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These works are copyrighted by Chris Gerrib. The works are freely given and may be freely distributed on a non-commercial basis, in whatever electronic format you please, as long as the work remains intact and unaltered and is attributed to me, Chris Gerrib. All other rights are reserved by me, specifically commercial and derivative rights. If you are interested in commercial and/or derivative rights, contact me.
The Mars Run - A Science Fiction Novel
Click here to read the entire novel online.
A Writer Writes, or I Got Bored.
I’d said that I would write a novel someday. In eight grade, I tried to write a play (a mystery) but only got four pages done, so my track record of success wasn’t that great.
Readers of the Chicago Tribune are probably familiar with the columnist Eric Zorn. Well, in the winter of 2001, he started trumpeting his “SIN” club (Someday Is Now.) Eric’s goal as I recall was to run a marathon. I decided mine would be to actually write that darned novel.
I bought a couple of books, notably The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray and On Writing by Stephen King. Of the two, I found King’s book more helpful. I mean, I actually finished it! What I most liked about King was that he said you needed to have an outline and a deadline, or at least a goal, as to when to finish.
The Weekend Novelist was not has helpful to me, although I took away from it two good ideas. The first was that I should have a character sketch for each character in the book, and the second was that I needed to have the back-story, or what happened before the story started, on paper.
Armed with these two ideas, and a life-long love affair (unrequited) with Mars, I started writing. I finished something I thought at the time was marketable in late August, 2001. The title at the time was The Reluctant Astronaut.
On of the things science fiction writers have to do is “build a world” which is in some way different then ours. I was and am a big fan of the “Golden Age” SF writers, like Asimov and Heinlein, so the original “high concept” of the plot was “The Rolling Stones meet pirates.” For you non-SF fans (hi, Mom!) The Rolling Stones was a juvenile novel by Robert Heinlein in which a family of lunar colonists buys a rocket and flies to Mars. (For the record, the rock band took their name from the novel, not the other way round.)
Unlike the Heinlein classic, my heroine didn’t really want to go, hence the title. Also unlike practically all SF I’ve read, governments do not have a lot of control over interplanetary colonies. I postulate this for two reasons.
First, as anybody who follows the “alt.space” movement knows, there are literally dozens of companies trying to develop cheap access to Earth orbit. Inevitably, many of these companies will become the Packards and Peirce-Arrows of the space age, but I assume (hope) some succeed. After all, it takes the same amount of energy to fly from LA to Sydney as it does to get to orbit. If that’s the case, then we’re halfway to anywhere in the Solar System, no advanced warp drives needed.
Second, under the current international law (the United Nations Space Treaties), no nation can claim territory on another celestial body. However, any nation can set up “scientific and research” stations. Well, if a private company can get to Mars, and Ethiopia can set up a “scientific and research” station, what would stop Ethiopia from licensing private companies? Those familiar with maritime law would recognize this as a “flag of convenience” which is done all the time.
What is the logical extension of these two ideas? Well, on a big place, like Mars, you’d see dozens or hundreds of colonies under dozens of different flags. Some (maybe many) would be de jur under the control of a country, but de facto independent. If this doesn’t sound like a recipe for anarchy, I don’t know what does. It has the added advantage of being a fun place to play as an author.
I was just about ready to bundle the story off when our not-so-friendly neighborhood Islamofascists attacked the World Trade Center. For a time, I felt silly writing about SF, and, since my story had some state-sponsored terrorists, (and still does), I felt it needed a bit of a re-write. I eventually shipped off something to a publisher in late winter of 2001.
The publishing industry moves at a glacial pace, even when they weren’t donning gas masks to open unsolicited packages (remember anthrax, anybody?) While I was waiting for my first series of rejections, I wrote another novel, working title A Private War, based on the same world as above, although with entirely different characters.
I decided to skip the outline, and just write as the spirit moved me. The result was an unpublishable mess that I had to create an outline for just to edit. And when I saw the mountain of editing before me, well, I almost hit delete on the spot.
By this time, late 2002 / early 2003, I had gotten a slew of rejections and one come-on from a vanity publisher. I think his offer was for me to buy a hundred copies at $16 each (AKA “retail”) and sell them out of the trunk of my car for $20. I decided I needed to figure out how to write, so I joined the online group critters.org.
After submitting a few short stories, and generally getting useful advice, I decided to re-write this book. A new version, Sole Survivor, went through Critter’s “dedicated reader” program in 2003. The “family-purchased spaceship” concept was gone, which meant that my heroine, Janet Pilgrim, had to age from 16 to 18, and get a job as a crewmember.
This led to a lengthy back-story about her parent’s financial troubles, a few vestiges of which survive in the version you are reading now. An exceptionally clumsily written sequence in which Janet tries to get pregnant (!) to avoid making the trip hit the cutting room floor, and some other characters moved in.
I got some useful remarks about the story, which included a strong suggestion to cut half of the “story-killing” parental bankruptcy details. I’d also learn from Critters about the concept of the “hook,” and so a scene where Janet’s boyfriend of the time dies in a training accident got moved to chapter one.
Something else happened in 2003 – Private Jessica Lynch. I had always been interested in the “reluctant hero.” In my view, that’s one of the problems with a lot of Heinlein fiction – of course a super-competent and motivated character can move mountains, but what about the rest of us? Private Lynch (and her friend, Private Piestewa) didn’t join the Army because they wanted to serve, rather, it was a means to an end. Since I joined the Navy for similar reasons, but didn’t see action, I have always wondered how I would respond in combat.
At any rate, the new draft, Sole Survivor, got shipped off to another clutch of publishers, with no more success then before. My last attempt to get it published commercially was after a pitch meeting with John Halfers of Five Star Books. We met at Windycon in November 2004. Actually, I think this was book’s first outing under its new name, The Mars Run.
I wasn’t that upset, because I had started work on a new novel, Escape from New Deseret. This was set in the same circumstances of Mars as The Mars Run, semi-independent colonies on Mars. I will give out a “shout out” to Julie E. Czernada, who I met at Duckon earlier that year, for helping me resolve a key plot point of the new work. Since it’s out to publishers (left the barn in January 2005) I’ll discuss it later.
A Writer Writes, or I Got Bored.
A few days after I’d shipped New Deseret off to its first publisher, I got bored, and opened up The Mars Run. I immediately saw several things in this, my “best” version, which needed fixing – including a typo! Things like:
§ A hook? You call that a hook? “I watched my lover die.” It beats the crap out of what was there before.
§ POV. I’d mistakenly assumed first person was the easiest POV. It’s not. One of the biggest issues is deciding “when” the narrator is talking. Is it a journal (nearly contemporaneous) or am I telling my grandchildren?
§ The postscript (written in 3rd person) didn’t belong. I’d only added it in the first place to lengthen the story. If you want to read it, go here.
§ Chapter 3 ended on an equilibrium point. Janet, who wasn’t really in any jeopardy after the accident, was cleared. I wonder how many editors got to there, said, “Oh well, the story’s over,” and rejected me.
So, as a writing exercise, I decided to fix all of this. I’d just read a book, Kingston by Starlight, by Christopher John Farley. The book is a novel about a real-life female pirate, also in first person. Here, Ann Bonnie is talking to her (dead?) child. I came up with a modified “when.” Everything before her escape attempt on Mars is told from the point of her writing a journal just before leaving, in case she doesn’t make it. The trip from Mars to Earth is more-or-less contemporaneous, and Africa to the end is after she regains her freedom.
The Postscript was an easy fix, and I did another rewrite, more for posterity’s sake, to not end chapter 3 on an equilibrium point. Various other sidetracks, gabfests, and general impediments also hit the bricks. I had already decided to self-publish on Lulu, and in an attempt to not price myself out of business, shorter was better.
The section in the book now called “Africa” is (I think) a much more sensible re-envisioning of the story. In all previous drafts, the Central African Empire (who are sponsoring the pirates) come up with a cockamamie scheme to use Janet to buy illegal weapons, which they then will smuggle back to Africa.
It was clumsy, requiring new characters and a big political dissertation. Moreover, I had to figure out a way for the Africans to make Janet do their bidding. They only solution I could come up with, fit her with a remote-controlled necklace bomb, meant that I either had to have her bypass bomb detectors (after 9/11? yea, right) or make it obvious that it was a dummy bomb. Which then begged the question, why not run away?
The solution was to ditch this, and do what I should have done before – have Janet attempt to escape from the Central African Empire. This required a trip to the Villa Park Public Library to perform Research (the bane of the writer). Actually, all I needed to do was pull a few maps for place names.