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“In the Shadow of Ares” (formerly known around here as “Labyrinth of Night”) is now available for download at Amazon.com:

In 2029, the third exploration mission to Mars vanishes without a trace. Two decades later, the success of human settlement of Mars and the life of a young girl hinge on the secret of what happened to the Ares III mission.

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Twenty years later, Mars is a growing outpost of humanity, and 14-year-old settler Amber Jacobsen is a minor interplanetary celebrity – ‘the First Kid on Mars’.  Pioneering Mars is hard, unglamorous work, though, and Amber secretly wishes she were just an ordinary girl living on Earth.

When her family’s homestead is destroyed in an apparent accident, the Jacobsens relocate to an independent settlement located on the northern fringes of Noctis Labyrinthus, a vast and largely unexplored canyonland.  Their new home promises new opportunities, and Amber looks forward to being just another member of the community. Instead, the other settlers dismiss her as a burdensome child and refuse to accept her as the responsible young adult she has become.

In order to prove the value of her unique knowledge and perspective, Amber vows to uncover the fate of the Ares III mission, whose loss had largely been forgotten in the rush of the Martian settlement boom.  But this seemingly harmless challenge thrusts her into a deadly conflict: those who know the truth will kill to keep it hidden, while those who destroyed her family’s homestead would use the secret to secure their dominance over all of Mars.

In solving the mystery, Amber could destroy everything the Martian settlers have worked to create.

It’s priced at an affordable $6.99, and would make a wonderful Christmas present for the science fiction reader or young adult on your shopping list. Especially if you’re buying them a Kindle or they already own one (remember, you can also download the free Kindle app for various electronic platforms if you/they don’t have a Kindle reader).

While I’m going to be occupied for much of the weekend with writing a business plan and attending Christmas parties, I do expect to get the blog at AresProject.com up and running again in the next few days. We will use that forum to discuss the book, the backstory, etc.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 under Economics, Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, politics, Science Fiction, Settlement, Space Commerce, Writing. Tags: Amber Jacobsen, Ares Project, ebook, In the Shadow of Ares, In the Shadow of Ares, kindle. Comments: 7

Small change in plans: in order to avoid confusion with the twenty-odd other science fiction books set on Mars which use the same name, the book previously known as Labyrinth of Night will now be titled In the Shadow of Ares.

And yes, I’m still struggling to get it ready for Kindle. Almost there…

UPDATE: formatted and uploaded now. Turned out to be a pretty painless process, much to my surprise. Just haggling over what price to set, and then we can publish it.

And before anyone asks, no, the title does not have anything to do with Constellation. Sad to say, we actually had the book half-written and most of the backstory laid out well before NASA applied the name Ares to Mike Griffin’s misbegotten launch vehicles. After I catch up on a few things, I intend this weekend to revamp the book’s website so that we can start giving out tidbits of the backstory and how we came to write the book.

Here’s the cover art:

Bonus points to anyone who guesses where the image is from…

Posted on December 8th, 2010 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Tags: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, In the Shadow of Ares, In the Shadow of Ares, kindle, novel. Comments Off

…that the federal space program isn’t about space anymore (assuming it ever really was):

NASA’s human spaceflight program is ‘adrift’ as budget cuts may doom deal

It’s merely a jobs/votes program.

I saw the same mindset in action when Mike Coffman (CO-6)  and – much, much later – Ed Perlmutter (CO-7) came to reassure us about their efforts to preserve our jobs even at the expense (if need be) of commercial space. To be fair, though, in a subsequent conversation with Rep. Coffman he did sound more amenable to commercial space, and regretted that he wasn’t on a committee with direct influence over that area of the budget. (Perlmutter? Who knows?)

I bet the Utah/ATK delegation will be really proud of their job-saving performance when they cause the entire Orion program to be cancelled.

(An amusing aside: the article cites February 22, 2031 as the launch date for a mission to Mars…which happens to be about six weeks before the launch of the fourth exploration mission to Mars in the backstory to our novel, a launch which includes the hab in which our protagonist grows up.)

Posted on December 1st, 2010 under Constellation, Orion, Space Policy. Tags: ares, ATK, In the Shadow of Ares, Orion. Comments Off

I thought I posted a summary of the novel here, back when we entered it in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. But since I can’t find it in the archives, here’s the description we used for the contest entry:

The world was shocked and saddened by the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters.  But after the memorials, recovery efforts, and detailed investigations were over and the hard lessons were learned, we moved on.

But what if a spacecraft and its crew simply vanished, with no explanation?  What if, years later, you had an opportunity to solve the mystery of this disappearance?  And what if someone else knew what happened – and would do anything to stop you?

This is the challenge facing 14-year-old Amber Jacobsen in “Labyrinth of Night”, a mystery set on frontier Mars.  Amber is an interplanetary celebrity: ‘the First Kid on Mars’…and so far, the only one.  Pioneering on Mars is hardly glamorous, though, and Amber secretly wishes she were an ordinary girl living on Earth.

When their homestead is destroyed in an apparent accident, the Jacobsens relocate to a new settlement located on the northern fringes of Noctis Labyrinthus, a vast and largely unexplored network of canyons.  Their new home promises new opportunities, and Amber looks forward to being accepted as a regular member of the community rather than a celebrity.  Instead, the settlers treat her as a burdensome child and not the responsible young adult she is.

In order to prove herself, Amber vows to uncover the fate of the Ares III mission, which vanished near Noctis Labyrinthus.  As she digs into the disappearance, however, she discovers that those who destroyed her family’s homestead want power over the settlement she now calls home — and ultimately the entire planet.  By solving the mystery, she could hand them the tools to destroy a free and prosperous Mars.

Posted on November 26th, 2010 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Comments: 2

After a minor catastrophe forces the Jacobsen family to move to a new settlement, Amber and her mother get a tour of the place. Having spent her whole young life within the cozy spaces of habs, settlement tunnels, rovers, and suits, Amber finds certain parts of her new environment a bit unnerving at first.

Margolis led them down a set of steps to floor level, then to another large bulkhead door.  Inside the door was the chamber of an  airlock, one large enough to drive a small rover through.

As they entered the airlock into Bubble 1, Margolis muttered something into the small object strapped like a watch to her wrist.  Amber only caught a quick glimpse, but was sure Margolis’ MA was a new Holst Informatics Onyx 3.  She could only hope her new job paid enough for her to buy one of those.

The door behind them swung shut, and the one in front of them immediately opened — it was pressurized on both sides, so there was no need to pump down or suit up here, but the small difference in pressure made her ears pop.  Like the emergency bulkhead at the entrance to Main Street, the airlock was a safety feature against catastrophic depressurization of the bubble above.

Walking up the long ramp into the bubble, Amber thought she knew what to expect.  After all, they had had a greenhouse at home…arguably the prototype for this one.  This one was bigger, of course, but how much different could it be?

She looked up at the narrow slot of sky visible between the walls lining the ramp.  The tint of the translucent membrane overhead gave the sky an alien hue, a pale red-blue, not quite Martian or terrestrial, but somewhere in between.  It was far enough above that she didn’t notice at first that anything was there at all — it just appeared to be a strange-colored sky.

But it wasn’t the size or the color of the dome that made Amber look around, slack-jawed.  As she reached “ground” level, she stepped into a world she had only imagined before, based on pictures, vids, and her parents’ descriptions.  She stopped, astonished.  Is this what Earth is like?

The openness made her stomach knot.  She had no problem with open spaces while out on the surface, suited, but this was very different.  Here she stood unprotected at the edge of a grassy field a hundred meters on a side — larger than any open place she had ever been without a suit.  Worse, there was much, much more volume beyond the end of the ramp, where instead of grass there were long ranks of trees and assorted crops stretching into the distance.

She gulped and squeezed her eyes shut.  The nausea and unease gradually passed.

Looking up again, she could see the sky for what it was:  a multilayered translucent membrane some thirty meters above her, curving down to the waist-high anchorage wall.  Just inside the anchorage was a deep recess where the windows of the residential area below were located.  Construction details  — crisscrossed tension-stay wires, broad light panels, small clusters of sensors here and there — brought the bubble into a manageable but still unsettling scale.

Towards the near end of the bubble, the grassy field was bounded by a concrete trough filled with assorted bushes and flowering plants, sunflowers mostly, carefully arranged and meticulously manicured.  Amber looked at the dark green carpet stretched out in front of her.  “Is it real?”

Margolis giggled. “The grass?  Of course.  Try it out.”

She hesitated.  “I’m not going to hurt it, am I?”

“No,” her mother laughed, giving her a playful nudge forward.

Amber took a few cautious steps. Even through her slippers, the ground felt strange, spongy.  The floor is actually alive! She pulled her slippers off and ran her toes through the soft, slightly moist blades.  Imagine a whole planet like this…so full of life you can’t go anywhere without seeing it, touching it…or stepping on it. She closed her eyes as she walked gingerly into the field, imagining she was on that lush planet, instead of a world carved with great effort from a cold, dead wasteland.  Opening her eyes again, she felt a fleeting twinge of disappointment.  True, the Green was a little spot of paradise in the middle of the barren Martian desert, but no matter how real it looked, it was still only a simulation of the real Earth.  The thought tempered her delight…but only slightly.

Posted on November 12th, 2010 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares, mars, Science Fiction. Comments: 2

For those unfamiliar with the novel, or who may have forgotten the synopsis from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award entry some time back, Labyrinth of Night is a young adult science fiction novel following the struggles of Amber Jacobsen — the first and so far only child on Mars — to prove her value to the other settlers by (among other things) resolving an old and largely forgotten mystery.

In this short excerpt, Amber and her parents are camping out in their beat-up rover, as they travel from their home (one of the old tuna-can habs left behind by the early exploratory missions) to the main settlement, Port Lowell. Amber, having just turned 14 a few days earlier, is finding herself increasingly bored with life on the frontier:

Amber awoke with a start, feeling dangerously exposed under the transparent curve of the rover’s front window.  She had lived all her life surrounded by walls or a suit, seeing the surface only through a small viewport or a helmet visor.  This broad, clear view of the sky always made her feel vulnerable.

She wondered what time it was — just above the horizon was one of the morning stars, which the daily astronomy report said would rise about an hour before the sun.  Dawn was near.

She reached out both hands towards the faintly blue star, touching her wrists together and forming a cup as if to cradle a precious jewel.  “Earth”, she whispered.

(more…)

Posted on October 30th, 2010 under Entertainment, In the Shadow of Ares, Science Fiction. Tags: In the Shadow of Ares, mars, novel, Science Fiction, young adult. Comments Off