Tim Major’s new novella, Universal Language, is out now from NewCon, and in this short post, Major takes a lookback at our fascination with the Red Planet.

What is it with Mars? Long before the Apollo missions obliterated the Moon’s mystique, we had collectively settled upon the Red Planet as a site for our projected imaginations. In 1877, when Giovanni Schiaparelli observed long, straight lines on the surface of Mars and referred to them as channels, and then the Italian word canali was mistranslated into English as canals, it made immediate sense to everybody that Martians might be fastidious constructors, and that human society might be reflected on this remote planet. Edgar Rice Burroughs took Schiaparelli’s garbled concept and ran with it, creating citadels for his hero John Carter to run around in. Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet featured teen students skating home on the frozen Martian canals.

Ray Bradbury’s sequence of stories which were later collected as The Martian Chronicles explored this sense of projected nostalgia. His vision of the Mars landscape may have been as barren a wasteland as several of his predecessors’, but his emphasis remained squarely upon the human colonists washing up on the planet’s shores. Creating an unbreakable link between the colonists’ old and new lives, he allowed his characters to create settlements barely distinguishable from the ones in which they grew up. As with 17th-century British colonists purloining the names of English villages to christen their grand new settlements in America, Bradbury made clear that this New World was simply an attempt to recreate the Old World afresh, and that no amount of distance or new discoveries could eclipse colonists’ nostalgia for their childhoods, or allow them to flee the ghosts that haunted them.

It’s specifically Bradbury’s vision that has inspired my own Mars stories. I’ve enjoyed the freedom to superimpose my own nostalgia for childhood, and my take on the foibles of British society, onto ragtag communities of Mars colonists. Despite the vast ‘trawler’ bases scouring the Martian deserts, the sand-sculptor robots and the servile ‘aye-aye’ droids, the emphasis has been squarely on the humans, their relationships and their thwarted ambitions.

My novella Universal Language is actually a murder mystery; its subtitle is The Airlocked Room Mystery. Detective Abbey Oma arrives at a dilapidated Martian trawler base determined to solve a murder, yet her sole suspect is an aye-aye robot whose Asimovian protocols would make murder impossible, and yet the circumstances in which the body was discovered – in a room not only locked but also airlocked – precludes human culprits, too. The mishmash of genres allowed me to channel (no pun intended) other influences than just Ray Bradbury, including devious mysteries by the likes of John Dickson Carr, G. K. Chesterton and Maurice LeBlanc. It turned out that an isolated Martian community provides an ideal setting for a whodunnit, providing a fixed cast of suspects, each with their defined roles, rather like an intergalactic game of Cluedo… which is another good idea, come to think of it.

Universal Language is out now from NewCon Press