Posted: July 04, 2005

P: Let's not waste our reader's time and get straight to the point. Tharsis Books needed a new printing of As It Is On Mars, with minor errors corrected. Readers may want to know why you argued strongly for a revised second edition instead. The story as it was got excellent reviews.

TWC: Three reasons. First, I've spent many years telling students that the world will not fault you for making an honest mistake, because there's nobody alive who's never made one. What the world will fault you for is not fixing the mistake, and instead either denying the mistake, trying to cover it up, or blaming somebody else for it. I had to practice what I preached.

P: If that's your first reason, your second reason is obviously that you made a mistake with Edition One of As It Is On Mars that you felt you had to fix?

TWC: Right. I didn't do Chapter One right.

P: And your third reason?

TWC: As It Is On Mars is Book One in a three novel story. Since both Book Two and Book Three depend on it, the original Book One deserves to be put right in a new revised edition, even if each novel can stand alone. Some of the science in the book, but not a lot, also needed updating. We know a lot more now about the geology of Mars than we did five years ago, thanks to NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission, and the NASA and ESA survey satellites. It's been an exciting period.

P: Some reviewers did fuss a bit about the amount of background material in Chapter One of As It Is On Mars.

TWC: And they were right to. Unlike most other Mars Mission stories, As It Is On Mars begins eight weeks after the NASA mission landed on Mars, on the day the return rocket exploded. It had to, because the story of what happens after that point is so big, there was no room for the story of the mission prior to that point. Now a mission to Mars is no small matter, so I had the problem of how to do an efficient job of explaining the essential history of the mission before the explosion, the foundation for the story, so to speak. And the mission had to be realistic, because scientific realism is an important feature of the story.

P: Most authors would use flashbacks to solve a problem like that.

TWC: I know. But I can't stand flashbacks, and anyway I couldn't see any way to use flashbacks that I could accept.

P: So you solved the problem by having a Congressional hearing on the explosion the next day, with the NASA chief reporting to the Space Committee on the disaster.

TWC: Right. The NASA chief had to report to the Congressional Space Appropriations Committee on what had happened on Mars the previous day, and on the dire predicament the survivors were in--with food for only two weeks but with a seventh lander due to arrive in ten days carrying a supply of food that would save the day if it landed safely.

P: And right before the NASA chief did that, you got him to sneak in a summary report on the history of the mission up to the point of the explosion.

TWC: I did, although I wouldn't say I sneaked it in. But in that way I could argue I had solved the problem without any flashbacks. A history of the NASA mission up to the point of the explosion, especially how the mission related to the competing Japanese mission, was absolutely necessary to get the story off the ground. It was the foundation for the whole story, if you like.

P: And now you think that was wrong.

TWC: No, not that. What was wrong was the impact of the totality of the NASA chief reporting on three separate things in Chapter One: (a) the history of the mission, (b) all that John Erway and Denise Lavoisier, the two survivors, had been through the previous day, and (c) what the outlook for their future was. In total, it was just too much for somebody not familiar with the story. And those three things were told in the wrong order too.

P: But you didn't think it was too much at the time.

TWC: No, I didn't. I did think it was a lot, but not too much. One reviewer even praised it--but only one.

P: But you think now it was too much.

TWC: Yes, I'm convinced of it. I just didn't have the experience back then in telling a story that I have now. I understand now that an author has to be careful not to choke his (or her) readers in the beginning by forcing them to swallow too much story background, or too big a story foundation, all at once. An author should try to get readers to experience events as they occur, instead of asking them to swallow a whole report to Congress on them.

P: Didn't you consider any other solutions to the problem?

TWC: I did, but couldn't see one. At the time, what I did was the best I could come up with.

P: But after the book was published, the light bulb in your head lit up, and you saw a better solution, I suppose?

TWC: No, not after As It Is On Mars was published; not until in 2004, in fact, after I had finished Book Three of the Series, Glory Be To Mars. The old saying that you should never sign off on the first chapter of a book until you have written the last one turned out to be true in this case too. The last chapter of the full story is in Book Three of the Series, and shortly after I had written it, the idea for the correct way to rewrite Chapter One in Book One just popped into my head.

P: Would you say it was an ingeniously clever idea?

TWC: Not at all. Stupidly simple, in fact. And I'm sure any experienced author would have seen it right from the start, and done it right first time.

P: Readers may want to know what this idea is. Could you explain?

TWC: All right. The story starts in the prolog with the mission's return rocket blowing up, at 8:35 in the morning. The old Chapter One then covered the NASA chief's report to the Space Committee next day. The new Chapter One just takes us through the day of the explosion, on Mars, as experienced by John and Denise: how they set off in a rover at 7:30, on their survey trip to the next valley to the west; and what they go through, when they discover they have lost contact with the base and hurry back to a devastated landing site. By the end of the new Chapter One, the reader is familiar with two of the main characters of the story, John and Denise; he or she is also familiar with the landing site layout, with the sheer horror of what has happened, and with the predicament John and Denise are in. And now, that reader has two burning questions: What could have led to this disaster? And what is going to be done about it back on Earth?

P: And you get the answers in the new Chapter Two?

TWC: Some of them. But now the horse is in front of the cart, instead of behind it. The reader is curious about the history of the mission, and is concerned about John and Denise. So in the new Chapter Two, the reader experiences the NASA chief reporting to the Space Committee on these two questions only. The NASA chief also tells the Space Committee about what happened on Mars the previous day, of course. But the reader already knows what happened, because he or she was there with John and Denise, and so that gets dealt with in a sentence or two. As a result, the new Chapter Two, which is really a version of Chapter One from Edition One, is far shorter than in Edition One, and is now a natural part of the flow of the story. Another result is that the new edition has sixteen chapters, one more than the fifteen chapters in the first edition.

P: And you think that's the way the story should have been told originally?

TWC: Yes, if I could have been smart enough to see it. And for what it's worth, I also like the story much better this way myself, and find myself drawn to it, especially when I think of the enormity of the events that are just starting to unfold.

P: And potential readers should be able to see that as well, because unlike back in 2001 when the First Edition of Book One came out, Books Two and Three are now already published.

TWC: Yes, anybody can see now it's the start of something big.

P: And our reviewers also agree with you that the new Chapters One and Two of the Revised Second Edition are a huge improvement. A book should start out well. (Readers can check this out for themselves, to some extent, by reading the first six book pages of the new Chapter One in the excerpt posted for the book .)

TWC: I hope they will.

P: Are there any other improvements you want to mention?

TWC: I improved the writing in a lot of places, without touching the story. I'm a lot more skilled now than I was when I wrote the first edition, and where the writing was substandard I cleaned it up. I also fixed a few very minor technical errors, and made a few minor changes to keep the science, especially the geology, up to date. And there should be very few if any typos.

P: Any science in particular?

TWC: Yes, the answer to the question of whether it's possible to find silica deposits to make glass on Mars. I don't want to get into it here, but it's actually a very important question, not only because making glass is important for the plot of the novel, and for any future settlers on Mars, but because it gets into the heart of the geology of Mars. If Mars had been a long-dead planet that never had any plate tectonics, then it would be covered in heavy black basalt rocks formed from runny basalt lava flows, like on Hawaii or Iceland, and also covered in rust-red basaltic sand formed from worn down basalt rock, which it is, and no granite and so no silica, like quartz, for making glass.

You need melting and re-melting of basalt, which you get on Earth because of plate tectonics, to fractionate small amounts of light-weight silica out of the dark, iron-rich basalt, and concentrate it to form large masses of granite. That's why granite and quartz are common on Earth, as well as basalt.

Five years ago, many geologists thought Mars had been long dead with no quartz possible. I never believed that and assumed in the first edition of "As It Is On Mars" that quartz could be found. The latest data from Mars shows that granite deposits do occur, but nowhere near as commonly as on Earth. That means basalt got recycled (melted and re-melted) on Mars somehow, although the jury is still out on how that happened. This means that Mars had more life in the past than was thought five years ago, and that it should be possible to make glass on Mars. These latest findings are reflected in the book, as non technically as possible, but accurately enough, I hope, to keep the geologists from jumping on it.

P: I see. Wasn't there something about Zen that you improved too?

TWC: Yes, I also inserted an additional explanatory paragraph about Zen in a chapter deep in the book. As It Is On Mars is the only book I know of, fiction or non fiction, that gives a simple, rational explanation of what Zen is all about; that explanation's needed, because Zen is part of the plot. The extra paragraph just improves the explanation.

P: Are you going to write any more Mars stories?

TWC: I've ideas for two more in my head, but right now I don't feel like writing them.

P: Will you write one of them soon?

TWC: Probably not. You see, I've a burning idea for a very different story in my head. It does involve a desert setting, at least in the beginning, but it's set on Earth, in the present time.

P: Not science fiction.

TWC: Only to a very slight degree.

P: Do you think you'll write that one soon?

TWC: I don't know. But if I sit down and write part of the first chapter, I'm finished. I won't be able to stop.

P: One last question. Did you enjoy writing the three Mars stories?

TWC: I certainly did. It was an experience, that's for sure. I feel a lot better about them now too, with the beginning of As It Is On Mars finally done right. Those three stories, each of them very different, are the very best I'm capable of, for better or for worse.

P: Thank you for this.

The conversation is copyrighted, but may be published freely, in whole or in part, by anyone wishing to discuss the novel, or draw attention to it, provided the source (Tharsis Books) is acknowledged, and no attempt is made is misrepresent the opinions expressed--Tharsis Books.