Red Planet Blues

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In February 2004, Hugo Award–winning author Mike Resnick approached me with an offer I couldn’t refuse: write a “science-fictional hard-boiled private-eye novella” for an original anthology he was editing for the Science Fiction Book Club called Down These Dark Spaceways.

That story, “Identity Theft,” went on to win Spain’s Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, which, at 6,000 euros, is the world’s largest cash prize for science-fiction writing. It was also a finalist for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award (“the Aurora”), as well as for the top two awards in the science-fiction field: the World Science Fiction Society’s Hugo Award (SF’s “People’s Choice Award”) and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Nebula Award (SF’s “Academy Award”)—making “Identity Theft” the first (and so far only) original publication of the SFBC ever to be nominated for either of those awards. In a slightly modified form, “Identity Theft” makes up the first ten chapters of this novel.

In 2007, my wife Carolyn and I spent the summer at Berton House, the former home of Canadian historian and author Pierre Berton. One of Canada’s most prestigious writers’ residencies, Berton House is in Dawson City in the Yukon Territory—the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush. Although I’d already established the Great Martian Fossil Rush as the backstory to “Identity Theft,” it was my time in the Yukon—living across the dirt road from Robert Service’s cabin, and just a block from Jack London’s old home—that made me want to really explore the madness and greed that drives stampedes of prospectors. My thanks to the Berton House administrator Elsa Franklin, and to Dan Davidson and Suzanne Saito, who looked after us in Dawson City.

For other help and encouragement, my thanks go to Ted Bleaney, Wayne Brown, David Livingstone Clink, Paddy Forde, Marcel Gagné, James Alan Gardner, Martin H. Greenberg, John Helfers, Doug Herrington, Al Katerinsky, Herb Kauderer, Geoffrey A. Landis, Kirstin Morrell, Kayla Nielsen, Virginia O’Dine, Ian Pedoe, Sherry Peters, and Alan B. Sawyer.

My working title for this book was The Great Martian Fossil Rush, but my American publisher wanted something that played up the noir angle. I asked for suggestions online, and hundreds of possibilities were put forth. Jeffrey Allan Beeler, Nazrat Durand, André Peloquin, and Mike Poole each separately proposed the title we ended up using, Red Planet Blues. My thanks to them, and to the more than one hundred other people who made suggestions. As it happens, the same title was used in 1989 by my great friend Hugo Award–winning writer Allen Steele for a novella he later incorporated into his terrific 1992 Mars novel Labyrinth of Night; I’m using the title with Allen’s kind permission.

Finally, huge thanks, as always, to the Aurora Award–winning poet Carolyn Clink, who helped in countless ways; to my father John A. Sawyer, who encouraged my early interests in both paleontology and other worlds; to Adrienne Kerr at Penguin Group (Canada) in Toronto; and to Ginjer Buchanan at Penguin Group (USA)’s Ace imprint in New York. And, of course, many thanks to my agents Christopher Lotts, Vince Gerardis, and the late Ralph Vicinanza.