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Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

This week I am putting the final touches on a science fiction novel I call Ares. It is the middle volume of the “Ngu Family Trilogy”, the first and third parts of which are already in print and available as Pallas and Ceres. “Ares”, you may know, is the Greek name for Mars. I has taken me seventeen years, working off and on, to write this book.

Ares concerns itself with three very different groups of human beings landing on, settling, and beginning the terraformation of the “Angry Red Planet”. Terraformation is a process of converting a previously hostile celestial body, like Mars, the Moon, or an asteroid like Pallas or Ceres, so that it has a habitable “shirt-sleeve” environment. This is the kind of gigantic project of which Humankind will be capable in the future. It can be accomplished several different ways, which I have explored in the Ngu Family stories and other books. Ares features in detail yet another way to terraform a world—biologically.

The question remains, why did I write this particular novel at this particular time? The answer is: Robert Anson Heinlein, whom I think of as the “Old Man”, which is what you call the Captain of your ship, or the Admiral of your fleet. I think I can legitimately call myself one of “Heinlein’s Children” and very few individuals who read my work would challenge my right to do that. I started reading his books when I was eleven, in Sixth Grade, only read other people’s works (Asimov, Anderson) because more Heinlein was not available, and finally started writing for exactly the same reason. I came to appreciate Heinlein’s outlook and share his values.

It helped a lot that I was also a big John Wayne fan. I would later add Jeff Cooper to my personal trinity. I don’t just suffer “toxic masculinity”, I am toxic masculinity. Get used to it.

So it suddenly struck me as rather odd that, as a Child of Heinlein—he wrote many stories and books involving Mars and Martians—I had never followed his example, probably because my literary emphasis has always been more political than his was. My lovely wife Cathy says that what I write (Now how can I punctuate this properly?) is POLITICAL SCIENCE fiction. Call it whatever you like, Ares is my book for Heinlein about Mars.

Second, I wanted to say something about the current anti-industrial, anti-progress, anti-human movement that has festered within the guts of our civilization, like a malignant cancer. Today, their excuse for attempting to halt the wheels of progress is Global Warming, an article of malign religious faith, and everybody’s mythical “carbon footprint”. Tomorrow it will be something else—in Ceres it is the ridiculous claim that importing materials to Earth from the rest of the Solar System will slow the rotation of the planet’s crust, relative to the mantle and core, wrinkle and buckle it, and cause titanic super earthquakes, exterminating the human race. The day after that, it will be something else entirely—maybe toxic masculinity—imagine the environmentalists’ hysterical reaction to the terraformation of the entire planet Mars.

But there was yet another reason I wanted to write Ares, and it will give you an idea of the way a novelist’s demented mind operates. There had blossomed, completely unbidden in my brain, an action scene in which two people, a young man and woman, find themselves fighting a duel to the death with enormous knives, he with a foot-long “Gurkha knife” or kukri, she with a 17” antique Confederate “D-guard” Bowie. Instead of killing each other, they fall in love. That scene haunted my consciousness for seventeen years, and now it’s finally down on “paper”.

I don’t know when Ares will be published, exactly, possibly in a few weeks. My esteemed publisher is Mr. Shahid Mahmud of Arc Manor Books. [email protected] Write to him and ask him—but be nice. Be polite. Don’t give this good man a hard time; he’s pedaling as hard as he can. Without significant promotion or distribution, I’m not selling very well for him right now, and I feel deeply ashamed of that. What would the Old Man think? So the rest is up to you. If you appreciate my work, or you think it’s important, understand that it’s what I do for a living. It’s all I do for a living. Buy my books and spread the word. My family will thank you.