Old Mars

A writer whose work crosses several mediums and genres, Melinda M. Snodgrass was story editor on Star Trek: The Next Generation and wrote the award-nominated “Measure of a Man,” among other episodes. She worked on Reasonable Doubts, and was a writer/producer on The Profiler. She has written a number of SF novels, and was one of the cocreators of the long-running Wild Card series, for which she has also written and edited, and she has delivered a Wild Card movie to Universal Pictures. Her novels include The Edge of Reason and The Edge of Ruin, and she has just delivered the third book in that series. She also penned the Circuit trilogy, and Queen’s Gambit Declined. Her most recent novels are This Case Is Gonna Kill Me and Box Office Poison, written under the pseudonym Phillipa Bornikova.

This story shows that, even on Mars, family can be a strength and a refuge, and it can also be a claustrophobic, smothering trap—or, sometimes, both at once.