Alice Dare is a fearless kind of a girl. Not surprising really since her mum is a famous space-fighter and she’s been brought up to cope with danger. When the polar ice looks like enveloping her boarding school in Nottingham, Alice and her friends are shipped off to Mars for safety. Life on Mars is no picnic! You can barely breathe and the sun is so strong you can burn to death. And that’s before being chased down by aliens while trying to save the planet. Alice is the gripping narrator of her thrilling story of life on Mars.
The fact that someone had decided I'd be safer on Mars, where you could still only sort of breathe the air and sort of not get sunburned to death, was a sign that the war with the aliens was not going fantastically well. I'd been worried that I was about to be told that my mother's space fighter had been shot down, so when I found out that I was being evacuated to Mars, I was pretty calm. And, despite everything that happened to me and my friends afterwards, I'd do it all again. Because until you have been shot at, pursued by terrifying aliens, taught maths by a laser-shooting robot goldfish and tried to save the galaxy, I don't think you can say that you've really lived. If the same thing happens to you, this is my advice: Always carry duct tape.
Sophia McDougall is the bestselling adult author of the Romanitas trilogy (Orion/Gollancz). Her short stories have been published by Jurassic Fiction, Solaris and NewCon Press. Sophia has appeared on Radio 3 discussing Mars in literature with Samira Ahmed. She was a panellist at the 2012 How The Light Gets In arts and philosophy festival at Hay. She also creates digital art and mentors aspiring writers.
