Walt Trizna writes about...

“Martian Rebirth”

Dear editors,

When I submitted “Martian Rebirth” I mentioned that I wanted to expand the story into a novel. I read your challenge and wanted to give a little of what happened both before and after this story.

The Martians are not native to that planet. They left their dying planet millions of years before this story began. At that time, the planet resembled Earth. Of course, they drank the water and changed just as the astronauts.

When the new Martians land on Earth, they have only enough prions to infect a small population. But these New Martians have prions circulating in their blood. The more people they infect, the more prions they can harvest.

I have to look into prion chemistry and see how they are replicated. There has to be something in the physiology of the dying Martians in the beginning of the story that inhibits them from manufacturing new prions.

Do the New Martians take over the world, I don’t think so — BUT I’M NOT SURE.

Take care,

Walt Trizna

Copyright © 2007 by Walt Trizna

Hi, Walt...

Very interesting about the Martians! The scenario is vaguely reminiscent of H. Beam Piper’s “time crime” stories. However, Piper has his various parallel time “levels” spring from successive colonization missions that Mars sends to Earth.

Your scenario pushes the colonization even farther back: the original “Martians” were apparently refugees who settled on a “warm Mars” in the early history of our solar system. Unfortunately for them, their luck didn’t hold: Mars cooled and became uninhabitable.

That raises a huge question, of course: Why do the “Martians” — who were once capable of interstellar travel — stagnate and all but die out on Mars until the exploration team arrives from Earth? Why didn’t they move on to Earth, themselves, while there was still time? That’s not a stretch: after all, interplanetary resettlement was, for all practical purposes, their entire history.

In any event, “Martian Rebirth” is by implication a kind of cautionary tale in reverse: science fiction has traditionally taken Earth-like planets for granted, as though space abounded in plums ripe for the plucking.

In reality, our own solar system probably provides a model of the kinds of worlds we can expect to find circling other stars: mostly gas giants and some rocky planets that are hostile, like Venus, or barely survivable, like Mars. Another Earth? I suspect we may have to look far afield. And if we find one, it may already be claimed.

Don