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I love science fiction. My love started as a young boy, when I would ride my bicycle down to my small town’s tiny library, there to devour everything they had in science and fiction. To this day, I remember pages from an even-then dated book by Werner Von Braun, illustrated by the Walt Disney people, about building spaceships to go to Mars.
But as I got older, I noticed that fewer and fewer writers were talking about Mars. Much of that was because the more we learned about the planet, the more we learned it was just like Arizona except colder and with a lot less air. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Dejah Thoris would freeze and asphyxiate at the same time.
So, most science fiction writers moved on from Mars. The ones that stayed on-planet, so to speak, tended to focus on the first landing, the first colony, or some other Martian first. Which is fine, I suppose. Except people are first to do something tend to be square-jawed Dudley or Doris Do-Rights, and hyper-competent to boot.
Also known as “boring.” I wanted science fiction with unboring characters. I wanted real people, with warts, farts and bad hair days. Well, in 2001, I just wasn’t seeing that being written. So I said to hell with it, and wrote my own.
That novel, The Mars Run, came out in 2006. It’s a first novel, with all the flaws therein, but I liked the characters so much that I decided to go back to the well. My latest effort, Pirates of Mars, is pretty much what the label on the tin says it is – Pirates, Mars and the goings-on they get themselves into.
My pirates are not Jack Sparrow; for one thing, they all own soap and showers. For another, they’re not nice people. Nor are the people who fight them all 100% Dudley and Doris Do-Rights. But that’s what makes them interesting. They’re ordinary people who’ve found themselves in extraordinary circumstances.
Come visit my blog at chris-gerrib.livejournal.com or my personal website at www.privatemarsrocket.net.
