A Toaster on Mars is Darrell Pitt’s new comic SF YA novel set in 2509 in which Agent Blake Carter’s bad day gets exponentially worse when his daughter is kidnapped by his arch nemesis, an evil genius… The Australian author, best known for his YA Jack Mason series, here explains the roots of the adventure…

 

My father was Captain Kirk and my mother was Wonder Woman. Or at least, that’s how it felt as a child of the Seventies, growing up in a quiet seaside town on the East coast of Australia. Most of the other kids loved the beach, surf boards and ogling the girls. I hated the beach, couldn’t ride a surfboard and…well, I ogled the girls too. Being a nerd, my chances of getting lucky with the opposite sex were about the same as me landing on the moon.

Science-fiction got me through my childhood. I distinctly remember running home from a friend’s house because I didn’t want to miss the beginning of Doctor Who. Back then, it was an episodic program with every episode ending on a cliffhanger. The Doctor’s life was usually left hanging in the balance. Deep down inside, I knew he would survive, but it was how he survived that was interesting.

Much of my time was spent in my imagination, but this wasn’t a bad thing. The imagination is a playground with no borders. I had few friends, but the ones I had were important. Of the kids who didn’t like me…well… I didn’t like them either. They weren’t interesting. What did interest me was Star Trek, Space 1999, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Twilight Zone, The Six Million Dollar Man…

The list was endless.

I loved superheroes too. I wasn’t an avid comic collector (we didn’t have the money for them), but they inspired me. What kid didn’t want to be Spider-Man? Or Superman? Or The Flash?

This melting pot of imagination helped me realise that I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to create my own worlds. For many years, I wrote short stories. Some of these were published. Many were not.

I finally moved on to novels. I didn’t submit any of them for publication—I thought the possibility of them being published was too slim—but then the ebook revolution came along and everything changed. I started self-publishing a series of young adult books called the Jack Mason adventures, and they were successful.

How did my latest book, A Toaster on Mars, come into being? It started as a very different book; in fact, it wasn’t a book at all. The original version dates back to around 1987, and I wrote it as the script for a comic book. Mind you, I couldn’t draw, and didn’t know anyone who could, and so it languished in a drawer for decades. Additionally, it wasn’t even a humorous novel; it was a serious take on future cops fighting crime.

A few years ago I dug out the script again. This time it transitioned into a book, and then I added humour. So what did I do with it? I stuck it back into the drawer again, and went back to writing the Jack Mason adventures. Toaster was so different that I doubted it would ever see the light of day.

What resurrected it from the drawer was a chance meeting while I was completing a Degree in Creative Writing. A teacher offered to look at one of my books. Dusting off Toaster yet again, I handed it to her to read. Months passed. I forgot all about her, and then a call came from out of the blue.

Did she like the book? No. Did she love it? Yes! She asked if she could show it to a publisher. They contacted me and asked me in for a meeting. It didn’t know what to expect from that meeting. What I didn’t expect was what I got—an eight-book publishing deal.

The book that lived for so long in  the darkness of a drawer is finally bathing in the light of the world. It’s a satisfying feeling. This strange, offbeat and bizarre humorous science-fiction novel about a washed up cop and his cyborg partner has finally come to life.

Some births take a long time, but they’re worth the wait.

 

A Toaster on Mars by Darrell Pitt is out now, published by Text Publishing, price £8.99 in paperback original