Farewell, Earth's Bliss

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I'm sure the story of unwanted people that are sent to a distant island or so has been told lots of times in regular fiction too, but science fiction obviously offers a bit more possibilities than some version of Australia. In 1967 Robert Silverberg published Hawksbill Station - a novel I have yet to read, and he uses time travel as the method of exile. In the 1980ies Julian May takes that same idea for The Many-Coloured Land and makes an entire series out of it - one I loved as a teenager.

Stories about communities in isolation being abundant, the question then is whether Compton uses his Mars setting effectively - to wit, distinctively. The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is a bit more nuanced, as Farewell, Earth's Bliss is social science fiction, no hard sci-fi or space laser stuff.

That's easily explained by the fact that Compton simply was not interested in science fiction as such, and has read none of his peers' stuff, as he expressed in a fairly long 2019 interview with Darrell Schweitzer on Black Gate:

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Full review on Weighing A Pig: