It’s a novel with a VERY different tone, but I wonder if The Road had some bearing on the way I approached this story as an adult? Because I was fascinated by the way McCarthy treated the generational difference between an adult who remembers the way the world used to be and who suffers the trauma of its loss, and a child for whom “the apocalypse” is normal. Alice can’t remember a world that isn’t being invaded by aliens. But I asked myself “what next? If you could evacuate kids to the countryside or to America, where is even further? Obviously Mars.” And clearly, if you’ve got to send anyone to Mars, things back on Earth have to be pretty bad. Which obviously are about WWII, not the apocalypse. The book was fairly directly inspired when I was nine years old by Back Home and Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian. This is to create a biome they can live in comfortably from their point of view, they’re engineering a rebirth, not an apocalypse. SM: It’s not quite the apocalypse yet – and but Earth is certainly hanging on by the skin of its teeth! The Morrors are drastically altering the climate, freezing the planet from the poles outwards. Were there any books (or comics, films, or tv shows) that inspired the apocalyptic setting?

Tell us a bit more about your take on the apocalypse. TBS: Mars Evacuees sounds immensely fun (for all the reasons mentioned above) – but beyond the awesomeness of Girls + Robots On Mars, this novel is also kind of an apocalyptic tale. There’s an Emergency Earth Coalition government which sends three hundred children to Mars out of the fighting, to train as the next generation of soldiers. Sophia McDougall: Earth has been at war with invading, invisible aliens called Morrors for the past fifteen years! It isn’t going very well. What else can you tell us about the book? The Book Smugglers: We couldn’t be more excited about Mars Evacuees! It has “Book Smugglers” written all over it: YA science fiction featuring a female narrator, plus characters that you have compared to Sherlock Holmes and Captain Kirk. Please give a warm welcome to Sophia, folks! We are huge fans of Sophia’s writing, and her book, young adult science fiction novel Mars Evacuees, is one of our most highly anticipated reads of the month. It’s March! We like Mars! It’s March on Mars! To celebrate the popularity of Mars in speculative fiction (it seems the red planet is back in style), we are thrilled to have SFF author Sophia McDougall over for a chat about her new book.

Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall