On Finding Life on Mars, or: Bringing Indigeneity to the 23rd Century

"His name is Atlas, and he is dying."

“His name is Atlas, and he is dying.”

They Colonized Mars is my debut science fiction/horror short story, a passion project that’s been taking off better than I expected it to, in all honesty -- it’s something very personal to me, exploring intersections of race, queerness, and disability, set against a backdrop of colonial violence; a world not made for everyone, which one nonetheless is forced to attempt assimilation into.

We follow our protagonist Atlas, a half-Martian, half-Human who works stacking crates in a warehouse on a colonized Mars, as he finds affection for the surveillance robot assigned to “supervise” him, recognizing their shared position under capitalistic exploitation. He decides to take it to a drag bar.

I draw a lot from my own experiences as a mixed Native American person, happening to also be transgender/two-spirit, and how white-Western gender roles conflict with my own cultural ideas of gender expression (the story opens with Atlas, standing over a sink, cutting his hair along with highly sensitive tendrils that would mark him as recognizably alien were they to grow long enough to be visible.) Living in the American South, I find solace and community in the local drag scene, an underground, very DIY space for gender-bending in dollar store sequins and drugstore perfume. There’s a sort of magical, transformative feeling to it that I aim to capture in my writing, contrasted against the bleakness of mundane evil in everyday life and intergenerational trauma. Mars was first colonized about 200 years before Atlas was born, but he still carries the weight of grief for this world’s ongoing destruction in the name of profit.

Whenever I talk about this project, I find myself trying to explain how all of these threads are connected, because they’re inseparable in my own life, but those who aren’t as familiar with these systems’ functions tend not to see it as easily -- or, people have a tendency to only see what personally affects them, without recognizing the larger structures of cis-patriarchy and imperialism... But that’s another essay unto itself.

The disability angle is woven through the way labor physically wears on the body, especially for those with genetic predispositions or affected by environmental racism; Atlas, as a Martian, is adapted to Mars’ lower gravity, which has been disrupted by artificial gravity generators, making the planet more hospitable to Humans while actively hostile to its original inhabitants. Atlas wears hydraulic joint braces, supporting his arms and legs, a more futuristic version of the braces and compression sleeves I have to wear to keep my own bones in place. When I started working on They Colonized Mars, I already needed to use a cane, but I didn’t have one yet, and this is reflected in Atlas’ character. His body feels heavy, painful under its own weight, while he continues forcing himself through it.

I draw inspiration from classic sci-fi, especially 1960s era, at the crossroads of the civil rights movement and space race. It’s a fascinating point in time for me, and the sociopolitical climate is heavily reflected in its science fiction; everyone was thinking about the future. This future was also 50 years ago now, and its ideas of progress have either stayed ahead of where we are now, or we’ve already surpassed them. In particular, I find a certain colonial undercurrent in space exploration -- mirroring ideas of exploring faraway lands, with “exotic” people -- that goes largely unacknowledged. What does it mean to boldly go where no man has gone before, when these worlds are already inhabited? This question is at the heart of my Martianverse series (spoiler alert, it will be a series; I’m already working on more stories set in the same world), and the idea of seeing this from the aliens’ perspective.

Additionally, I’m inspired by the surreal and absurd; think David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I also have a somewhat inexplicable fascination with the city of Chicago, which I’m not from, but I’ve visited twice -- I find it texturally interesting, the blend of shiny, “new” skyscrapers, juxtaposed with old brick buildings and rusty train tracks. This is where a lot of aesthetic choices for my worldbuilding come from, a plasticky-smooth futurism in contrast with the grit and sand. This reflects something in the themes I did very intentionally, that the world presented here isn’t flatly dystopian, but a reflection of our own present day. It would be easy to make everything plainly worse than it is now, but I see a future with a functional public transit system, which is still upheld by brutalizing Indigenous peoples and the working class.

Early on in development, circa 2021, my plan was to have Atlas be a sort of space hero figure, but as I started drafting an outline for how he would single-handedly overthrow the government and demolish capitalism and so on, I got stuck until I realized he just... couldn’t. Realistically, none of this works like that. I don’t want to be a doomer about it, it’s important that there is still joy to be found in this world, but as Atlas shifts into more of a would-be revolutionary, we find a more grounded look at life on Mars and a story that I -- personally -- find more compelling.

Research for They Colonized Mars brought me to some interesting places, like articles about what Martian sunsets look like through their yellowish atmosphere (it’s blue, by the way, a really striking visual against the orange rocks), and the Wikipedia page for “evisceration.” Without spoiling too much, I found myself reading up on factory farming, particularly techniques for animal slaughter on an industrial scale, which comes back around to Chicago in its infamous 20th century meatpacking district. I wouldn’t consider myself an especially squeamish person, but I have some very specific phobias, as well as a currently undiagnosed condition causing bouts of low blood pressure, which culminated in very nearly passing out, on the toilet, Elvis-style, around Christmas of 2024, a few months before I’d finish writing They Colonized Mars, as I was making sure I’d get some details accurate towards the end. I also learned there’s not one, but multiple, layers of membrane holding the organs in the abdominal cavity, something not often discussed but relevant to my interests.

Currently, my main big project I’m working on is a part 2 to They Colonized Mars, titled Extraterrestrial Nullius, a play on “terra nullius,” the Latin for “no man’s land.” I’ve been calling it a cyber-noir, playing with cyberpunk and film noir genre conventions, and exploring grief through murder mystery a la Twin Peaks. It will be considerably longer than They Colonized Mars, I’m roughly estimating around novel-length, and with this extra breathing room I’ll be able to dig into it all more thoroughly, a sort of post-mortem on the first story. Unfortunately, due to growing censorship issues, I’ve had to change a few scenes from my original vision, so it seems you get no bug sex and my time spent looking up anatomical diagrams of parasitoid wasp ovipositors is for naught under fascism. I could, of course, find a website that would take it, but not if I want to get paid. You see my dilemma.

Despite all of that, though, you can still find my work at tlirs.itch.io or tlirswriting on tumblr. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you there!