Author: Generation Mars

Do you get frisson? More specifically, do some pieces of music make the hair on your neck stand up? I get that at exactly one minute and fifty-four seconds into You and Me, by Penny and the Quarters, on the word “you”. I encountered this little known piece while working on Part Three, and knew I had to work in a passing reference to it somehow.

Excerpt:
“At T-minus six minutes, their helmets were filled with softly strummed electric guitar chords. A chorus of voices sang “you and me” in harmony, while a plaintive female voice riffed wordlessly over them… The singer drew the word “you” out long and smoothly, voice shifting across several notes. Cas felt as if she were floating on that voice.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Image: Picture of skin with goosebumps. Image has been altered to display the words “it’s just a song”.
photographer: Ildar Sagdejev
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

My oldest also likes Radiohead, though she would probably think Creep is basic.

Excerpt:
“You’re just different, and different is good. We’re all different. In fact, I’ll tell you a secret that is true for everyone: we are all lonely and feel like creeps sometimes. That’s a good thing. It reminds us to treat each other kindly.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

We’ve all felt like one at some point. It’s a good song with the sort of staying power that will take it deep into the century. Maybe even to Mars.

Image: The author in a different and wilder period of life. This is too embarrassing to describe further.

My oldest went through a Riot Grrrl phase. That phrasing sounds dismissive. I don’t mean it that way at all. She still loves loud music that challenges social norms, and I love that she loves that. I also love the idea that Martian tweens have that same rebellious streak, even in a culture more nurturing than our own.

Excerpt:
“A heavy drumbeat filled the cabin of the Peregrine. A guitar moaned softly then erupted into distorted power chords. The singer came in, shouting the first verse. The sisters looked at each other, smiled, then they shouted the chorus together: Rebel Girl!”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Maybe the sisters recognize a kindred soul in the confrontational lyrics. Mars had its moment of revolution (the Schism). It was quiet, as revolutions go, but likely not without trauma. Of course the kids share that rebellious streak.

The end goal of the Schism was to build a culture in which we do a better job of treating each other well. Reading the text of the flyer pictured here, I feel like Kathleen Hanna would make a good Martian.

Image: Flyer written by Kathleen Hanna in 1989.

Excerpt:
“The Country Roads stood upright on the pad, engine bells down, nose up, like all rockets since the beginning of the rocket age. But this ship was not tall and sleek like a rocket from Earth. It was squat and ungainly, with weird bumps wherever some interior feature required them. Solar panels and heat radiators were folded uncomfortably against its sides, and various antennas and dishes stuck out here and there. There was no need for it to be aerodynamic, as it would never enter an atmosphere.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

One could argue that my choice of name for the translunar ferry that becomes a lifeboat, Country Roads, is a bit too on the nose. That’s fine. Sometimes on-the-nose is exactly what is needed.

(Savvy through-readers may also find a callback to my reference to lithopanspermia in the prologue to Water.)

Image: illustration by Luis Peres for Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

Do you remember the first time we see the Discovery One in 2001? It eases slowly onto the screen, as a melancholy orchestral piece plays (the Adagio from the Gayane Ballet Suite, by Aram Ilyich Khachaturian). The effect is to emphasize the foreignness of humans in deep space. I’ve always found the scene incredibly lonely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jft1rvWQv0&t=1s

I had that scene in mind as I was writing of Nyla playing her cello over Radio Mars. But I wanted to deemphasize the loneliness and instead focus on finding strength through shared struggle.

Excerpt:
“The intimate and plaintive tone of the instrument, so similar to a human voice, sometimes made the children cry, but the tears brought them together. It was as if the music spoke to them of their fears and their suffering and told them that they were not alone, that other humans have suffered so, and knowing that helped them feel stronger.”
— from Food: Generation Mars, Book Four

I didn’t have any particular cello piece in mind for Nyla to play for Radio Mars, but my youngest has been practicing Vivaldi’s Cello Sonata in E Minor, Op. 14, No. 5, from Suzuki Book 5, lately. I think it’s a good fit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoL5RYymIB4

Image: Victorian woman standing with cello. Public domain