Around The Martian Fringe Series

Colonel Boyd has worked most all his life at making the frontier of Mars more habitable for humans. He's fought the mutant natives, survived deadly thunderstorms, and lived off the strange and often inhospitable land outside of the safety of the clan cities. When the entire population of the Enginetown settlement goes missing, Boyd commissions a tracker, Doherty, to help him find the lost folk. Boyd knows Doherty to be his son, but has never met him before. As the two are drawn toward a violent confrontation with a pack of natives, Boyd also confronts the path of fatherhood he never approached. Regret swells within Boyd, and he must decide whether his long and often bloody treks in the frontier have transformed him into something even less human than the mutants he's spent a lifetime fighting.

Enginetown, a settlement in the middle of the Martian frontier, often has violent confrontations with the mutant natives. Recently, a raid carried out by the men of the town brought back a plethora of the natives for imprisonment and eventual execution. It's a cause for celebration for most of the town. For one young woman, it's an opportunity... Young Sara is fed up with the longtime cruelty of her brothers. Seeking reprieve, she goes to the one source of help that is more dangerous than any other—the very natives that the townsfolk held at the center of her town. Finding a strange kinship with a rare female native who possesses strange and mystical powers, Sara forges a dangerous alliance, and discovers how far she will go to teach her brothers a lesson.

Amos, a young Martian native, is about to become an adult in the eyes of his people, but first must take part in a dangerous ceremony. He is joined by his friend Obediah, who he has nursed an attraction toward for some time, and also by Enoch and Bart: two rivals who each long to hurt the other. To become adults, they must travel through an ancient forest where the fiend awaits them—a dangerous, merciless being whose only goal is to end the lives of the boys. Greater than the danger posed by the fiend, though, is the danger the boys pose to each other. Enoch and Bart each try to use the isolation of the forest as a staging ground for their aggression toward each other. Obediah and Amos can only watch in terror as their mutual hatred escalates into violence. These four boys must find whether they are able to put the past aside and work together to stay alive, or face a horrid death at the hands of the fiend.

Twelve year-old Laurence and his mother Martha earn a living by hunting in the woods outside of the crater city San Rodrigo, a center for trade in the Martian frontier. A rich woman, Volodin, desperate to break out of her privileged shell, hires the two out to give her a real hunting experience. Laurence is also desperate to break out of his shell--one imposed on him by his overprotective mother. Volodin's lack of expertise soon proves to be a considerable problem for the hunting trip, made even more dangerous when her pride gets both her and Martha injured. Laurence is soon tasked with keeping watch over the only family he has in his life, and somehow getting both his mother and Volodin back to civilization through the trials of the wilderness. In his journey to return to the shelter that adults provide, he becomes a man himself.

Pollux is an engineer at the dynamo, the terraforming center of Mars. Completely alone in the mountain engine and stuck well past the standard length of duty of three months, strange visions begin presenting to him. First they are simply images, but soon they transform into what seem as living apparitions of workers from the past and the future. In a series of letters to his estranged sister, he tries to lay out the case for these visions being part of reality, and not his own manifesting insanity. But could all these visions be sparked from his traumatic experiences fighting in the frontier against a band of raiders?

A girl uses supernatural means to take revenge on her abusive brother; a reuniting father and son search for a kidnapped village; a group of boys try to survive a night in an ancient forest, hunted by a savage monster; a young man finds his courage on a hunting trip when he must save his mother's life; and, a scientist tries to retain his sanity, locked in with an enormous terraforming engine and the many apparitions from the past and future that it creates! These five short stories complete the picture of the savage, dystopian Mars envisioned by J.P. Lantern, seen also in his Red Country Trilogy.