The Vines of Mars Ch1: Fantasmas

Tomás paused in his work amid the treetops to gaze at the brilliant coral and clementine tints of the Martian sunset. His back ached from the rush of trying to finish a week’s work in four days, his gloves were sticky with tree sap and the remains of last week’s harvest, and he was developing another blister on his knife-hand. Nevertheless, a deep sense of contentment filled him. He tugged at the sweat-soaked shirt clinging to his back and breathed in the cold, early autumn breeze, wishing it would alleviate the heat enveloping him. The branches under his feet swayed, like a boat bobbing on the surf. Bending his knees to accommodate the movement of the tree, he adjusted his grip on the machete. To the east, deep thunder rolled out of a distant dust storm, the sandy winds coloring the sky the color of tea and stained teeth. Beneath it all stretched the bronze plains of open Martian desert.
Some of his friends had followed the influence of their first-generation parents, becoming scientists and doctors and such. Yet it was moments like these that made Tomás happy that he was a simple orchard gardener. He felt as though no one else got to feast upon this beauty the way he did.
Twisting around, he looked over the town’s canopy spread out behind him. Four days ago, the satellites had warned them of coming storms. Because he had lived on Mars since he was eight years old, he knew what storms could do. He’d lost more than his fair share of friends and family to the winds, and to the vines. That’s why he’d been in a rush all week, going through every yard, clearing each cedar and maple of every excess, of every dead branch. If a storm pulled one lose, that broken limb became a weapon. The impetuous young wind might plunge it into someone’s home or their precious greenhouses. It could even throw it like a spear, through another human.
“We’re as prepared as we’ll ever be, Papa,” he murmured to the sky. The trees were secure and the equipment had been stored in sheds or tied down. Everyone was ready to rush down to their basements as soon as the storm turned their way. A tall cliff stood over the spread of trees that marked the colony’s borders. He could just make out the pitched roof of Town Hall at the top and the thin, pointed nose of the rocket behind that. Even if everything went wrong, they still had an evacuation route, which was some comfort— except the idea of evacuation felt like just another kind of death.
All he could remember of Earth was his grandfather’s splintered porch in the backwoods of Mexico. He felt in his bones that cradle-instilled faith of interplanetary Manifest Destiny, and he had a hard time imagining life after it. “They’re just late-season storms,” he reminded himself.
“This colony has weathered worse.”
Turning around, he grabbed the rope and prepared to lower himself down. A shadow moved against the horizon. Tomás paused and squinted his eyes against the sun’s glare. He stared until his eyes watered and brought the shadow into focus. Someone was outside the town. Against the evening sky, a long silhouette stretched across the bare desert rock. He was so surprised he almost dropped his padre’s machete. He looked at the oncoming sandstorm and back at the figure. This far off he couldn’t recognize their face, much less the long bedraggled brown coat they wore. Who in their right mind would wander outside the colony on a storm day?
He slid his blade into its sling and began rappelling down the 200-meter tall apricot tree.
He’d never had trouble getting a tree to grow fast and abundant in the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. Getting them to stick around long enough to produce a crop was another matter. Orange and yellow leaves brushed his arms on the way down like cold tongues of fire. If the trunk weren’t bent over like the back of a queasy man, it’d have been even taller. At the start of the season, he’d had two trees. He hadn’t expected this lopsided cripple to be the one that would survive until harvest time. He breathed in deep the sweet scent that still lingered from the late season fruit. Even though it was an ugly tree, it had given him a good harvest. But then nature often had a way of surprising him.
At last, his feet crunched into the dense gritted topsoil covering the colony grounds. He reached out reflexively and tapped his father’s funeral pole in thanks. His sister’s stood next to it. Before he’d taken two steps toward the house though he was accosted by his daughter. She’d somehow had gotten a nail head buried a centimeter deep into a pro-to chair leg. Just when he’d gotten past her, his wife called him from the kitchen hut. She insisted he help her with these heavy pots before they burned. As he did his youngest son bounded around him, shouting about some game in which his twin brother had obviously been cheating.
By the time Tomás got through them, he was starting to worry again. He walked to the back door. Who could’ve wandered so far outside the town borders when a storm watch was going on? Everyone from the desert labs had come in for harvest time, and he’d have heard if anyone had gone missing. The colony had grown to a couple of hundred people since his childhood, though it was still small by Earth standards. Secrets didn’t last long here. Perhaps someone’s kid had wandered off? He slid the front door open. It rattled in its frame and shook like it was wagging an angry finger at him.
Sitting on one of the six stumps of failed trees that marked their backyard, his mother
hummed a Corrida tune to herself, her fingers tracing up the stem of a potted mint plant. No doubt she was counting out the leaves she could not see with her milky eyes. At dinner, she would likely give him a prediction about the harvest, forgetting that it was over. It didn’t help that her predictions were almost always right.
Standing half a meter from her was the figure he’d seen on the horizon. What he thought had been an old coat was instead a strange hemp-woven robe of a kind he’d never seen before. His stomach gave a swoop even though he was no longer swaying within the tree branches. How had he gotten here so fast? With the sunlight behind them, Tomás could only make out his shape at first. He’d guessed it was one of the lanky teenagers from town, but his limbs looked overlong for even a native-born Martian. One of his arms stretched toward the old woman, a coil of hemp hanging out of his wide-knuckled fist. Tomás stepped forward. At the crunch of gravel, the young man jerked his fist behind his back and ducked his head.
Tomás frowned, his eyes adjusting. He’d never seen the boys from town wear a long knotted hemp dress, or walk over Mars with bare feet. The teenager tilted his head and glanced up at him through long matted hair. Tomás stepped back. That face! He looked just like Maria. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. It was impossible. Tomás realized his hands were on his padre’s machete.
He knew everyone on Mars. It wasn’t exactly a large community, but he didn’t know this boy.
His mother turned at the sound of his feet, her milky eyes twitched.
“Madre,” he heard himself say, “Step away from that boy.”
She smiled, and her crow’s feet deepened into long shadows on the sides of her face.
“Mijo,” she said. “Mijo, he says he knows Maria.” She held out her hand, groped blindly,
and gripped the boy by the forearm.
Tomás found himself stepping forward, snatching her hand from the stranger and pushing the boy to the ground.
“Who are you?” he asked. Those oh-so-familiar dark brown eyes looked up, revealing hurt and anger. Tomás felt himself pulling back from those feelings, a deep irrational fear filling him.
“He says his name’s Manuel, Tomás.” His madre sounded stern. “What did I raise you for? To treat guests like this?”
Behind him, Tomás heard the kitchen hut door hiss open. His sons tumbled out shouting but stopped and hung back, their wide eyes flickering back and forth between their father and the older boy on the ground. Felicity stepped out after them. She gaped at the stranger, who had his fists curled on the ground. Her full African mouth twisted. Her curly mahogany hair whipped across her light brown face, and her hazel eyes glared at Tomás.
“What are you doing?” his wife snapped at him.
But Tomás ignored her.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, his stomach tight. The boy stood up again, his hard arms moving with a youthful vibrancy that made Tomás’s backache.
“Mu-mu-Manuel,” the boy stuttered, but he succeeded in keeping his face confident. “Mi llamo Manuel.”
That small defiance in the upper lip – God, he looked just like Maria had when she and mother had been arguing! No, that wasn’t it. There was an explanation for this.
“Where did you come from? I know every face on this planet except yours, and the last settler rocket landed months ago.”
The teenager crossed his arms, face stiff, nostrils flaring. He raised one long wiry arm, his hand balled into a fist. Tomás flinched, thinking the teen was going to punch him. Then he saw a little string hanging between Manuel’s fingers. Tomás held out his hand, and Manuel dropped something cold and small into his palm. It was an “Our Lady de Fumie” medal, of the kind Bishop Miki gave out to young children at the church. In the back, scratched into the soft metal were three numbers, month, day and year, in the Martian calendar:
“6- 48-98,
10-35- 98,
10-43-98”
Tomás frowned at the boy.
He felt thin, firm fingers press into his shoulder.
“Tomás,” his wife snapped. “I don’t know what’s going on either let’s not over-react. He’s not doing anything to hurt us, Tomás. What’s gotten into you?”
But Felicity didn’t get it. She didn’t remember as clearly as he did, and his mother was too blind to see it but that boy’s face— that face was doing something terrible to him.
“Help madre,” Manuel gasped.
“Who’s in trouble?” his own madre stood up straighter, her lime green shawl slipping.
“Mi madre, Maria.”
“Oh, no!” She pressed her fingertips into her wrinkled cheeks. “Not Maria. She’s wandered off again, hasn’t she! I tried to tell her it’s dangerous.”
The old woman started rocking a little.
“I tried to warn her. Oh, I do hope she comes back soon!”
“Now you’ve set her off,” one of his young sons muttered behind him.
“Do you think he’s talking about Maria Lucia?” Adele asked, referring to one of her schoolmate’s mothers.
“What do you mean, help your madre?” said Tomás leaning forward. “Where is she? Is she outside?”
Manuel nodded.
“Oh my dear,” Felicity put her hand over Manuel’s. “I’m afraid there is nothing we can do until after the storm passes. Are you sure she didn’t make it to some shelter? She might be at a neighbor’s house.”
“Do you know where she is, Manuel?” asked Tomás. “Can you take me to her?”
Manuel nodded.
“Can I come too, Papa?” piped Adele. Tomás shook his head.
Above them, Tomás could hear the wind howling through the tree limbs. “It’s autumn,” he reminded himself, so there was still a chance. It was the summer, not the autumn storms that were the worst. Autumn storms only lasted a few hours. Sometimes summer storms lasted for as long as a week. The amber curtain covered the whole planet in sand clouds and dust devils that rose into the sky like long twisted skyscrapers. Afterward, everyone would come up out of their basements with brooms and shovels. The town would dig out their plants and homes again as if nothing happened. Rarely did anyone get stranded outside unawares anymore. If they did, finding the body was likely to be gruesome.
Once, when Tomás was younger, he and his friend Amun had been digging a ditch for some fort or other, and come across a lost skull, picked clean by the wind. It wore a miner’s helmet of the kind people used to wear back before the vines kick-started the atmosphere, back when this planet was just dust and silicon-diggers. The last storm victims had been Professor Whitehead, a teacher of his. A few weeks later, an older kid in school, Langston Freeman, and his sister Maria disappeared on the same day. They’d never found Maria’s body, but Langston’s mother was the unfortunate one to stumble across her son’s body first.
Adele and the boys might complain about all the weighted clothing Tomás made them wear, but he wasn’t about to back down. He wasn’t about to find them spread out over two square meters just because Martian gravity wouldn’t let them develop a proper bone density. And, of course, there were more dangers on Mars than just the storms. Anything might happen to a person if they strayed outside the colony borders too far for too long. He couldn’t really be considering helping the boy?
When his sister disappeared, the adults told him that the storm must’ve been what did it in the end. It’d gone on for three days after she ran off, wiping away any trace of her footprints. That’s what they told him to his face anyway. But whenever he came into a room, there was always a furtive mutter from the corner about the vines.
Tomás swallowed his fear and took the boy’s hand. His sister’s eyes stared back at him.
“Take me to her,” he said.

The Vines of Mars- Coming Out Sept 28th

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Chapter 2

Leaf & Bone

His wife watched him load the rover, and her hands crossed over her stomach.
Tomás brushed his hands off on his heavy lead-lined coat and threw in the last tank. He looked around for the first aid bag.
“Will you be all right here? With Abuela? I think Manuel’s story really set her off.”
“I’ll be fine, mon cheri, just promise me that if the storm catches up with you, you’ll hide out in the rover until it’s over. Don’t even think of driving through it.”
Tomás nodded. “Don’t worry, Felicity. The plating just got serviced last week. It’s not going to leak.”
His wife nodded, but a frown marred her brown face.
“Que?” he asked. When she looked like that it was better for her to just say what was on her mind.
“I just…” she looked away. “I’d almost forgotten what Maria looked like. It wasn’t until you pointed it out that I saw. And he does look like her. It’s uncanny.”
Her chin lifted and she fixed his gaze on her’s. “Promise me something else too. When you get back, that’ll be the end of this, okay? Your mother just stopped making us chase her out into the desert whenever she had one of her episodes. I don’t want to have to start chasing after you too.” She handed him the first aid kit and put her cool hand on his. “No more ghosts. No more raising the dead. You have a famille now, and a daughter who needs you. I’m tired of watching you dismiss her.” Tomás squeezed her fingers between his own to warm them. In the cold air and evening light, the smell of her was like a beacon or a lighthouse.
“What does that mean?” he asked, smiling.
“She was trying to talk to you at lunch today, and you hardly listened to a word she said.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was distracted.”
“It’s more than that, Tomás,” said Felicity, her hazel eyes spearing him. “Would it hurt
you to help her build that chair?”
“Chair? What chair?”
“La Chaise! La Silla!” Felicity stamped her foot in frustration. “The rocking chair she’s been working on all month! She only took an interest in carpentry because she thought it would please you!”
“Rocking chair?” Tomás frowned. “She’s working on a rocking chair?”
Felicity put her face in her hands.
“I mean,” Tomás struggled, wondering what it was she wanted him to say. “It’s fine if that’s what she wants to do, but a chair? She ought to at least start with something simple, like a table or whittling. I don’t understand where she’d have gotten interested in it anyways. Maria never had the patience for it.”
“Mon Dieu!” Felicity’s curse sounded muffled in her hands. “Adele is your daughter,
Tomás. She’s nothing like Maria.” Tomás’ mouth opened and closed.
He knew that, of course. He knew he should have paid more attention to Adele earlier, but she couldn’t understand. How could he explain it to her? Maria had been gone a full two years before they started dating. He’d had time to grieve his sister by then. She’d seen his mother’s grief resurface as dementia took hold over her mind, but she’d never really understood what it had done to Tomás, what that boy’s eyes did to him now.
Felicity wasn’t there when Tomás walked in on Kaliq and Maria. Felicity never heard his family arguing about it in the kitchen, never heard Madre use anything like the word “slut,” an old-world term for “Earth girl,” she’d never lain still, pretending to sleep so Maria could have a cry in the next bed over. “It was only a bit of kissing,” she said before she left his parents framed in the doorway of the kitchen hut. The next morning Tomás woke up to the stark outline of his hermana against the horizon outside his window before his head hit the pillow again. In all the drama Maria never said a word to Tomás. But then he hadn’t known what to say to her then, and he certainly didn’t know what to say to Felicity now.

***

Manuel said he knew the way back by the landscape. They took the rover and started towards the mouth of the red skyline. Manuel directed him past the row of spread out homes along the outer ring of the town. They drove past the corn and soy fields, and around the back of the greenhouses on the Western side of town. Darkened leaves of the most recent failed soybean crop fluttered dark blue against the sinking sun. They quivered like a field of black butterflies settling over the ground, determined to suck the transplanted soil dry.
Manuel pointed out into the desert, and Tomás put the rover’s back to the failing crop. To the distant east spots of lighting flashed from within the storm’s darkness.
The speck of light that was the smaller moon, Phobos, came up over the close horizon just as they were reaching the black tree. He shivered at the sight of the bone-thin branches and told himself it was not the revealed outline of her skull that created the twisted curves and hollows of the center trunk.
The first Martians taught their children the rules to keep safe through stories. One of the first stories he’d been told was the story of the black tree. How a woman, new to the planet, ignored the rules. She had a slight cold, but she didn’t cloister herself or wear the water mask. She didn’t want to miss her first tour of the colony. Along the western border, she sneezed or spat, or hacked a boogie if your storyteller was young enough to find that funny. Whatever it was, the drop of water at her feet quivered, then disappeared beneath the ground as if sipped from a straw. A green tendril of a vine wriggled its way above the ground and wrapped around her in an instant, sucking the water out of her. The firefighters didn’t have much choice really, the poor woman was the epicenter, and it was either her life or the life of the colony. It was a frightening story, one that the adults tried to lessen by leaving out names and exact dates; wanted to make it seem an old fairy tale. In the end, it was a schoolyard rumor that told him the truth.
Tomás drew closer to the black branches that reached out of the ground like the fingers of some demon. When they passed by he crossed himself and whispered a Hail Mary.
When the smell of apricots and other Earth fruits faded, Tomás started coughing. Manuel glanced at him in confusion. Likely he was one of the new generation born with Martian-sized lungs. That was good and well for him, but Tomás pressed a button on the dash and heard the seams of the rover hiss shut, and the fan on the oxygen tank start. He leaned back in his seat, panting. He hadn’t realized how thin the air had become until he suddenly had more of it.
The hours passed in still silence, broken sometimes by Manuel’s silent gesture for him to drive in this or that direction. Manuel didn’t speak but only sat, twisting the hemp cloth of his shirt into a tighter and tighter coil as they drove. Tomás pushed the rover to its max but still unimpressive speed. It was only meant to be used as the public’s pickup truck, intended to carry objects too bulky or heavy to transport across the short thirty-minute span it took to walk to most of the colony’s central buildings. Though it did have enough energy within its solar panels to ferry scientists all the way out to the away stations and back if need be.
They’d been traveling so long into the night Tomás was beginning to think that was where Manuel was taking him. Perhaps he’d grown up isolated there? He didn’t like the idea that one of his neighbors would do that to their own kid, but it made sense. It was perhaps the only place on the planet that a person could keep someone hidden and secret. Anywhere else on Mars a person would be lucky to survive a week unaided, a vast expanse of open bare rock, ringed by the forests that covered the rest of the planet’s surface. His mother’s tireless work might’ve stopped the vines from encroaching any further, but nobody was foolish enough to go near them.
A steep cliff wall rose up over the short horizon, and Manuel gestured at him to slow down as they neared it. “Finally,” thought Tomás, thinking the boy had at last given up and realized they needed to turn back. But then something shifted in the light of the rover’s headlights. Tomás felt the blood run out of his face. The dark shadow against the night sky was not the rocky face of a cliff. He’d traveled further than he’d expected, or perhaps he’d driven too fast. The tall stems of the Martian jungle rose up in a quivering mass before him, the dark green vines disappearing into shadow beyond the rover’s headlights.
Tomás had seen pictures of the vine, he’d seen it’s black charcoal carcass after the firefighters were done with it, but he’d never seen even a live tendril before, much less been to its home. He’d heard stories of these forests, and like most colonists he dreaded them. The first team of astronauts, led by the famed first human on Mars, Captain Kateri Acorn, had been found as human skeletons wrapped in a cocoon of vines that grew like kudzu. Of all the horrors of Mars, the vine trumped them all. Attracted to any open water, the vine used to invade the colony in quick and deadly outgrowths. Back when his madre was a brilliant young scientist, she’d come up with a serum that quelled the vine’s rapid growth patterns. It was still dangerous to encounter the vine, but now it grew in slow, languorous movements, like a reluctant drunk. Now all the firefighters had to do was re-burn the boundary lines once a year around the forest’s edge, though it still made people nervous to spill water and the vines devoured every human who’d had gone past the forest perimeter without a flamethrower at hand. If the vines weren’t so vital for creating the thin breathable atmosphere the colonist would’ve burned the whole planet’s surface themselves.
After a generation growing up under threat of having their whole home swallowed overnight, where half the deaths were from storm and the other half from vine, pioneer mistrust did not dissipate with the immediate danger. Now Tomás’ children told each other ghost stories of the Marte fantasmas whose ruins and skeletons were found deep in the center. Ghosts haunted the empty places, hungry for children who strayed too far. The colonists still kept their distance, preferring the more familiar, altered and mutated Earth plants, even if they did grow unimaginably big in the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere.
“Go.”
Tomás turned. Manuel was looking at him.
“Go,” he repeated.
A doubt flicked across his mind. Did the boy mean to lead them into the forest itself?
“How much closer? If we don’t turn back soon, we’ll get caught out here until the air clears.”
Manuel looked annoyed, turned, and pushed against the rover door.
“Out,” he said. “Out! Out!”
“Hold on, hold on.” He leaned over and opened the door for him. The boy bolted out the door and started running straight for the forest.
“Hey!” Tomás leaped out of his seat, grabbing his machete from the back.
“Hey, where are you going?!” he shouted.
Something jerked his head back, and Tomás fell onto the sand. He coughed. He was still hooked to the oxygen tank in the back seat. He jumped back into the rover, slammed the door shut, and took off across the dunes after him.
The boy was fast! Tomás wasn’t going to make it. Had despair at not finding his mother given him a death wish?
A huge lightning bolt, at least a meter wide struck the next hill over and blinded him. He felt the shudder of thunder shake the sand beneath the rover’s wheels. Tomás slammed on the brakes. What if he hit Manuel by accident in his blindness? The rover skidded across the top of a dune and swung sideways. The headlights plunged into the forest border now, revealing endless woods that reached to the starry horizon and wrapped around Tomás’s planet, squeezing the human lives trapped with it. His heart fluttered like a hummingbird’s. He shook his head and saw spots. When his vision cleared the storm was breaking upon him, and Manuel was nowhere in sight.
Tomás ran a hand over his mouth and felt goose pimples on his arms. Had the lightning
got him or had the vine? Would the vine come after him next? It was still early in the storm, should he run out and try to find him?
Tomás shook his head. “No, don’t be stupid,” he muttered. He put the rover into reverse and tried to pull back. The wheels slipped on the shifting sand, and already the grainy winds were obscuring the landscape behind the windshield. He could see even the vine forest sway in the wind like a giant cat stretching its back. And then, as the scant drops of rain began to come down, the woods began to grow.
Shoots, so pale green they were almost white curled out of the ground like poisonous smoke, then became thin reeds, then arms that reached for him.
He slammed the gas and felt the rover jerk as it pulled itself back. He drove the car backward, the vines growing out to chase him. There was another jolt as he felt the rover’s back left wheel slip over something. Alarms and whistles screamed at him as he fumbled with the controls. It looked as though he’d gotten himself stuck. He’d driven reverse over a slanted boulder. The jolt had been his back wheels going over the edge. The rover was resting on its belly directly against the rock; it’s back two wheels hanging less than a meter from the ground.
He let loose a string of curse words he hadn’t known that he still remembered. The vines before him gained. They’d reach the front of the rover in another minute.
Light took him. He could hear nothing. He could see even less. When his sight finally cleared, the ground in front of his rover was scorched black. All of the screens on the rover were blinking in a pattern that didn’t instill confidence in the rover’s condition. But the vines were gone. Tomás leaned forward, trying to see outside, but the air had grown so dark it was difficult. That sudden burst of rain seemed to have stopped at least. As long as the storm stayed dry near him, he shouldn’t have to worry about the vines again.
Tomás punched the steering wheel in frustration. Now he was stuck out in the storm and even if the plating held, Manuel was likely dead already. Felicity was right. He was more out of it than he realized. He slumped back in the driver’s seat and watched the sand drift across the glass in waves until the fear and anger dissipated into a numb disappointment.
A shape moved in the vine.
Tomás sat up, hardly daring to breathe. He might be able to survive a storm in the rover, but if the forest started moving again, he’d have no chance of getting away. He couldn’t see much of the vines except what his headlights showed him in brief flashes as the sandy wind cleared and thickened again. The shape moved. Tomás leaned forward.
For a moment it looked like a strange many-limbed creature. Then Tomás realized it was Manuel and he was carrying someone wrapped in a long blanket. Tomás pushed all his safety training out of his mind and broke his promise to his wife. He opened the rover door.
Sand scraped across Tomás’s hand as he stuck it out of the door and waved. It was like moving his whole arm through a giant ball of steel wool. He yelled over the roar of the storm and waved. Manuel paused at the forest’s edge and then ran toward him. Tomás felt himself count the boy’s steps in heartbeats. Every moment the door was cracked was another moment it could get damaged. The seal could get broken, and then, once given a start; the storm would tear into their shelter in hours.
At last Manuel reached him. Tomás gritted his teeth against the pain and swung the door open fully. Manuel climbed inside with his bulky load. As soon as his feet were inside, Tomás pulled as hard as he could. Fighting the wind, he strained at the door until he heard the soft whisper of the vacuum door sealing. Then he collapsed back in his chair, breathing hard.
He felt Manuel readjust himself in the seat next to him. Tomás pushed his fear and pain away and glanced over at the boy. He was easing the blanketed form he’d been carrying into the back seat where the person could lay down. Though, other than some sand burn Manuel didn’t look injured.
Tomás shook his head and felt a shower of grit sprinkle his shoulders. A blanket of silt three centimeters thick lay over the floor bed of the rover but none of the machine’s sensors were flashing warning signs. Most of them had even begun to restart normally.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, some voice was shouting that something was wrong, but he was still too relieved to be alive to pay attention to it. “That your madre?” he asked.
Manuel nodded.
“Maria,” he said.
“Si, si, yo se,” Tomás muttered, brushing the sand off his arms and hands. He was too relieved that he and the boy were still alive to think clearly. He probably should have guessed by the shape or the smell, but he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to. He turned to check if their visitor was injured.
His sister’s eyes stared back at him.
She was dead. Tomás had been telling himself she was gone for years now, but he had never been able to envision it. Her eyes were open and dull from sandy winds. Her right arm splayed out at an odd angle, still clutching a thick gnarled staff. Her face – older so much older now – was calm and peaceful. The thin skin of her throat betrayed the beginning of varicose veins. Crow’s feet cracked around her eyes, but – it couldn’t be!
Tomás twisted around and clutched his head, reeling.
It couldn’t be Maria. His sister died sixteen years ago in a sandstorm. Nobody could survive a summer sandstorm. Nobody could survive the thin air outside the colony. Nobody could survive the vine.
Tomás repeated the facts to himself over and over again as though their litany alone would drive the look of those eyes out of his mind. After all, two other people had died of the same thing that year, and they’d found their bodies.
But not mine.
Tomás flinched at the whisper in his mind. He didn’t want to hear that voice, did he? He half turned to tell Manuel off for bringing him here and then stopped. He didn’t want to risk seeing the body again— her body sitting just behind him! The litany continued in his head.
No one could survive the vines. No one ever had. If there had been a way, his madre’s experiments would’ve found it.
And I wouldn’t have?
Her voice came again to him.
Or did you just imagine seeing him carry me out of there?
“Stop, stop, stop!” Tomás clutched his head again. He couldn’t even begin to take this all in now. If he was mad, he was mad because everything pointed at the impossible.
“Help.”
It was a whisper, and it wasn’t her speaking this time.
Tomás glanced to the side.
Manuel looked at him, large overgrown arms, and a young man’s voice.
“Help, please!” he gasped.
Tomás stared at the man-child. Something expanded in his chest and then collapsed.
He twisted around and saw his sister’s face again. His hand reached for hers, resting on her hard, oddly warm stomach. He felt sorrow shudder through him and that oh-so-familiar shape of her hand in his. He was drowning. Air refused to go down his throat. It entered his mouth but went no further. He could not cry. He could not make a sound or ask for help. It felt like forever before he could manage to inhale a solid breath again. Manuel’s warm hand touched his back.
The man-boy, whatever he was, looked at him with large brown eyes full of terror.
Tomás swallowed his grief. Gasping, he forced himself to exhale evenly. His hermana’s face! He hadn’t imagined it. Manuel had Maria’s — had his mother’s— exact eyes. Forcing his grief down back, he let go of his hermana’s hand, reached out and took Manuel’s. The boy was nearly a man already, but Tomás could not squash the sudden protectiveness that rose up within him. He never wanted to see those eyes look at him in terror again.
They sat there for a few moments, and Tomás began to put the pieces together in his mind.
He had heard of disgraced Earth daughters running away to the cities, but Mars had no other settlements. It had the mines for the working families, a town center, a few scattered research bases, and the jungle. The Mars settlement was “First Settlement;” a small community. Sitting on the edge of space; it had the worst and best of small-town symptoms. If Maria had gotten pregnant…
Tomás looked at Manuel. Then he reached over and, touching his sister’s face for the first time in sixteen years, closed her eyes. When he looked up, those eyes looked back at him out of the boy’s face.
“Help?” Manuel asked, soft like he was uncertain of ever getting an answer. On the way here, Tomás had thought that the boy wasn’t distressed enough for someone worried about their mother. He saw now that Manuel had been worrying so much and for so long that it had worn him down past the edge of hope and into confusion. Most likely Maria was already dead before Manuel came to the colony. The boy didn’t understand what had happened to her, but some part of him must sense it. Manuel needed someone; a father maybe, to take this from him. An adult who would know what to do next.
“Yeah,” he swallowed. “Yeah, she’s going to be fine.”
They spent the night in the darkness of the storm. Tomás held his sister’s cold fingers in one hand and his nephew’s warm one in the other. Once during the night, Tomás felt his fingers brush up against his sister’s ribs. They were warm– almost hot, where the rest of her was cold.
He raised his head and stared. Manuel lay snoozing softly next to him. He saw now how Maria’s stomach bulged unnaturally under the loose hemp tunic and through a tear in the weave he saw her skin had blistered, like a burn wound. She may have survived the storm that took her, but she didn’t die naturally. Tomás glanced at his sleeping nephew. Old tear tracks ran down his face even as he slept. Something had made his sister leave. He could chalk it up to passion, shame, and anger, but that didn’t explain the rest of it. Something, or someone, kept her from coming back. Something or someone made her stay, not even daring to talk to her family. And someone had killed her in the end. Tomás felt his fingers twitch within his sister’s cold grip, eager to wrap themselves around the neck of whoever was responsible.

The Vines of Mars- Coming Out Sept 28th

Email Subscribers will get a free copy of the book

What is Solarpunk?

There’s a new genre in town.

Back in 2015 there were only four books on Amazon that popped up when you searched Solarpunk. (Now in 2019 there are 97 results). The first one published was Solarpunk, a collection of short stories from a Brazilian literary journal. (Unfortunately the book is in Portuguese with no translation available.) The other three are Donor by Sheryl Kaleo, Suncatcher by Alia Gee, and Viral Airwaves by Claudie Arseneault. Both books’ settings involve near future worlds dominated by eco-friendly technology. Though it came out years later Ann Margaret Lewis’ Warrior of Kizan is also an excellent addition to the emerging genre.

It’s still an emerging genre so a lot of the conventions have yet to be decided by so far bio-tech and environmental themes are common. But don’t think this a genre just for left-wingers. Only 1 out of these 3 books I’ve read so far could be classified as such. So far I’ve found most Solarpunk books do a good job at considering both the human & environmental cost of advancing technology.

Solarpunk got its start on Tumblr with this post by Miss Olivia Louise.

Solarpunk – a plausible near-future sci-fi genre, which I like to imagine as based on updated Art Nouveau, Victorian, and Edwardian aesthetics, combined with a green and renewable energy movement to create a world in which children grow up being taught about building electronic tech as well as food gardening and other skills, and people have come back around to appreciating artisans and craftspeople, from stonemasons and smithies, to dress makers and jewelers, and everyone in between. A balance of sustainable energy-powered tech, environmental cities, and wicked cool aesthetics.

For example, in Donor, humanity is at harmony with the earth but at war with their moral natures. Human experimentation & genetic engineering are among the darker results. Becoming a kind of bio-engineered Vampire is even considered an environmentally friendly thing to do.

In Suncatcher– the world has survived massive flooding from rising sea levels and other environmental disasters but humanity has also risen to meet these challenges with new technologies and engineering feats. There is a really cool scene where you see Miami is a now a walled city surrounded by a low level salt water marsh. And solar-powered flying clipper ships have become a major source of travel that can bypass a lot of the ground destruction done to roads.

Warrior of Kizan has it’s Solarpunk elements on a different planet. There, a Sumerian-based Utopian culture has developed advanced bio-engineering along with mechanical engineering and the two technologies coexist in harmony.

This article was first published by Carbon Culture Review. You can find the full articles plus interviews with two solarpunk authors here:

Part 1 Interview with author Sheryl Kaleo: Solarpunk, a world in harmony with Nature but in Disharmony with Man. 

Part 2 Interview with author Alia Gee on Solarpunk & Environmental Disaster

Warrior of Kizan Fanart

I was a fan of Ann Margaret Lewis before I even knew who she was. My brother and I grew up reading her Star Wars The Essential Guide to Alien Species until all the pages fell out and had to be stacked back into the peeling cover. Then I found her Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Vatican Mysteries and The Watson Chronicles, which were a delight. But when I heard Lewis was coming out with her own original Space Opera I think my fan-geek squeals were heard around the world, not in the least because she also had some elements of Biopunk / Solarpunk in her worldbuilding. That book was Warrior of Kizan.

I was really taken with her world full of bio-engineered ships and a culture based on ancient Sumeria and I found myself doodling this lil portrait of one of the main characters. It’s set on one of the bio-ships and catches this moment where one of the main character’s, Dakhar, is contemplating the potential that he might be turning into a monster. This isn’t an exact scene from the book, more of a character sketch. For one thing, I think the armor they have on Dakhar’s planet is much more high-tech than the old world suit of armor I have him in here, but I’m tired of this trend of futuristic-warriors that are just wearing black padded leotards. (The Thor marvel movies for example aren’t my favorite but I have zero issues with the costuming.) Unfortunately I don’t think I captured the Sumerian influence very well but as a basic character sketch I suppose it will have to do.

I published a full review of Warrior of Kizan Here.

What do I mean by Solarpunk? Solarpunk is a subgenre of scifi that is VERY new. It only became a category on Amazon a few short years ago. If you want to find out about what Solarpunk is you can do so here.

Dakhar Talin, the Warrior of Kizan, aboard one of his planet’s space ships. (They grow their ships from plants on his planet.)

My Nerd Origin Story

I didn’t start out as a science fiction & fantasy fan. Up until the 10th grade my favorite genre had always been Historical Fiction. I think the nearest brush with speculative fiction I’d ever had was a 6th grade ambitious attempt to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. I don’t remember if I finished it and to be honest I was much too young and inexperienced to really appreciate it at the time. Of fantasy I’d read hardly anything beyond the Narnia books. Thanks to a dyslexic mother  who’d taught me to read when I was five, I was already an obsessive reader but I wasn’t a self-aware reader. I enjoyed the stories but I never thought about what the words meant.

But in 10th grade I met Ms. Lockhart. Now I’ve had great teachers before and after her but for some reason or other I felt more comfortable talking with her than I had any other teacher since a very charismatic second grade young miss. I was already a suspicious and moody teenager prone to read the worst into someone’s words no matter their intentions but through some slow, possibly supernatural method Ms. Lockhart gained first my respect, then my trust and admiration– though I am uncertain she was ever really aware of it. In other Literature classes I’d always enjoyed reading the assignments but I found the class discussions boring and the conclusions obvious, but Ms Lockhart didn’t ask the obvious questions and I found myself thinking and debating about my beloved books in a manner quite different than I had ever done before.

In particular she began walking us through the development of literary movements; ancient myths & epic poetry, medieval chivalric ballads, the Romantic era, the Transcendental, etc. She helped us see how each movement fed into the next, how their art influenced the culture around it and formed the next succeeding movement. She showed us how the earliest writers of the Romantic era at first produced their art instinctively and later identified it’s differences from older styles and formed an established idea of stylistic expectations for their new genre, which the next generation in turn experimented with breaking. It was all absolutely fascinating.

The second thing that happened was I received a very strange Christmas gift. I received a battered copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. It was from a step-relative who didn’t talk much to anyone. At first I thought the gift was some sort of passive aggressive snub, like he’d been pressured to give me something at the last minute and pulled an old copy off the shelf. But the man wasn’t by nature passive aggressive. In fact he remains the most painfully shy man I have ever met in my life. I think in the decade that I knew him I heard him speak only about five sentences. (Of course it might also be because he married one of the most talkative people I’ve ever met so it’s not like he had much opportunity to talk in the first place.)  Even when I later told him I’d read the book the result wasn’t a newfound common interest upon which we could build a friendship. In fact when I told him that I had fallen head over heals for the story he only blushed a brilliant coral crimson that started at the tip of his knobbly nose and bloomed across  his predominant cheekbones. Then he retreated to the other part of the house to refill his glass of sweet tea.

But I didn’t need a guide after that. Having tasted this strange new world or imagination I decided that one science fiction book wasn’t enough. After all, perhaps I only liked Ray Bradbury’s style rather than the genre? So to test myself I pulled down the book my Uncle had given my brother that same Christmas; the novelization of Star Wars Episode One, The Phantom Menace by Terry Brooks.

YES- You read that correctly. Something good came out of the existence of Star Wars Episode 1.

See it’s not that my parents hadn’t tried. They’d done their best to raise me right. When I was six years old they took me to a fancy theater screening of the original series. When the alien in the bar got his hand cut off I got up and walked out of the theater. When they talked me into going to see The Empire Strikes Back a little while later it was even worse! This time Luke got his hand cut off! I think I was more horrified by that than anything that Darth-guy was saying. Needless to say my personal tolerance for gore and body horror has gotten better but is still VERY low. (It wasn’t until a college escapade with H.P. Lovecraft that I began to fall in love with horror but even now I like the psychological creepy-crawly stuff. I can’t do torture or rape scenes).

Now before you go judging me on that understand that Brooks actually does a pretty solid job at the novelization and fixes a lot of the problems present in the movie. Also keep in mind that until this point I was only vaguely aware of Star Wars. I quickly corrected that later and my parents still have several shelves worth of my Star Wars book collections in their bookcase.

Photo Credit:
Photo by Rick Han from Pexels

Only two books in and I knew that this wasn’t going to just be a literary crush I’d indulge in over the summer. This was the beginning of a life-long love affair.

I started asking myself the questions that Ms. Lockhart had taught me to ask. Where did this strange genre come from? How did it form it’s identity? What influences caused it? We were still in the midst of studying literature from the 1800’s so I assumed we’d keep moving forward in history and eventually get to it. I was very interested in hearing what my teacher would have to say on it but didn’t know if I could wait that long. So I asked her one day when we would start studying this strange new genre of science fiction.

We weren’t going to apparently. The answer stunned me. Why would a person be sent to school if we were expected to skip over a major movement in history? Also a lot of the questions about a literary movement’s origin were difficult to know with certainty simply because the movements we studied were developed so long ago. Surely we’d learn some valuable insights about all of literature by studying the development of something so recent?!

Added to all this was a streak of American pride. I’d read about how from my nation’s onset there had been a quiet obsession among American writers to produce something to set them apart from the long European tradition. And this, science fiction seemed to be the answer. When I searched for classic Science Fiction literature most of the authors I found listed were American ones, with the occasional Russian.

So I decided then that if school were not going to educate me I’d teach myself. I looked up a list of classic authors and determined to read a little bit by every single one of them. So I read through some of Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert and of course as much of Ray Bradbury as I could get my hands on.

It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to get a grasp on the answers to my questions and found others with the same strange interest. In fact if you’re interested in origin and development of the scifi genre identity I recommend The James Gunn Center for Science Fiction.  They get into these things much deeper than I ever could.

But in the spirit of that inquiry I do think that I will write some articles tracing some of the more recent sub-movements of science fiction that catch my eye, Cyberpunk and it’s strange little sister Solarpunk to name two. Perhaps I’ll even get around to dissected the strange rules of the Scifi Mystery sub-genre.

 

A Scifi Book List with Real Diversity of Thought

Let’s be real for a moment.

Every individual, group, and category has a default, a preference, nay even a prejudice towards certain ideas, tropes and symbols. This is not in and of itself an evil thing. In fact, in art, it is even a necessity, boundaries and rules being what allows artists to create story and structure from chaos.

But it gets awfully boring if you stay too long in one set of rules, or worldview.

Science Fiction, the genre I love, has its own cultural tendencies. Most of its famous formative authors were well-known humanists and atheists. So it is no wonder that many of the awards set up in their name tend to support those books that parrot their ideals.

Now before you get the idea that I am here to bash Humanism or Atheism let me assure you that I’m not. Frank Herbert and Isaac Asimov are two of my favorite authors and I hope their tradition of thought continues in modern science fiction as strongly as it ever has. And if you’re a white secular male scifi author out there you have every right to be proud of the tradition others like you have left. Anyone who espouses the virtues of diversity but forgets that has forgotten the whole meaning of diversity.

But sometimes, for my own sake, I need to read something from a different world view to keep myself from getting too lazy in my imagination.  I need to stretch my mind outside of it’s normal cultural bubble.

So to that end, I’ve compiled a list of books I have read that takes the sci-fi genre into worldviews it is not normally known for trespassing. I will try to keep adding to it as I read, and if you have any books you recommend I read next please leave a comment on my facebook page. I’ll also try and write some full-length reviews of these book in other posts but I hope that this post will be some help for others like me who desire the mental stretch.  These books are in no particular order and they are all good and wonderful.

 

Pink Noise by Leonid Korogodski

This is a cyberpunk story like none other I have read. It involves a posthuman neuroscientist in his journey to free himself from slavery and rescue the child Princess of Mars while a giant battle involving sentient ships goes on outside the castle. It is very heavy on the tech and has some great ideas. I have reread this multiple times and find new layers everytime.

One running theme comes from the hero’s childhood Zulu-Zionist faith. Zulu Zionism is a South African religion that mixes Zulu traditional beliefs and Evangelical Christianity for something truly unique. Specifically, the hero is haunted by the souls of his ancestors and often makes references to Zulu gods and goddesses that I completely missed until I looked up. It’s a heavy read but if you’re looking for something completely original it’s worth a look. It’s also made me interested in reading more Afropunk so I’m looking for recommendations regarding that (yes Binti is already on my TBR list).

  • The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell 

A first contact story in which two Jesuit priests, two atheists, and an Orthodox Jew get into a spaceship built by the Vatican. It’s a commentary on the mixed intentions, both good and bad of the European explorers to the Americas. It’s also an exploration of post-Holocaust Jewish theology about suffering and pain.

It’s rare too in that it shows some real functional and respectful inter-religious friendships. It’s critical of Catholic sexual ethics but if you’re a Catholic reader I think even you’ll be impressed with how respectfully it makes its case. The author herself has spent time as a Catholic, an Atheist and is currently a practicing Jew so it’s no wonder that she can portray each with a nuance and empathy many of the most well-meaning authors fail to grasp. The sequel is on my bookshelf and my TBR list.

  • The Star Brother’s Series by Colleen Drippe

This series of stand-alone books heavily evokes the Golden-Age scifi of my childhood. Each story involves The Star Brothers, an order of missionaries working within a universe where giant mega-corporations rule worlds, and bounty hunters are a powerful political force. There are also a number of planets on the fringes that have been cut off from contact with the rest of humanity and have devolved into the sort of cultures that laud various forms of human sacrifice. The Brothers are usually on missions where they can act as disinterested intermediaries and there is only one book where they are on overt-conversion missions. The stories are more about the political intrigue.

The Brothers are often accompanied by their Faring Guard, an order of Body Guards comprised of exiled penitent criminals from the planet Lost Rythar. Rythans are kind of like reformed Vikings. They cooperate with civilization but prefer a good bloody ax-fight to talking, which makes them interesting partners for the peaceable Star Brothers.

There is also an interesting cultural reversal in that most of the barbarian and backwater cultures involve the descendants of Europeans and most of the “civilized” cultures involve descendants of brown races. It’s similar to what Asimov did in his book Currents of Space. 

Also for all that the books follow an order of Christians most of the main characters are either secular or members of various barbarian cultures. And I mean barbarian quite sincerely when it’s a culture that glorifies ritual suicide and human sacrifice. But like Russel, Drippe knows how to portray all of her characters with a depth of empathy and respect that makes them all heroes of their own story. Icewolf or Treelight are good places to start the series. Gelen is the official first book but it was also Drippe’s first written so the writing is of a slightly less quality than the others.

  • Engraved on the Eye by Saladin Ahmed

A series of scifi fantasy short stories with an Islamic spin on things. Prepare for the heroics of an Islamic Demon Hunter, a Zombie Killer and a physician for Inter-Human Inter-Demon mixed marriages. This is another author I hope to read more of. His stories are fun and his prose is vibrant with descriptions that touch all the senses. There are a few times where he misunderstands some Christian symbolism but I found those moments interesting and not at all insulting. It’s hard to find books that capture how others view your default culture.

I don’t know of any other Islam-inspried scifi fantasy authors so if you know of some PLEASE tell me about it.

Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex

Ok so this is an anime and isn’t a book but I have yet to find a more beautiful exploration of Buddhist theology of body ethics, reincarnation and sci-fi technology. It’s an old classic by now but if you haven’t heard of it go watch it now. A lot of people miss the Buddhist theology angle but if you want to learn about it and how this story explores it is absolutely fascinating.

This interview with the Dahli Lama on what his theology says about the possibility of reincarnating into a sentient computer is a great place to start if you’re interested: https://sanjindumisic.com/dalai-lama-on-reincarnation-and-artificial-intelligence/

  • The Long List of Mormon Scifi

Seriously I don’t know of any Mormon-inspired fiction that isn’t sci-fi or fantasy. Though I confess I also haven’t researched enough about Mormon spirituality to properly appreciate the references. It reads a bit like the jumbled Islamic references in the Dune Series does to me. Perhaps the series that most clearly seems to ask Mormon-like questions about the universe might be Brandon Sanderson’s expanded universe. And his stuff is so long that I think it’s going to be a while before I understand what he is trying to say.

Regardless I think it is worth noting that scifi has a history of Mormon-inspired stories almost as powerful as it’s Atheist inspired stories. I’m not sure why this is exactly but I’ve heard Sanderson and Orson Scott Card joke about how their faith is already kind of sci-fi like. And even the most ardent of Scott Card haters still admit that the stories are great and positive contributions to the world. I know a lot of readers are weirded out by either Mormonism or some of its figures but let’s be real guys– this is THE GENRE for confronting the weird, so embrace it and let yourself enjoy it.

Actually, that’s kind of my personal take on diversity anyways. A lot of people talk about it like it is this beautiful ideal– and it is– but in everyday life, diversity usually just means people doing weird stuff you don’t understand, learning to be ok with that and embracing the joy of learning itself… kind of like reading a scifi-fantasy book.

 

We Hunt the Flame by Hafsah Faizal

A Young Adult, Fantasy story with an enemies to lovers love story, written by Hafsah Faizal, a feminist Muslim who wheres an niqab. If you, like myself were surprised that someone can be a feminist and wear a niqab then Faizal is a fun and positive author to follow. Her book however, doesn’t delve much into her faith, or rather it delves into in the way that The Last Airbender delves into Buddhism. Her fantasy world is inspired by Arabic culture. That in itself is fascinating but I hope that as she writes she will gain the courage to explore her faith in fiction as much as she does in her public social media. If you want something Muslim-light though and adventure-heavy this is still an excellent read for any YA reader.

Structure & Plot Tools for Story Telling

At a panel I gave on Plot and Structure I mentioned a number of resources I have found useful for quick plotting and general writer’s-block-busting.

For convenience here is the definitive list of links. I will try to update it as I find new ones.

  1. 7 Point Plot Structure by Dan Wells– Great for Hacking your brain, this structure is best plotted out NOT in chronological order. It’s great especially for pantsers because it lets you get down the basics without ruining a lot of details. I also find it works as a macro series plotter down to a micro scene plotter.
  2. Anatomy of a Story by John Truby–  Probably the most exaustive resource for delving into story structure and theory. I find it useful to read and refer back to but too detailed to go through all 22 steps. Still having it’s lessons in the back of my head helps.
  3. Take off Your Pants – Outline Your Books for Faster Better Writing by Libbie Hawker – This takes the high brow ideas of Anatomy and makes them concise and actionable. She also has some of the best advice on pacing I have seen yet. So if you want to write a book that reader’s can’t put down pick this one up.
  4. M.I.C.E. Quotient by Orson Scott Card – this is great for right at the beginning of a story creation. It helps you figure out your nature opening and beginning scenes and what sort of reader expectations you will have to fulfill. This delves into story type that goes beyond genre. You can read it in Card’s own words from his book or listen to Writing Excuses’s explanation of it.
  5. Writing Excuses Podcast– this short podcast has become part of my writing routine in helping me get into the right head space before I hit the keys.
  6. Brandon Sanderson’s Lecture Series – It’s a bit long but has some solid gems in there. If you want to make excellent plot twists, this is the master to learn from.
  7. Hague’s 6 Stages – great for coming up with my character arc and connecting internal actions and external ones. It’s also one of the few structures I have seen that break the 3 act structure and rethink it.

Sassy Dragons & Old Icons

Fanart inspired by the Dragon Eye P.I. series by Karina Fabian.

I have begun reading some stories set in the fantasy/ humor genre about a sassy dragon named Vern who gets pulled into our world from Fairie world and has to get a job as a Private Investigator because the government won’t let him hole up in a nice cave in a state park somewhere. (After all, he’s an invasive species.) It’s been a fun read and reminds me a lot of Terry Pratchett’s style of writing. I can very well see Vern and Nanny Ogg teaming up and going on adventures together.

A big pet peeve of Vern’s is how everyone thinks that being a dragon is synonymous with being an evil demon. There are hints that he did have a run-in with St. George but Vern continually swears he was innocent and St. George was being an annoying paladin about everything.  Given Vern’s ego, I’m sure there is more to the story. Regardless it’s been an amusing read and inspired me to make this fanart based on a medieval icon. Is that sacrilegious of me?

I don’t know. But if you like comedy fantasy like Terry Pratchett or just need some sassy dragons in your life I’d pop over here and give the DragonEye P.I. a look-see. (please disregard the bad covers a lot of the books have. The quality of the jokes is not reflected in the covers.)

Vines of Mars: Prologue

What follows is the prologue from my upcoming book, The Vines of Mars.
John Crowley, award winning author and creative writing teacher at Yale University, begged me not to delete this prologue. I was uncertain at first but have kept it in in respect to his judgment.

“The second team found the astronauts’ skeletons wrapped in a coniferous cocoon of vines, their blood now feeding the flowers that bloomed around them in great cascading walls of greenery. The alien vines were what filled the air with oxygen, and warmed the atmosphere, that later her compatriots would bolster and augment as needed, directing the burgeoning environment into a second cocoon for humanity. But first, the vine sent out feelers like great intelligent Venus fly-traps, chasing the second astronauts back into their shell.
Life began on Mars the way life always begins; in a holy darkness, between communities of small hopeful stars. It formed, grew, and had it’s being long before the rest of humanity perked up from their stubbornly practical tempered wine glasses. We knew it would happen eventually; we had taken the precautions that we had the time and resources for. But like all life, it took everyone by surprise. Before the people in stiffly air-conditioned cotton collars admitted that it came for our blood, we only knew of it as a curiously large comet. It appeared out of the icy Oort cloud and winked saucy greetings at the naïve robots mining our asteroid fields. When a few lonely scientists spelled out the message on their calculators the world braced for death, and in the last minute throws of labor wrought out life. We deflected it. The moon-sized comet and its playful cloud of asteroids streaked across Bangkok’s night sky to crash instead into the face of Mars and spread its wet fingers across the expanse of two dead oceans. She watched the drama unfold in the fierce winter of break rooms, and through the screen of her media, feeling one in terror with the rest of her helpless race. She had not known they would come for her then, but first, they came for the world.
Humans in white and silver tubes, landing like locusts on the green summer dirt. Out of the flood of water that came with the comet, a thousand vines had split from the skin of the planet in the largest and most impossible desert bloom humankind had ever seen. She’d watched her family sit, stunned, around the hallowed glow of their screen, the light of a new heaven dazzling their imaginations. The reanimation of the planet’s magnetic field had been enough of an astrological anomaly– scientists were stalwart in the discipline of never using that tainted word: ‘miracle’. But it had been an invisible miracle for scientists, for the high minds that escaped the mundane and cracked open beer cans in NASA break rooms where she worked. When her toddlers rolled on the floor before the TV and laughed at the green light reflecting off each other’s faces, she knew she would leave them soon. But then the film stuttered, the voices muffled, and the signal dropped. Mars was silent and so was the first team, and she gained a little time while they searched. But even after they found blossoms burgeoning out of sockets and stomach, the second team never fully recovered the lost astronauts’ bodies.
Evaña watched from her TV screen as humanity struck back at life’s inconvenience. They brought their own plants and chose their own rivers, and burned away a wide circle of refuge. Vine-ash and rock made soil. Soil and seeded bacteria made arable land. Gas carried from the smoggiest cities of the world spread itself thin and humans walked the Mars with wonderment and copious amounts of sunscreen. And then they came to her, as she’d guessed they would eventually, and they asked her for a tree.
The officer they’d sent to convince her had peach fuzz on his upper lip. He’d talked about the future, about what an honor it was to be offered the job. To give the boy credit, he had been a wonderful poet, full of ideas and metaphors that hid behind his smile like cats. He’d called her “The Mother of Mars”, “the new ‘Demeter,'” and looked confused when she’d told him that she was already a mother. Didn’t she know how important this was? Didn’t she know this was the only salvation of man? It didn’t matter, what wars were won or lost. Life would cycle on, but in an endless, purposeless, and ultimately frail circumference if it never left that of Earth’s.
‘Frail’ was certainly an appropriate adjective. For seven days earth had lived in a state of frailty, chaos, and panic, when word of the impending comet had leaked out, but Evaña and her fellow scientists had lived in that state for three months, ever since the mining companies had reported seeing a comet the size of the Caribbean Sea hurtle past their mines toward earth, dragging along a cloud of asteroids in its gravity.
“Perhaps we had been too numbed by our success,” Evaña would think. Back in the early 21st century, it would’ve taken seven years. Now it would take no less than three years to garner enough international cooperation to throw an asteroid or a comet off course. But after their first reports they knew, for all the progress, they had much less than three years. Every day was spent waiting for the trajectory reports; every evening spent coming home, running through the door to clutch her oblivious children, to kiss her ignorant but worried husband. Eventually, the story got out. The first journalist refused to publish it once he had the truth, but the second wasn’t so clear-minded.
At first, there had been an upswing in looting and armed robberies but the robbers found the shop owners abnormally compliant. The damage to the world economy hadn’t been because of violence but because of extreme ambivalence. What was money worth when it would all burn the day after tomorrow? For seven days humanity left its work. Grocers left their doors open and unguarded, liquor sellers shared a bottle with their customers, and a group of artistically repressed stockholders made a series of papier-mâché sculptures out of their lose cash and records. After the comet had been thrown off course through a last-ditch engineering experiment, those same stockholders were-almost simultaneously- fired from their jobs, and then offered millions for their sculptures. The comet and asteroids landed instead on their red neighbor. But now it was obvious to every government official and corporate investor that humanity needed to get off this rock and on toward safer, newer ones. And wasn’t it obvious to her too? The young man’s eyes looked scandalized at her hint of disagreement, and she wanted to take all the bitter sarcasm inside her and throw it back into his stupid face.
“What was it like to come home every day and know that your children would never grow up?” she wanted to ask him. “That they would never fall in love or get married, or never learn how to fly in the hang-glider that her daughter had requested for her birthday? She’d wanted to ask the puffed-up-suit all of this, to crumple his nose and shave that stupid peach fuzz of his lip. She knew it was pointless though because after all, there was only one answer she could give.
She had known it then but still tried arguing with him. They wanted her to join the other scientists designing plants and animals that would thrive in a Martian environment and then transition over to attempting to re-engineer the vine to control its growing speed and patterns. But wasn’t there someone else who could fulfill the position? No of course not. In the field of Bioengineering only Evaña Villalobos and her teacher, crumbling Dr. Uchendu had been successful at actual creation. Most of the work in the reconstruction of the rainforest was done by other scientists who could recreate extinct plants fairly well but only she and Dr. Uchendu had been able to create entirely new life forms that fit the missing niches in the environment. “Of course she would have assistants,” he’d insisted. When the sage abuelo of modern science says that you’re the only one he would trust, the only one with the resolve and commitment to stare down the universe in the face, she can’t have expected to get off the hook so easily. At this Evaña tried cursing the white-haired Igbo, tried pretending she did not trust his judgment; would not follow him into that jungle.
Besides, it was only three years of training, said the peach fuzz above the mouth. But Evaña hadn’t cared about training. She was an academic, she’d been in school most of her life. It’d taken a few more minutes of strained conversation before he’d seen her twisting the ring on her finger. Then he told her that if her husband and children went into space training now they’d be able to join her after a separation of no less than three years. Evaña lost her nerve then. Tomȃs would be ten and Maria would be thirteen, a teenager. They would be seven and ten when she left. She would miss too much. But Evaña had already lived with the comet for three of the most painfully slow months of her life. After three months of study, she knew better than this young suit, who’d known of the comet a total of seven days. She knew her answer, the only answer she could give. She would not see her children in their childhood, but she would see them grow up. She would see them fall in love, and become whatever it was that they wanted to become. Her family, and a million families after them; all under the shade of the trees she’d genetically engineered, eating the crops she’d built in the basement of her iron-shod Martian home, eating and growing and marrying and birthing, and dying on two circumferences; twice the chance for life in relatively barren universe.”

Thank you for reading my prologue. The full book will be released Sept 28th 2020

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Can’t Wait? Read the First Chapters Here

New Artwork from the Vines of Mars Part II

In truth, this is the first drawing I made for this book, but as it more clearly indicates the nature of the first chapter I thought it prudent to release after.

The sky gave me some trouble because at first, my research indicated that my Martian sunset should be in hues of lime green and turquoise but after a conversation with another sci-fi writer, Allen Shoff, I was assured that once my Martian planet had a relatively-self-sustaining atmosphere the sky would take on a more familiar hue.

The dust storm on the left also gave me trouble and I don’t think I’ll ever be quite happy with it. Perhaps I should travel to a desert location and experience one in person before I could ever be completely satisfied with it.

The trees are deliberately inaccurate. My story opens in Autumn so the whole world is cast in golds and oranges. Symbolically such a choice made sense to me for the story but in visual art, it did not offer enough contrast.

The title is a joke on an oft-quoted adage from writing classes; “There are only two types of stories, A Person Goes on a Journey, and A Stranger Walks Into Town.” The Vines of Mars definitely falls into the latter category, though I hope it may be as original in the telling as it is typical of a beginning.

First Artwork from The Vines of Mars

This one comes from a short image at the start of my book. My main character, Tomas was born on Earth but spent his childhood on Mars. He has a childhood memory of finding this helmet and skull buried in the sand. As a young boy, the find was a precious romantic treasure but it hints at the planet’s long difficult past.

Below I’ve included an excerpt explaining a little of that past.

Martian Buried Treasure

“Above them, he could hear the wind howling through the tree limbs. “It’s autumn,” he reminded himself, so there was still a chance. It was the summer, not the autumn storms that were the worst. Autumn storms only lasted a few hours. Sometimes summer storms lasted for as long as a week. The amber curtain covered the whole planet in sand clouds and dust devils that rose into the sky like long twisted skyscrapers. Afterwards, everyone would come up out of their basements with brooms and shovels. The town would dig out their plants and homes again like nothing happened. Rarely, did anyone get stranded outside unawares anymore. If they did finding the body was likely to be gruesome. Once, when he was younger, he and his friend Amun had been digging a ditch for some fort or other, and come across a lost skull, picked clean by the wind. It wore a miner’s helmet, of the kind people used to wear back before the vines kick-started the atmosphere, back when this planet was just dust and silicon-diggers. The last storm victims had been Professor Whitehead, a teacher of his. A few weeks later an older kid in school, Langston Freeman, and his sister Maria disappeared on the same day. They’d never found Maria’s body but Langston’s mother was the unfortunate one to stumble across her son’s body first. Adele and the boys might complain about all the weighted clothing Tomás made them wear but he wasn’t about to back down. He wasn’t about to find them spread out over two square meters just because Martian gravity wouldn’t let them develop a proper bone-density. And, of course, there were more dangers on Mars than just the storms. Anything might happen to a person if they strayed outside the colony borders.”