Carrie Vaughn on Martians Abroad and Crossing a New Frontier

I spent more than 10 years writing about a werewolf named Kitty and her adventures in a world filled with vampires, magic, and all things supernatural. I wrapped up that series because I wanted to give Kitty something close to a happy ending, and make sure I closed her story with a big howl rather than a fading whimper. Mission accomplished, I hope!
My next novel is about a girl who grew up in a colony on Mars and is now headed to Earth for boarding school. She isn’t happy about it, and has no idea what awaits, besides more gravity. So, a little bit of a change in gears. Something of a new direction.
All right, yes, interplanetary adventure with teenagers is completely different from werewolves and talk radio. So why? After spending so much time immersed in the supernatural world, why boldly go into science fiction?
The short answer: I have a lot of ideas. A lot of ideas.

Along with the Kitty series, I’ve written novels about superheroes, dragons, and pirates. I’ve written short stories about, well, just about everything. Unicorns hunts. First contact. Alien worlds. Writing lots of different stories, about lots of different things, helps keep my imagination fresh and stretches my writing muscles. I think that writing about lots of different things makes all my writing better.
And really, when you get right down to it, science fiction and fantasy are two branches on the same family tree. They’re both genres of the imagination. They both ask the question, “What if?” and follow the answers out to the craziest, most wonderful conclusions. What if werewolves and vampires had their own talk radio advice show? What if kids who grew up on Mars came to Earth for the first time?
I was always going to write a science fiction novel someday. The hard part was picking just one idea to write about. As I said–I have a lot of ideas. That’s the easy part. This particular idea — I think I was probably destined to write this novel since I was about ten years old.

Martians Abroad isn’t just a science fiction story. It’s my version of the kind of books I read as a kid, the golden-age era science fiction “juveniles” I borrowed from my mother’s bookshelf when I was growing up, that she read when she was growing up. The books that helped me fall in love with imagination and adventure, science fiction and fantasy. And maybe as I got older, I realized that some of those books didn’t give girl heroes their just due. I could do something about that. I could write my own interplanetary adventure with a girl hero, the kind of story that’s been living in my brain all this time without my even realizing it. Wrapping up the Kitty series gave some of these other stories space to bubble up, and room for my imagination to do something about it.
Could I write the kind of book I’d loved as a kid, and could I pass that love on to someone else?
I want a kid to read Martians Abroad and fall in love with space and adventure the same way I did when I found Arthur C. Clarke. I wanted to update the genre with all the new information about space travel and the planets we’ve learned over the last fifty years—heck, over the last ten years. It was both astonishing and frustrating for me to realize I can’t just make up stuff about Mars like Bradbury and Heinlein did. If I want to set a story on Mars, I can’t invent locations; we have detailed maps of the planet now, with all of the features named and labeled, and I need to use those existing labels. The unfairness! And yet, the wonder of it, that Mars is more real than it’s ever been for writers like me. It doesn’t feel so much like we’re writing science fiction, but like we’re writing a history that just hasn’t happened yet. Even Pluto has a map, now! All I have to do is follow those maps.

And how excellent if I can put all the wonder that science fiction inspires in a book of my own?
To add my own twist to the genre: Earth is the alien planet. Polly Newton thinks of herself as a Martian, and Earth is far outside her experience. When we get to a point in the future where significant numbers of people aren’t born on Earth, have never been to Earth—what will Earth look like to them? I wanted to tell a story that maybe answers that question.
Polly believes without a doubt that she has a big excellent future waiting for her. She just isn’t sure what all she’s going to have to do to get there. But she’ll find out…I hope you like her journey as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Preorder Martians Abroad, available January 17.