Image: ID 218650378 | Mars © 3000ad | Dreamstime.com
This story was finished a year ago last June. It seems long ago now. I had just finished my Cislunar Series collection (June of 2023), Lunar Series collection (October of 2024), and the novel L4 Station (February of 2025). All are part of my Remembered Earth Universe, which was intended to chronicle the near-future expansion of humanity into the Solar System. After the Moon, Mars was the next obvious step, and the story began as just another settling of Mars story. But because of rapidly advancing AI, which was on my mind at the time, super-intelligence became a big part of the story. Surprisingly, such super-intelligent AI provided the impetus for rapid settlement.
Another contributor to the story was my reading of the book The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps by Marshall T. Savage. In the book he develops several technologies for the support of Space Habitats and the space habitat of the book, Solaria, is named from the book and uses some of those technologies. Once the settlement of Mars was well along, this seemed to be an ample project for my three protagonists to pivot to.
The antimatter starship that the AIs are credited with developing was going to be another point of focus in the book, I bought the book Mirror Matter by Dr. Robert Forward, for the research to build it credibly. But in the end, I only used a bit of the technology in that book. I hope to revisit the creation of such a starship in the future.
So, here is my story of the settlement of Mars, not as I originally intended, but told as a tall tale.
“The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.”
― Elon Musk