Looking for a book about a girl on Mars

[Marius]

I read this book as a kid, but I don't remember the title.
It was about a girl living on Mars. There was a rebellion against Earth, and this girl somehow had to survive in this hostile climate. I remember there was these towers that were named after chess pieces. Near the end she figured out that she was a clone, and that her "parents" had created her as a kind of emergency backup of their daughter. She also finds the body of both her "parents" and her "original". It was a wonderful book about identity and self-construction. I would very much like to give my own children a chance to read this too, but alas, I don't remember the title nor the author. I think the title was this girls name though...

I appreciate all input

Kind regards,
Marius

 

[OutofThisWorld]

I read this book as a kid, but I don't remember the title.
It was about a girl living on Mars. There was a rebellion against Earth, and this girl somehow had to survive in this hostile climate. I remember there was these towers that were named after chess pieces. Near the end she figured out that she was a clone, and that her "parents" had created her as a kind of emergency backup of their daughter. She also finds the body of both her "parents" and her "original". It was a wonderful book about identity and self-construction. I would very much like to give my own children a chance to read this too, but alas, I don't remember the title nor the author. I think the title was this girls name though...

I appreciate all input

Kind regards,
Marius

I've never read the book before but could it be "A Princess of Mars" by Edgar Rice Burroughs?

 

[The Ace]

Doesn't sound like ERB, It wasn't Heinlein's, "Podkayne of Mars," by any chance was it ?

 

[j d worthington]

Most definitely not ERB, and there's little here that sounds like Heinlein's Podkayne either, I'm afraid....

 

[Marius]

Hi!

Thank you so much for your replies

I'm afraid it's not Rice Burroughs, and not podcayne either...
I'll try and sqeese my memory a bit further once i get home from work

-Marius

 

[Marius]

OK. Here follows a summary as I remember it:

This girl wakes up with a memory filled with holes. As she tries to unravel the mystery of her past we learn that she's on Mars, and that there is a brutal civil war. she's thrown around from one place to the next, never really belonging anywhere. During this search she's usually with the Mars rebells/freedom-fighters who fights against an oppressive earth expeditionary force/local government/ something like that. The Mars forces have bases that are named after chess pieces (e.g. Rook, Bishop, etc.), and the Earth forces have tactical nukes in their arsenal.

After some incident I can't remember she tries/has to flee (or she tries to kill herself?) from one of these bases. She goes out without a spacesuit and expects to die, but to her great surprise she does not. She has some kind of epiphany and for the first time she feels free and so on...

Sometime later she finds her home. Her mom and dad are dead, victims of the war. She stumbles upon a message that her parents have recorded for her. Her parents were to genetic scientists and they had created her as a clone of their dead daughter. Apparently they were aware that they would probably not survive for long (I think they did something unpopular with the Earth people...) so they decided to make a copy of their daughter so that at least she would survive. They genetically modified her so that she could better survive the harsh Martian climate (she could stay outside without protection for some time, but not for ever).

That's about as much as I can remember. The book had a sort of cold-war feel to it. I think it was probably written in the seventies, eighties or early nineties. It really is a beautiful story about identity and human relations. I can certainly be wrong about the chronology of events, but this is how I remember it.

Again, thank you so much
Marius