Martian Blood in BIS’s Odyssey

Where do stories come from?

With my Noctilucents young adult science fiction series, the answer was it came from a picture in my head of a blimp flying across the surface of Mars, with a teenage boy at the controls. It raised all sorts of questions. Who was he? What was he doing on Mars? Why was he flying a blimp not something futuristic like a spacecraft? Where was he traveling from and to?

Answers came flooding, a whole story, people, places, ideas, motivations, threats, deceptions, conflicts, histories and two further questions:
• Why do we want to go into space when it’s such a challenging environment for humans?
• How will humanity respond to artificial intelligences that are smarter than us?

More on the background to Noctilucents can be found in an article I wrote for the British Interplanetary Society's November issue of Odyssey magazine....