Mars Fever is a speculative literary fiction about the sudden arrival of extraterrestrials on planet Mars.
For reasons unknown, they choose to occupy the Red Planet and show no interest in Earth or its inhabitants. Their arrival and their decision to practically “ghost” us ignite a terrible itch for knowing, unleashing a chaos of theories that unsettle everyone on Earth, including the authorities, who must decide how to respond to the mysterious occupation of their neighbouring planet.
The novel explores geopolitical themes and plays with concepts of territory versus map, cosmic borders, and the security dilemma. It is written in two main parts. The first, The Inward Gaze, includes twenty-three chapters, each examining how the discovery affects the lives of strangers across various parts of Earth. The second, At Lagrange Point, follows five astronauts sent to Mars on a diplomatic mission to negotiate with the entities on Mars.
For reasons unknown, they choose to occupy the Red Planet and show no interest in Earth or its inhabitants. Their arrival and their decision to practically “ghost” us ignite a terrible itch for knowing, unleashing a chaos of theories that unsettle everyone on Earth, including the authorities, who must decide how to respond to the mysterious occupation of their neighbouring planet.
The novel explores geopolitical themes and plays with concepts of territory versus map, cosmic borders, and the security dilemma. It is written in two main parts. The first, The Inward Gaze, includes twenty-three chapters, each examining how the discovery affects the lives of strangers across various parts of Earth. The second, At Lagrange Point, follows five astronauts sent to Mars on a diplomatic mission to negotiate with the entities on Mars.
An Excerpt
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Her pupils were running left and right after what was written on the teleprompter. She had to practice reading the full text at least twice before they went live to ensure she wouldn’t mispronounce anything, and that was the network’s guideline for all the news anchors, even the seniors like hers, who over time had grown so accustomed to the neutral intonation that they could pronounce the names of the smallest islands of Franz Josef without the tiniest slur or dropped syllable. And yet tonight, despite the large, thick white font at size 78, she couldn’t figure out how to read those lines. The problem was, she wanted to add a little "touch" to it, but couldn’t quite decide how much was just enough. The teleprompter displayed:
"Undeniable evidence of extraterrestrial activity on planet Mars. NASA confirms that our neighbouring planet is being occupied."
And that’s where she had a problem: occupied. She thought colonised was the right word. In her view, Mars had been colonised by aliens, plain and simple. But the editorial team couldn’t agree on a term, arguing that you can’t call it colonisation—or even occupation—if no one had lived there before. They wanted to use a safe, benign word like “terraformed” or “settled,” even though CNN, in their report, simply called it “the colonisation of Mars by aliens.” They dropped the whole “occupation” and “extraterrestrial” bullshit, and their report was on display on everyone’s phone. But the network she worked for didn’t want to become what CNN had become; They wanted to be a prestigious and unbiased news channel, like the BBC once was, long before its controversial coverage of the Battle of Orgreave in the ’80s, long before it ever had to apologise for anything. Back when it was a concrete, anonymous voice, a voice of God: just and holy. There was half an hour until 8 p.m., and she could still change things. The studio engineers were adjusting the three broadcasting cameras in front of her, mounted on a massive tripod that made them look identical to the Bofors 57mm Naval Automatic Gun, designed for firing at drones and low-flying jets. The news anchor was the final stop in the long chain of this syndicate, where daily matters were slaughtered, cut, processed, packaged, labelled, and delivered to the consumers. She liked to think she had a say, that she was more than just the mouth on air. So naturally she chewed on it a bit more, looking at it from different perspectives, trying to be what the Pulitzer crowd calls an “impartial journalist,” even though the Bofors 57mm was pointed at her in a rather threatening way.
It was true that Mars was uninhabited at the time, but Earth had plans to reach it by 2070 and terraform it by the next century. To insist on calling the alien invasion of Mars an act of “colonisation” was to acknowledge that our neighbouring planet already belonged to us, just like Puerto Rico. The problem was, we hadn't left dibs on it. We kind of had, but only in our minds and among ourselves. The aliens never cared enough to come and read our Outer Space Treaty of 1967 or the Artemis Accords. We hadn’t left a cosmic dib on Mars, something obvious and visible to other life forms. But neither had these dumb aliens, she thought to herself, although she wasn’t really sure if they were dumb. No one knew much about them, other than a handful of poor-quality photos of their structures. There was no clear footage of what they actually looked like. What if they were so strong and advanced that they didn’t need to leave dibs on things? She tried to see it from their perspective, that they would just come and take what they wanted. After all, leaving dibs is a sign of weakness. It’s almost like begging for things, hoping that everyone would respect the childish first-come, first-served rule...