The novel “C.O.D. – Mars” by E.C. Tubb was published for the first time in 1968. In 2007 it was published with the title “Fear of Strangers”.

A spaceship comes back from an interstellar voyage but most of the crew members were killed by a kind of alien disease. The few survivors are also infected so the ship is put into quarantine.

When someone gest the astronauts out of their isolation a manhunt throughout the solar system starts. In fact noone has yet managed even to identify the cause of the disease and if the contagion touched one of the colonized planets the only remedy would be its complete sterilization.

Edwin Charles Tubb passed away last year after a long career during which he wrote over one hundred and forty novels and more than two hundred short stories and novellas using a large number of pseudonyms. Inevitably, to write so many novels most of them were short, around one hundred pages: “C.O.D. – Mars” is one of them.

E.C. Tubb often wrote space operas in which there was some intrigue: “C.O.D. – Mars” takes place within the solar system and various plots are developed around the survivors among the spaceship crew members returned from an interstellar journey after they were contaminated by an alien life form.

“C.O.D. – Mars” contains various ideas, unfortunately they aren’t as developed as a novel with such a complex plot and with so many characters deserved.

First of all there’s the central theme of the novel, the alien contamination and the transformation that affects the humans who don’t get killed by it, but it’s treated superficially. On this issue there would be room for many developments but it’s used as a banal narrative device to tell an adventure.

Concerning the contaminated astronauts there’s a plan of a Martian faction that wants to free them from quarantine while others want to eliminate them or at least send them back into deep space. Again, it would have been interesting to have more information about the various colonies and interplanetary politics that has developed. Instead, the information included in the novel are rather vague and have the sole purpose of creating an intrigue centered around the astronauts’ fate.

Eventually what remains is the preparation of the plan to free the astronauts and get them in a safe place, the failure of the plan that however gives the astronauts the opportunity to escape on their own and the manhunt that starts to prevent them from contaminating any planet. Don’t get me wrong, the plot is all in all pretty enjoyable but at the end the impression is that the novel was written in a hurry.

Today we sometimes complain that some novels are too long and are filled with useless parts that seem written just to increase the number of pages. Instead “C.O.D. – Mars” gives the opposite impression: a substantial increase of pages with various developments would have improved it considerably.

Overall, “C.O.D. – Mars” is a decent read to spend some time but nothing more.