In a dysfunctional 2065 where religious zealots restrict the world to outdated twentieth-century technology, eighteen-year-old Zeke Venan dedicates himself to the life of the mind and to the further evolution of humanity. He drags his Australian girlfriend to an impoverished University of Mars in a bombed-out Texas city, but Tansley quickly pegs this school as a mockery of their dreams. Yet they both begin to wonder whether aliens have infiltrated this fraudulent institution to research their own psychological flaws.

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The Publishable Work

From 2005-2009 I polluted several novels with overuse of italicized thinking before seeing my error and revising them all back to sanity. In fact mastering this technique of retranslating italics convinced me I could produce a 2024 version of The University of Mars fairly quickly. Despite earlier disappointing versions of this novel, I’ve always found myself drawn to its story and its themes.

I’d really gone overboard with italicized thinking in the 2009 version, with three of the thirty-four chapters entirely italicized, and similar italics dominating almost every page. At the time I thought this technique infused the story with emotional resonance, but I finally saw how it slowed the reader down and muddled the narrative.

Simply changing the main character names to Zeke and Tansley transformed how I felt about this novel. I hadn’t expected Tansley’s Chapter Six and Zeke’s Chapter Seven to suddenly strike me as a compelling story. And as I converted italics to regular narrative I was surprised by the high-energy fiction underneath all that italicized clamor.

When I started this project I’d assumed the 2009 manuscript had several rambling parts, but I was heartened to find no plot holes or dull sections in the novel. I must evaluate for self-delusion, but I do navigate by high energy and I feel pangs of dread at letting crap stand. I don’t think I’m fooling myself with the structure of this novel. It all works, after forty-four years, and I’ve been able to infuse this novel with my current consciousness.

I also managed to reduce the book from 69,592 words to 57,923, saving you the reader from having to slog through 11,669 unneeded data bits.

A vision for a great cover hit me during the revision, and I was certain I had to make that cover and publish this book at last.

Astonishment

Of course it’s puzzling that I’m now excited about the same novel I once declared unpublishable. In fact, for most of my writing career I assigned this book the status of failed experiment. Now after publishing what I think is an excellent 2024 version, I’m astonished that I once emphatically rejected The University of Mars at two different eras in my life:

• The 1984 typewritten manuscript was way overlong and meandering, though I was proud that a good story lurked in there … somewhere. I stopped shopping the novel in 1986 after rejections from twenty-three publishers and agents.
• The 2009 reboot offered a compelling new structure, removing unnecessary characters and strengthening the plot, but italicized thinking polluted the novel and I called it unpublishable after seven rejections.

But now that I have a finished and I think valuable University of Mars, I guess I’ll live with this astonishment. This novel has meant a lot to me over the years, and it’s wonderful to see it finally surface.

copyright 2024 by Michael D. Smith

A Brief History of The University of Mars
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