Jan 13, 2016

I promised an update yesterday and here it is today. A day late but hopefully you won't feel short-changed.

First off, my thanks to A.C. Weston for supporting Transilience and for allowing me to wax on at length about the role of females in the novel. I encourage everyone to check out her Author page and her book, She is the End, which has cleared the eBook publishing milestone.

Now...

Why Mars? Why set my novel on the Red Planet?

I know right? Mars Mars Marsity Mars Mars

Lots of news about Mars. How we are going to go there. How we are going to get there. How we are going to live there. How we are going to science the shit out of it and make it the next hot spot travel destination. It makes sense to capitalize on the fervor, right??

Ah yes...if only I possessed that level of cleverness, or foresight, when I sat down to write Transilience. Because I fear my reasons are far more pedestrian than a keen insight into these sort of things.

Deep breath. Release slowly. And deliver the sad truth....

I chose to set Transilience on Mars because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could not convincingly set the novel in an existing city. It's been nearly a decade since I lived in a major metropolitan area. A decade!

I lived in Detroit. I am from Detroit. Well...that is to say, I grew up in the suburbs, went into the city for baseball and hockey games and then left. However, I did actually live in the city when I went to grad. school. I also lived in Ann Arbor, which is a pretty amazing city for a place that began life as a college town.

However, my time spent in these places specifically are now nothing more than memories. Places frozen in time. Perhaps they exist currently much in the same way as when I haunted their streets, but I can't say for certain. Doubt is never a good position from which to begin any undertaking.

To make an attempt to locate my novel in Detroit or any other place on Earth would require the heavy use of the Internet. But how much conviction, how much authenticity can one conjure from Google Maps and web searches? Where ever I chose to set Transilience would've about as much substance as those stage towns in Westerns. Looks good from the outside, just don't poke your head through the doorway. It'll destroy the illusion.

Chandler's LA, Dickens or Doyle's London, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith's Edinburgh, Capote's New York, Murakami's Tokyo. Larsson's Stockholm and so on and so forth. All of their novels feature a city that possess a vitality to it. A familiarity that is imparted to the reader by the experiences of the author and how the city has shaped their view of the world. You can't recreate that type of authenticity from a web browser.

That left me with the decision to create a city on my own. I used my imagination and my memories of the places in which I have lived. And viola! New London came into existence! It is an amalgam of all that I love about some of the greatest places on our little planet.

I chose Mars because I believe it is the next great frontier for human exploration and settlement. However, I also chose Mars because Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet and Burrough's John Carter of Mars series left an indelible print on my mind. And, I chose Mars because I first watched Total Recall at that age when things stick with you. The same goes for Mars Base Sara, the Mars Staging Grounds and the Mars Orbital Armory floating around the Red Planet (props if you know the references). I chose Mars because it is the birthplace of Spike Spiegel. I think those are all pretty good reasons.

If I haven't lost you yet, it might be because you're wondering why, if I did choose to place my city and all my characters on Mars, it isn't a bit more exotic. Good question...even if I didn't pose it as a question. 

I believe that in the expansion of one civilization or civilizations there has been a concerted effort to recreate the familiar. As the Greeks and, then, the Romans pushed the boundaries of the empires outward, they built cities that all contained stuff that made them very Greek, or Roman, right? Amphitheaters, baths, forums, architecture, aqueducts, and so forth. The familiar.

Once we colonize Mars, I see the same thing happening. I see a nascent city on Mars as a reflection of the people who founded it and populated it. It will contain the familiar. Because it doesn't matter how far into the future we will go, there will always be seedy bars, run down factories, and utilitarian architecture juxtaposed against the outward of expression of wealth and power.

Oh! And the ending wouldn't work very well on Earth. There's that too.

Cheers!

Kev