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I’m gonna be putting Planet Rasputin out there on Monday [June 6th], so here’s the prologue to either suck you into, or put you off, buying the whole thing.

To summarise, it’s set in 2114 and features:

an ion-drive ship with Slovene dissidents

Martian bases

Void-Helenism + death

Undiscovered dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt

Anarcho-communism

The Lem-12 Field to circumvent spin gravity

invented social theory

absurdism

and a lot more…

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P R O L O G U E

Roughly Halfway To Mars

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The Martians were indistinguishable from one another by rank, by fashion, by etiquette, all striving to ensure the red vegetation was maintained, working not because they were coerced, but through a deep sense of duty and fulfilment…

   ‘Why’s the vegetation red?’

…one day, they would work a shift in the clothing factory, the next they would switch to food production, eschewing any form of specialization, though there were some that did exist…

   ‘They change their jobs?’

…the elder Martian had previously been married to six other Martians, some male, some female, a concept that Leonid attempted to comprehend but with great difficulty…

   ‘Six people! Will I have to do that too?’

…the corpse of Sterni stared sideways towards the wall, at the poster of the first Martian factory, and Leonid stared too, falling onto the ground and weeping over the stained history, trying to pick up larger puddles of blood and return them to his friend’s body…

   ‘I don’t like it…’

…but the crime was as old as the first sharpened rock, as hellish as a nightmare based on other nightmares, as evil as the first devil that ever popped into man’s head, and there was no escape from it, not on Mars, not in this red-hued paradise of rotational shifts and unparalleled job satisfaction…

   ‘Rasputin, stop…’

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