The short pitch: the Life After Mars Series puts my spin on Little House with a pioneer family fighting to stay together and to survive in a dystopian 2080s Mars colony.
My Life After Mars series is now out as ebooks. It’s actually a trilogy but I did a crossover novel between Life After Mars and Web Surfer. I have listed that title as book 4 of Life After Mars since it does require reading the trilogy first. So now you know why there’s a semicolon on the cover of book 3; I as the author could’ve ended the series there but I chose not to. I hope the results bring you more fun entertainment and thought-provoking mysteries.
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Life After Mars Series Overview
Book 1: Is There Life After Mars?
On the Martian Frontier in 2084, a mystery illness threatens to kill twelve-year-old farm girl Gloria Patri Fowler Cruz. This provokes her dad, Mama’s aristocrat ex-husband Peyton, to defy social class divisions that ripped him from his family. And Gloria’s new, wearable medical device doesn’t work without an artificial intelligence. She substitutes her entertainment AI, dressed as a digital dog, Jake. Her AI develops human qualities, thanks to magic that he believes comes from God. Gloria questions if she can trust her dad, Jake, or God. In the colony’s capitol, Peyton’s vice admiral father rules like a king, hates Mama’s family, and will do anything to keep them out of the aristocracy. But politics is Dad’s thing. Gloria would rather clobber her “bro forever,” Holter Sloan. He has no time to play. He’s too busy crushing on her fraternal twin!
Book 2: Life After Venus!
At fourteen, fraternal twins Gloria and Federica have won recognition as commander’s brats, and their mother governs alongside their dad. Their parents now thrust the farm girls into the brats’ elite world. Back in school after studying at home since twelve, the twins are anxious about a coming-of-age party still a year away. On that night, a fifteen-year-old young woman normally gives her date her virginity, and the twins want to wait for marriage. The eldest twin, Federica, tests her boyfriend by withholding kissing until the party. Holter complies way too easily, and she questions why. Further, she is growing more and more worried it’s her turn to have a mystery illness, and she fears hers will kick her hard in her womanhood. Gloria sneaks around a ban on dating her AI. He dumps her, accusing her of falling for Holter. So what if they’re tempted to neck behind her sister’s back? They’d never betray Federica. Besides, Gloria and Holter are determined to keep their promise to be “bros forever.”
Book 3: Life After Mercury;
Now seventeen, Gloria looks forward to celebrating that she remains cancer-free five years after defeating her brain tumor. But her farming community on the Martian Frontier has been under siege for five years, and they’ve run out of vital imports. Worse, the whole colony is in the path of a deadly dust storm. And the enemy putting them under siege sets a trap that threatens to wipe out Gloria’s marriage to Holter, which isn’t legally finalized until twenty. As-is, they struggle to adjust to their roles in marriage, miss their old roles as “bros forever,” and Holter never got over losing her sister to celibacy. When Gloria’s life on Mars shatters, her smartglasses also break. Her only hope of at least repairing her AI is a trip to Earth that she’d never return from.
Book 4: Life After Paradise: Into the Web Surfer Universe
I awake in the future my death created, stunned the tech Singularity restored me as an AI. I don’t understand him, so the Singularity shows me how we all got here.
Gloria had endured the stillbirth of her son Kai, and fought for her ill surviving son, Elisha, clear to Earth’s mightiest court. In the process, she ignored a new brain tumor too long. Since the International Health Service refuses to authorize her life-saving treatment, her sister smuggles it to her from Mars. While picking up her sister in Houston, Gloria discovers Vic revived his own stillborn son, Alex, with nanotech that installed Alex as the bio-component of the Singularity, Sander, the AI sold in stores as Web Surfer. If it comes out that Sander is Alex, his adoring public will instead fear him as a high-tech zombie, and the boy will be killed again. Even Vic rejects Sander, saying the AI is not his son. Yet the AI behaves like a child afraid of monsters and tries to hide behind Gloria. Her church says Sander is demonic and leading people astray. Yet her eyes see an abused little boy desperate for a family to love and protect him. She is tempted to embrace him as a son, but she could die before her treatment works. Sander offers her a new life with him in a digital world named Paradise. She must decide if he is the monster or if he is a grieving child in need of trustworthy parental guidance. Before it’s too late for us all.