West O' Mars
1958
A 1950s Mars novella about the price of treating love as a transaction. Samlaan Britt built a fortune using his wife Dori's psychokinetic abilities to cheat at gambling games, constructing the lavish estate West o' Mars with his winnings. But Britt sees Dori not as a partner but as a tool, a weapon for accumulating wealth. Their marriage is a cold transactional arrangement until the night Britt goes too far, wagering Dori herself against everything a rival owns. When the dice roll and Dori's emotional resolve finally cracks, the consequences shatter more than just the gambling table. Fontenay writes with lean, hardboiled prose that recalls Hammett translated to the red planet, and the story carries a surprising feminist edge for its era: a warning about what happens when you treat a person as property. This is a compact, intense piece of pulp SF that earns its emotional gut-punch.
