Book Series
Air: Generation Mars, Book One is a Red Ribbon Winner from The Wishing Shelf Book Awards.
“Young readers will love this story of children living on Mars–and they might learn a few things too! A RED RIBBON WINNER and highly recommended!”
– The Wishing Shelf Book Awards
I’m very excited to announce that Shelter: Generation Mars, Book Two is a Wishing Shelf Book Awards finalist in the “Books for 9-12 year olds” category.
I had a goal of 10,000 words by the start of my kids’ Fall Break.
Things are going well.
Here’s the soundtrack I play in my office lately while I write. I don’t know how a collapsing glacier on Mars would sound to those stuck within, but I imagine it wouldn’t be too far from this.
The lights have gone out. The tunnels have broken and shifted around you. And these sounds constantly rumble and zing up through your feet and the thin atmosphere outside your helmet. Do you have enough air to find your way out?
My gosh, this book might be too scary for kids!
How do you write a Martian dungeon crawl? First, you have to make a model dungeon (abandoned ice mine), so you can keep track of where everybody’s at.
Of relevance to my next book, Water, is the question of subglacial water.
Here’s reporting on a recent study that modeled glacial movement on Mars. It has been assumed that most glaciers on Mars have been frozen to their beds for quite some time. The question has been, did they ever move or have they always been stuck? This study suggests that they may have been able to move in the past, though more slowly than glaciers on Earth.
It’s an interesting piece, but doesn’t help my case. For Water, I need a significant reservoir of subglacial water in the present. This is where I’m going to have to exercise some creative license and claim that remnants of ancient vulcanism have kept my fictional ice sheet wet at the bottom. At some point in any work of science fiction, one must lean into the fiction part. This is where that happens for Water.
Here’s a very nice review of Generation Mars from Anita McDivitt Barrios for her Fabric of Words blog.
There’s also an accompanying interview with yours truly.
“I loved these books and loved the fact that it shows young kids not just coping but thriving and adapting as the children of Mars’ first colonists.”
https://amb.mystrikingly.com/blog/the-martian-for-middle-grade-readers-generation-mars
NASA will take another stab at getting Artemis one off the pad this Saturday.
From the article: “It was not immediately clear from Tuesday’s news conference what the implications of launching with a warmer-than-normal main engine would be. From a physics standpoint, igniting super-chilled propellants in a warmer-than-anticipated engine would likely severely damage the RS-25 engine’s turbopump, at a minimum. Presumably, therefore, NASA would not launch the SLS rocket without high confidence in its flight rationale.”
So, we’ll see…
JWST has been working round the clock since those first glorious images. If you have wondered how its time is allocated, The Planetary Society has the answer right here.
NASA 
Ars Technica 
The Planetary Society