Hello and welcome to today’s Track of Words Author Interview, where this time I’m lucky enough to have been able to chat to the fantastic Jane Killick about her novel In the Shadow of Deimos, the first Terraforming Mars novel from Aconyte Books. If you like a good adventure story set on the red planet, with competing corporations, crashed asteroids and all the usual dangers of life on Mars, then this is definitely worth checking out. It’s out now as a global ebook, with the US paperback coming later this month and the UK paperback following in November.
Without further ado then, let’s get straight on with the interview.
Track of Words: To begin with, could you give us an overview of what In the Shadow of Deimos is about?
Jane Killick: It’s about an asteroid crash that goes wrong on Mars, and the two people caught up in the fallout from that. One of them is investigating why it went wrong, while the other ends up being in a position to accidentally discover that maybe this accident is not necessarily an accident…
ToW: The terraforming part of Terraforming Mars is particularly cool in this book – could you talk a bit about the setting for the book, and how the terraforming works?
JK: The game Terraforming Mars is all about corporations competing over Mars, which is quite relevant today! Right now we’ve got SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, so it’s not NASA any more doing these amazing things with space travel, it’s the corporations with the money. The game itself is set in 2315, when the World Government made its terraforming announcement and invited all the corporations to Mars. I’ve set the book a year later in 2316, when migrant workers are starting to arrive on Mars from Earth.
The concept is all about taking a small, cold, inhospitable world, where there’s barely any atmosphere – you certainly can’t breathe, as there’s less than 1% oxygen in the atmosphere – and turning it into something where humans can live. Where there’s water on the surface, where there’s oxygen in the atmosphere, where it’s warm enough, where the radiation is reduced. And for the people who want to move out into the solar system, Mars is kind of like the next big step. Because way back in its history Mars used to be warmer, it used to have more of an atmosphere. But gradually, that dissipated over the years.
So the idea is to revert Mars into more of an Earth-like world. And the characters in this story are just playing a small part in that, because it’s something that’s going to take hundreds of years to do. It’s not something you can do in a character’s lifetime, which is why I’ve tried to provide just a little bit of a snapshot of the terraforming process seen through the eyes of these people.
The specific idea here is that if you bombard the planet with asteroids, it will heat up the bedrock and that will make the planet hotter. And we need the planet hotter, because at the moment, even around the equator where it’s warmer, it’s an average temperature of minus 30 degrees Celsius. So pretty cold, yeah. In the book, the guy who’s in charge of crashing these asteroids on Mars – Bard Hunter – is the head of one of the big corporations. He really likes to do it where everyone can see, to make a big impact – rather than on the other side of the planet where it’s out of the way – but in this case it goes wrong, the asteroid splits in two and crashes, and kills someone.
ToW: Without spoiling anything, who are the main characters and what do we need to know about them?
JK: The book begins with the main character, Luka, who arrives on Mars as a migrant worker from Earth. I wanted somebody who was new to Mars, so everything is new to him. He’s seeing the planet afresh, and everything is fresh to him as we get to explore Mars from his perspective. He ends up taking the job vacated by the man who died in the asteroid crash, and then he starts to find out a little bit more about that guy. And things sort of spiral from there…
The other character, Julie, is the one that carries out the investigation, digging into the truth behind this asteroid crash. She’s been on Mars a long time, in charge of the United Nations Mars Initiative (UNMI), an organisation that basically ran Mars and began terraforming, but wasn’t going so great. The world government then announced a new terraforming project, getting corporations onto the planet to spearhead the terraforming. The UNMI still exists, but Julie’s power has been particularly undermined.
ToW: I thought it was interesting that Luka starts the book as an indentured worker, only to quickly end up in a position of greater responsibility that isn’t really what he wanted. Was that an intentional idea, to get the reader thinking in one direction only to take it somewhere else?
JK: No, but I like the twist! Thank you for adding greater depth to my book! With Luka, I wanted him to have a past and a reason for coming to Mars. His family has been killed in an industrial accident on Earth so he wants to get away and move on, because otherwise the grief is kind of overwhelming. The industrial accident is based loosely on the Bhopal disaster in India [in 1984], which was just absolutely horrific, and a lot of people died. There was a lot of corruption surrounding that, and people got taken to court.
The job Luka’s taken on Mars is going to be very physical so he hopes he’s going to be working all day tiring himself out, and hopefully that will just take everything out of his head. But his job before he came to Mars was something a bit more intellectual, and when this other man dies, he ends up being moved into a job similar to what he’d done on Earth. Really I just wanted him in a position where he had had access to things.
ToW: Were you already a fan of Terraforming Mars before you started working on the novel?
JK: I knew about the game, but I wasn’t as familiar as I’d have liked. I’ve got friends who love to play it – one of my best friends has got every expansion, all the proper sleeves to put the cards in and the big box to put everything in, and plays it all the time. But I had to do a lot of research. My background is in science fiction, and I have a layperson’s interest in the science behind the game, so I knew the rough details and then added to that with research.
I got the game and spread it out over the table, watched some YouTube videos, and basically just immersed myself in the game. And did it that way knowing that loads of people I know play it and love it!
ToW: What sort of sci-fi story would you say this is? Are we talking hard SF, a straight-up adventure story, more of a mystery…?
JK: I think it’s basically an adventure and a mystery. The science is there, but it doesn’t dominate. You know, I’m a journalist and a writer, I’m not a scientist. So if you’re in it for the science, it’s there…but if you’re not so bothered, the science is basically the backdrop. The editors wanted drama, and jeopardy, so it’s definitely what I wanted to put in there rather than anything cerebral, or lots of technobabble or anything like that.
ToW: With that in mind, where did this specific story come from? Of all the Terraforming Mars stories you might have written, what made you choose this one?
JK: Well the cards in the game show all the different things you can do, but the most dramatic of them is that you can crash asteroids into Mars! But obviously, if you crash a big rock onto a planet, that can potentially do some damage, so that’s where the core of the idea came from. And the other thing is that some years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, I wrote a little short story about somebody on Mars whose wife had died. They were out on the surface of Mars and became low on oxygen, and they started hallucinating their dead wife. That image really, really stuck with me, and I just thought it was a great background for Luka to have.
So those things were the initial inspirations, and everything else kind of came from that. And as I mentioned, the United Nations Mars Initiative – UNMI – just seemed really interesting, the idea that one minute they were in charge, and now they’re not. That gave a good hook for Julie – as the person in charge of that corporation – to have, because I knew that the editors were really keen to avoid always focusing on the people in charge, or the spaceship captain. They wanted to focus on people who are more relatable, further down the chain. But the issue is, the further down the chain you go in a story about Terraforming Mars, the further away you get from what’s actually going on in the terraforming. And because it was related to the game, I still had to bring some of that in.
So I think it works to have one character who is relatively low (i.e. Luka) and one relatively high, but who is still buffeted by other people who are now in charge. So those are the dynamics I wanted to go for. And then as soon as I decided that this asteroid crash had gone wrong and killed someone, it was then a case of building in the mystery and the adventure of why that happened. And also making sure I looked at all the things that could go wrong on Mars – which is quite a lot – and tried to build those in.
ToW: The idea of Mars – and the question of whether it holds (or held) life – has always been popular in science fiction; can you tell us a bit about some of the influences you drew upon while writing this, outside of the game itself?
JK: Well, it’s quite well known that the people who created the game are very keen on the big fans of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, which is Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. If you read the introduction to how to play the game, it talks about imagining there are three players playing this game: Kim, Stanley and Robinson! So the influence is quite clear there. I had read Red Mars ages ago but completely forgotten it, but basically I tried to steer clear of everything like that. Although I did immerse myself in watching a lot of stuff on the TV when I was originally setting up – I rewatched The Martian, which is a brilliant film but of no help whatsoever in writing the book! Although it did allow me to pretend I was working for a couple of hours, which is amazing!
Really I just wanted to get the feel of what could happen and immerse myself in the world, and then I read around the subject of terraforming. After that, if I needed to know something I just Googled it – like ‘what does it look like on the top of Olympus Mons?’ Actually, there’s a video on YouTube where someone has taken all the mapping that has been done, and shown what Olympus Mons might be like, so you can actually see it, which is amazing! It’s a double edged sword though. Resources like that are fantastic, but people are working on new ideas all the time and the danger is that in three years, the science will have changed. So you just have to kind of put that aside a little bit. You can spend your whole life doing the research because there’s so much stuff out there, but you get to the point where you have to stop. Otherwise, you know, I’d still be doing it now!
ToW: What do you hope readers will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
JK: I just want people to have fun reading the book, you know? That’s kind of it really. I’m just interested in writing a good story, something that I’m happy to put my name on. I try not to think of any of these bigger things, because they’re not in my control, really. Although I did want to keep the book exciting and keep it a little bit real, so that it feels like something that might actually happen.
ToW: Is this a standalone novel, or do you have more plans for more Terraforming Mars stories to come?
JK: There are three books planned, although In the Shadow of Deimos is basically a standalone novel. When you play the game, each game round represents a whole generation, because all the things you can do – planting forests, crashing asteroids and so on – take a really long time! So the first book is about one generation of characters, with the Luka and Julie storyline, while the next book will be several generations on, as the terraforming process has progressed. I’m currently working on the outline for the second book, which will have new characters with just a few names referenced from the first book. Then the third book will be even further on.
ToW: Can you tell us anything about what else you’ve got coming out or recently released, or what you’re working on at the moment?
JK: If you want to go and find out about my other books, it’s janekillick.com – if you go to janekillick.com/freebies, you can download the first books in two series. One is a ‘teenagers with special powers’ series called The Perceivers, and the other one is a kind of a space adventure with a little bit of romance in it called The Freelancer series. Aconyte asked me if I wanted to do anything else, but I said “let’s just do Mars first!” I’ll try and work on some other projects around that, and then we’ll see what happens.
ToW: Finally, how do you think you would get on if you joined an expedition to Mars?
JK: Awfully! I’m not very good with foreign lands and foreign cultures, so if I can’t cope with bartering over prices in shops, how am I going to cope with not being able to go make myself a cup of tea when I need it? You know, where’s the gravity gone? I’d just be hopeless. When I was 13 I thought it might be amazing to go up into space and have all these amazing adventures, and go to the moon and go to Mars…but I like my home comforts now. Sorry to be boring. As a writer, I can stay in my office and I write about these interesting things rather than, I don’t know, go mountain climbing…which would be healthier, but it’s not for me.
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Jane Killick is an author and journalist who juggles working for BBC Radio with a lifelong passion for science fiction. Alongside several series of original SF novels, she has also written numerous behind the scenes books, including Stasis Leaked Complete, a guide to TV show Red Dwarf, and a series on Babylon 5.
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Thanks so much to Jane for taking the time to chat to me for this interview, and for giving us the lowdown on this first Terraforming Mars novel from Aconyte Books! In the Shadow of Deimos is out now as a global ebook, while the US paperback is due out on the 28th September and the UK paperback on the 11th November.
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