woman comes crashing into his work place and hints that she is familiar with his long lost twin, he sets off to find answers of where she ran off to and gets tangled up in the mission of a group of historian travellers who want to find out more about their past and the planet they migrated from, Mars. Their search has them coming across an encrypted recording of a mysterious message about Nabatea’s founder. The other timeline takes place around 1000 years before when humanity has been living on Mars and follows a young circus aerialist who wants revenge on the man behind humanity moving to the red planet and thus her lot in life. However, she ends up stumbling upon a conspiracy which changes the course of her life forever.

Afifi is a brilliant storyteller, instantly drawing you into the two imagined futures and the lives of her characters. The worldbuilding overall was really well done and while the technology side of things had its questionable aspects, how it came into play with the dual timeline was really interesting.

The societies on Mars and Nabatea couldn’t be more different but through the two leads we come to see how they equally pose dystopic civilisations that are rooted in discrimination and elitism. With one supposedly being the utopia of the other it was really interesting to see the known details of each society and then following the characters on their individual journeys as they slowly uncovered the hidden truths over the course of the book.

It’s a story of lost history and looking for answers as much as it is breaking free to make your own choices and I loved how this came about through both Azad the medic’s and Kezza the aerialist’s narratives.

Azad’s side whilst action packed and fast paced had a lighter feel to it which I think came down to there being more moments of banter and the found family aspects with the historian crew that he fell in with. Kezza’s has a much darker, thriller edge to it and I found myself more emotionally invested in her storyline of wanting better for herself and others, though both narratives were as charged with emotions as each other.

There is a little bit of repetition when the two storylines start to line up but the overall mystery is engrossing and I really enjoyed how everything came together by the end. This book is up there with my favourites of the year so far and I’m looking forward to picking up more work by Afifi in the future!
Final Rating – 4.5/5 Stars

This was my first time reading anything by this author, and I have to say, I was really excited to dive into this book after the intriguing description from the publishers caught my eye!

"A Rebel's History of Mars" takes us on an adventurous journey to the future, where humans are starting to make a life on Mars.

The writing is fantastic, and I found the plot so engaging! The story is told through two different storylines and timelines, which at first had me a bit confused since they didn’t seem to connect. But as I read on, I loved how everything came together in the end! I did notice some repetition when the plotlines overlapped, and I initially felt that the pacing was a bit slow. However, by the time I reached the end, I realised it helped to build the story nicely.

The characters were really well-developed, and I couldn't wait to see how their stories would unfold. Plus, the vivid descriptions of the Martian landscape were simply delightful!

Overall, I really enjoyed this science fiction novel! As I mentioned before, this is the first book I've read by this author, but it definitely won’t be my last—I'm looking forward to exploring their other works soon.

A big thank you to Flame Tree Press for sending me a digital review copy via NetGalley. All of my thoughts in this review are entirely my own, and I’m excited to share them voluntarily!

Well I've run out of days on this download because I am terrible at being distracted on my phone.

I only made it 15% of the way through this book before my Netgalley download expired, but I loved it so much that I just preordered a physical copy of a book I could have read for free from Bookshop.org. This is my second Nadia Afifi book and I love them, I wish they came in audio!

I have never not finished a Netgalley book and then bought a copy, NEVER. That's how good this is. I just forget ebooks exist!!!

This is a sci-fi book about a capitalistic society where a circus performer contracts some sort of pathogen that makes her suddenly stronger, but will eventually make her crazily jump out an airlock of a planetary colony where she cannot survive outside the dome. The man she wants to kill? The guy who created the colony, where everyone is a slave.

But there's this other POV with a man on another colony who is enslaved by an AI in his head that gives him only 3 choices for any scenario and destroys his ability to think freely. Big Brother uses citizens to spy on each other too.

I have no idea how these POVs will converge but I am SO EXCITED to find out.

As a sci-fi fan, I was really intrigued by the premise, the element of people separated through time finding a way to connect, which I’ve enjoyed in other stories before. Unfortunately, this one didn’t quite work for me. I found the narrative a bit confusing to follow, and despite the interesting concept, I wasn’t feeling that pull to keep picking it up. This might be a better fit for readers who enjoy a more abstract or layered storytelling style, but ultimately it just wasn’t the right match for me.

(Didn’t star review on Goodreads didn’t think it would be fair)

I enjoyed following the escapades of this Martian group over two time periods. I thought some of the concepts, which I can't share because of spoilers, were a fun addition to solving a scifi mystery that happened over 1000 years before present day in the book. If you like interstellar mysteries you will enjoy this one. It kind of feels a bit like indiana jones in space, maybe because of the dusty martian landscape.

You do need to suspend some medical science disbelief and hand waving of some science. I don't want to spoil anything, but I would think that people that far into the future would have a better grasp on some concepts than they do in the book. However, the fun and the mystery of the plot still made it enjoyable. I'll be curious to see what Nadia Afifi continues to write in the future, lots of potential here!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this advance reader copy. All opinions are very much my own.

I am known to be a sucker for a good suppressed history story, and I’ve enjoyed Nadia Afifi in shorter form, so when I had the chance to read an advance copy of A Rebel’s History of Mars, I was excited to give it a try. 

A Rebel’s History of Mars is told in two timelines, with the perspective alternating each chapter. The first timeline features a rebel on Mars: a circus performer with an axe to grind against the wealthy, powerful civilizationist whose rhetoric had convinced her parents to abandon Earth in the first place. The second is set on a distant planet well into the future, one that’s divided into one race of people with freedom to move and to explore and another that’s expected to perform their mundane jobs and be satisfied with a stable life of restricted choices. But when the latter starts to dig into the history of his civilization, he finds their genius founder may not have had such clean hands, and the first-timeline protagonist’s story is crucial to understanding why. 

In setting up the second timeline as dystopian, A Rebel’s History of Mars signposts from the beginning that its founding is not as utopian as the characters believe. And there’s never much secret about the central figure responsible for all the good or ill involved. So any mystery about the history cannot be about the existence of scandal or the perpetrator of it; the characters may seek evidence of any scandal at all, but from the reader’s perspective, it's purely about the details—exactly what went on, and how bad was it?

With the focus on discovering the suppressed history and a hand-wavy sci-fi device that allows for the reconstruction of past events, the second timeline almost becomes a frame story for the first. Make no mistake, there’s still danger to escape and character development in the second timeline, but the main goal is piecing together the story from the first. The state of society in the future gives some hints—often ominous—about the tone of that story, but in many ways, the book stands or falls on the Mars timeline. 

And while the Mars timeline probably looks like a lot of other crappy dystopias, it’s well-written and pretty entertaining. The future knowledge can cut both ways at various times, with some instances in which details about the new society adds disturbing overtones to developments on Mars, but other times where knowing the identity of the ultimate betrayer leaves the reader merely waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

But even in those times where the reader is merely awaiting the inevitable, an engaging writing style keeps the story from dragging, and the alternating perspectives keeps any one timeline from wearing out its welcome. And when it does come time for the final confrontation, it’s truly thrilling, delivering an emotional punch and filling in enough details to make it feel revelatory and not just matter-of-course. The “what’s to be done in light of the revelation” story gives the second timeline some time in the sun, paying off its slow development into an ending with enough progress to feel satisfying and enough ambiguity to feel real. 

Ultimately, A Rebel’s History of Mars is a well-written piece of dystopian fiction that’s elevated by a high-quality ending with plenty of emotional payoff and glimpses of messy progress. 

Recommended if you like: sci-fi dystopias.

Overall rating: 15 of Tar Vol's 20. Four stars on Goodreads.

A Rebel's History of Mars weaves between a (future) past and present as the origins of the human society on the planet Nabatea are slowly revealed. I found the transition from the story told by the future-present day character Azad, a human from Nabatea, back to the story of Kezza, a woman living on Mars before the founding of the new planet, to be jarring at first, but I quickly adjusted to these two different perspectives and time-periods. The overarching theme of the novel is about who gets to shape the official version of history, and as the Nabatean characters seek to learn the truth of their origins and the origins of a more advanced species of human, Kezza's narrative fills in some of the gaps for the reader. It's more on the hard science fiction side of things, but the novel also explores familial relationships through Azad and his sister Ledo, and what it means to form a community that leaves behind it the mistakes of the past. The novel is not overly optimistic about the ability of humans to completely overcome capitalistic greed and hierarchy, but the ending suggests a slow revolution, starting with smaller communities. I would recommend this novel to any reader of science fiction interested in questions of social justice.