Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I have just completed what I believe to be my 36th book, the science fiction novel, Ares. It will be e-mailed to my publisher later this afternoon. My notes indicate that I began work on it on August 12, 2002. I have been working on it for sixteen years—with a significant interruption or two—which is 22 percent of my life. The next time a radio interviewer asks me how long it takes to write a book, I’ll have something to tell them!

Please don’t misunderstand me. It has not been a particularly onerous task. Ares is a part of what I call “The Ngu Family Saga” which concerns Emerson Ngu, a little half-Cambodian, half-Vietnamese boy—and his many descendants—whose parents take him to a socialist agricultural commune on Pallas, second largest of the Belt Asteroids. The rest of Pallas (the asteroid has been has been terraformed) is decidedly not socialist, and we watch him as he escapes, grows up, and struggles for freedom, love, and success.

An aside, here: to one extent or another, these stories are all about “terraformation”, which can be any one of a number of processes designed to change an inhospitable alien world and give it a “shirtsleeve” environment. It’s gotten to be a kind of specialty with me, and, just as they wanted to know if I was an historian after my first novel,The Probability Broach, readers often want to know if I’m a civil engineer. I’m not; I’m a writer.

The next book I wrote in the series was, well, Ceres, which is about Emerson’s great-granddaughter Llyra and her family. She’s a talented athlete who aspires to compete on Earth at twenty times the gravity she was born and grew up in. Going directly there and exerting herself would kill her. Her quest takes her from lower to higher gravity: first to the asteroid Ceres (her father is Chief Engineer of the terraformation project there) where she trains, then to the Moon for a long while, afterward to Mars, and finally to Earth.

Along the way, Llyra—and the rest of her civilization—are forced to confront violent and politically powerful environmentalists who for various evil and stupid reasons are bitterly opposed to space exploration and colonization and not above breaking a few eggs to make their Luddite omelet. The very notion of terraformation drives them absolutely bug-nutty.

While I was writing Ceres it suddenly occurred to me that, as one of the “Children of Heinlein”, it was peculiar (at least) that I had never written a novel set on the Angry Red Planet. So I conceived, and began to outline Ares on the spot, never dreaming that the damn thing would take me sixteen long years to write. Perhaps a bit awkwardly, at first, I fitted it into the series between Pallas and Ceres, because I wanted to meet some of the generations between Emerson and Llyra. Turns out they’re pretty good people.

Without giving too much away (which my wife Cathy says I always do), Ares is about the settlement and terraformation of Mars, while three groups are struggling militarily and politically for control of the desert planet. It gives us glimpses of the ugly political corruption of Earth. It especially concerns a young woman, Julie Segovia, who is, by turns, a kind of numbers runner in New Jersey, an (East) United States Marine Corps officer, a revolutionary of sorts, and a Solar System-famous author of anti-authoritarian children’s’ books. It is probably the sexiest and most romantic book I’ve ever written.

The rest is entirely up to you, dear reader. If Ares sells well, then there will be at least two more books in the Ngu Family Saga, Rosalie’s World, about this civilization’s first extra-solar settlement—on a truly alien planet—and Beautiful Dreamer, which … well, you’ll just have to be there. But I do have a family to feed, and a mortgage to raise. “Don’t applaud,” as the ancient saying goes, “throw money.” You can buy Ares (in a few weeks)—and any of my 35 other books (right now)—through L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise “Free Radical Bookstore”, at the bottom of the front page.

And I’ll be seeing you—on Mars!