• Title: The Mars Imperative
  • Publisher: Shadowrose Publishing
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Words: 102,100
  • Pages: 271
  • ISBN: 978-1890785086
  • Amazon order link: Trade Paperback

 The Mars Imperative is the first book in The Imperative Chronicles. It was published in June, 2007.

The premise of the series is that nearly 200 years from now, mankind is still largely stuck on Earth. The population has grown into the tens of billions of people. Cities have merged into megalopolises of 50 million or more souls. More people mean more buildings, more vehicles, more of everything but natural resources. Raw materials of all kinds are in desperately short supply--iron, copper, aluminum, beryllium, lead, you name it. Oil, gas, and coal are gone, and food consists largely of subsistence-level proteins and kelp. The only way to survive is to mine the solar system short-term and expand to other systems long-term.

But that's easier said than done. The solar system beyond Earth is inhospitable in the extreme. And the stars unfathomably far away.

The Mars Imperative concentrates primarily on the mining and colonizing efforts on Mars.

The second book in the series, released in October 2007, is The Tesserene Imperative.

The only real connection between the characters and events in the two books comes in the final chapter of The Mars Imperative, where the protagonist, James McKie, meets a young man named "Swede" Johansen. Swede goes on to become the protagonist in The Tesserene Imperative. 

After finishing The Mars Imperative, I decided to write a sequel, set four years after the events in The Tesserene Imperative, and fourteen years after The Mars Imperative, which brings together some of the characters from the first two books (including both protagonists) in a new adventure. The  <unnamed> Imperative is about half-written. I've also begun a prequel to the prequel—Book 0?—set in the asteroid belt 23 years before The Mars Imperative.

For more information about The Mars Imperative or my other novels, including book reviews, use the links at left.

(Approximate word count: 104,000)