Image: ID 218650378 | Mars © 3000ad | Dreamstime.com
The day arrived and Harold was up earlier than anyone. He quickly made some sandwiches and put some soda in his thermos before his mom even walked into the kitchen.
“Looks like you’re ready,” she said.
“I can’t wait mom.”
“Okay, I’ll get you some breakfast,” she said.
Harold was eating his breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausage when his dad showed up.
“Good morning son, you ready to go?”
“Yeah, dad,” said Harold.
“Alright, let me get a little breakfast and I’ll drop you off at the bus station on my way to work,” he said.
“Thanks dad.”
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It is Book 1 in a novella trilogy, the second book of which is ready for preorder and the eBook will be released August 20. The third book is almost finished and will be released in eBook format September 20.
I've never written a time travel story because I hadn't found any possible physical support for such a story. Then I found some hints of such support in a popular science article about Einstein-Rosen Bridges. See my posts about extrapolating this science here and here.
The novella (along with my novels Zero Point and MarsX) will be available in the upcoming EPIC Indie Summer Sale for 99 cents which also starts on July 20. (However, I've already lowered the price on these if you want to purchase early, see the EPIC Indie site, here. You'll have to scroll the carousel to find them).
Here is the description:
What began as a teen boy's curiosity, became a physics research project into the time effects of the Einstein-Rosen bridge.
At first, the excitement of the project hid the dangers, even from the experts.
But in time they will become very aware of the dangers.
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
My stories usually begin when I've read about some physics news that piques my interest. So, the narrative is generated from an explication and extrapolation of a science article. However, once I start, sometimes I have to go out and search for a possible physical effect to provide a solution to a problem that the narrative creates.
As I was writing the second novella in The Einstein Nexus, I found myself creating an area (I usually call them bubbles of time, since their effect is sphere shaped) of shifting time which became a danger, because unlike the former bubbles, this one didn't dissipate but grew. It turns out that if two time singularities are created at the same time in close proximity they will warp spacetime just like masses and orbit each other and continue to ever shift time. Who knew? Okay, got a problem to work through.
One obvious solution to stopping this disaster is to separate the time singularities. Separate, they will dissipate. Now the problem as I