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One of the distinguishing features of science-fiction is that ideas are as important as people. Whereas a mundane book might be about a family's struggle for respectability, or a heroic warrior trying to overcome fearsome enemies, or even a couple's search for romance in trying circumstances, an sf book might also be about how to integrate robots and humans in a society without repeating the mistakes of previous racial integrations, or how computer systems might work in the future, or how to terraform a planet. People and their problems still feature, but often only as a foreground to a wider discussion.

Whatever else they might be about, John Brunner's books tend to feature society as a key theme. In ‘The Shockwave Rider’, he explicitly contrasts the social interactions within megacorporate culture against those in a small-town setting. In ‘Born under Mars’, Brunner goes further, forking humanity. Earth's colonists have gone their separate ways, one branch in the vague direction of Ursa Major to become the “Bears”, the other in the direction of Centaurus to become the “Centaurs”. The Bears have become friendly and informal, very rowdy and prone to drinking and gambling. The Centaurs have developed a rigid, formal hierarchy, founded on regulations and hypocrisy. The two branches of humanity are in a cold war, mediated by their forebears who remain on Earth (about whom we don't hear much). Brunner explores the notion that this merely organisational difference between their societies deeply affects all aspects of life. As an example: because monogamy within marriage is rigidly observed by Centaurs, most Centaur families have similar children; but it is common for Bear siblings to share only one parent because they are much more permissive.

But there is a third colonial group: the first colony, Mars, founded before the invention of superluminal travel. Because of its historical status, Mars has never become independent from Earth, but its colonists have their own culture, based on trust and rigid adherence to rules of conduct developed for surviving the hardships of colonising a planet with a thin atmosphere. Because of the Martians' special status, the narrator, Ray Mallin, is one of the few space engineers to have worked in both Bear and Centaur space, which conveniently puts him in a strong position as narrator to explain the differences between the cultures to the reader. The book opens on his return from a voyage he'd like to put behind him, and immediately he is set upon by agents of both sides looking for he knows not what. He tries to track down his old teacher, and on his way takes in some interesting ideas about alien artefacts found on Mars by the first colonists, and an explanation of heraldry in terms of genetics.

On Brunner's Mars, as in the early USA, most people can trace their ancestry to one of the early colonists. The halvings and quarterings of coats of arms provides a way to visualise the genetic minglings of ancestry. For Brunner, genetic endowment is the one “ultimate and absolutely indispensable resource,” the means and end of the human ability to adapt and make progress, and heraldry is a means of tracking this resource.

It is no surprise that the book, written only a year before ‘Stand on Zanzibar’, should contain a small stylistic experiment. Early on, Mallin loses (or has lost for him) his memory, and he spends a chapter retracing his steps, but describing everything in different terms. The reader, though, has not lost his memory, and this way of taking a second look at old territory turns out to be slightly confusing and somewhat boring. Even though it doesn't quite come off, by no means does it spoil the book as a whole. ‘Born under Mars’ is a short book, and it is more discursive than descriptive, but it fits the size of its ideas perfectly, being neither rushed nor drawn-out. Brunner is relatively matter-of-fact in his presentation, without the exuberant style of his later work and few lexical embellishments to distract the reader from his thesis. The book is not really an adventure story nor a thriller about an innocent getting caught up in espionage and intrigue. It is about ideas, about how societies come to be arranged the way they are and our reactions to them, from within and without, and it is an interesting and worthwhile read.