by William Preston
Willam Preston returns to our blog to discuss some of the inspiration behind his latest story, “Remnant,” in our Nov/Dec issue! Here you’ll learn about the ideas put forth by Ray Bradbury and Jack London that William set out to expand in his own work
I didn’t know I’d go back to Mars.
I went there the first time (“Aftermath,” Asimov’s June/July 2025) to explore what came after—and before—Ray Bradbury’s elegiac “Night Meeting,” a tale written specifically for The Martian Chronicles. In writing about investigations into time-bridging incursions, some of which involved explorers from Earth, I was struck by the ease and humor of interplay among my Martians.
Those relationships, those characters, pulled me back to the red planet. For “Remnant,” I gave my investigating team another problem, one that was more dire while equally confounding, a problem that could potentially tell me and my readers more about these aliens, whose curiosity guided my curiosity.
My Martians seem human. (They are not.) Their bodies, the first time we encounter them, seem like ours. (They are not, as the occasional detail reveals.) They talk as we talk. (That’s fiction’s magic trick, though I’ve avoided some idiomatic expressions to provide rhetorical distance.) The Martians do apply our same combination of intuition and logic when encountering a “mystery.” (I’m sure another writer could have invented far stranger minds.)
There’s one profound physiological difference, though: The Martian people are blessed with (let’s call it) telepathy. I think of it as a radical openness over which they can exercise some control. Just as I can’t prevent someone with eyesight from looking at me, these people can’t help but be known to each other in a nonintrusive way that is accepted as a part of community life. And just as I might look away or regard someone indirectly, Martians can alter their telepathic focus. (This issue is dealt with more in a forthcoming tale.)
The Martians we’ve met so far are unlike us in another crucial way: They don’t know much about fiction. They don’t traffic in storytelling as we do. This means the Martians don’t (at this time in their history) allow false narratives to govern their lives and direct how they perceive others. Humans tell themselves stories. I assume I speak for all of us here in saying we enjoy and appreciate storytelling. However, in “Remnant,” as on Earth, stories can cause great harm.
My Martian stories exist because Ray Bradbury made of Mars—in at least three dozen stories and bridging scenes—a fantastical landscape on which he could play with motifs as mundane as disorientation and as disorienting as colonialism and faith. I have other motifs to consider.
If you’ve known me for long, you’ve likely heard me bring up Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” In London’s story, an unnamed person and his unnamed companion dog cross a wooded, frozen Yukon expanse (circa 1900) between two places of human habitation. A key detail (a major difference between the 1902 and 1908 versions of the story) is the threateningly brutal cold. Despite his (and our) growing awareness that the situation is more dire than it initially appeared, the man continues to imagine himself safely arrived at his destination, warmed by a fire and the hearty companionship of others.
“To Build a Fire” fits firmly in the glorious narrative tradition of “everything gets worse.” Our protagonist’s efforts at firebuilding fail. His hands become useless clubs. At the end, following a spate of frantic sprinting, he slumps into a final sleep, and the dog nonchalantly moves on toward safety, surefooted and confident.
Why does the man die? At root, it’s because he’s been telling himself a story, a survival story. The story is more compelling to him than the brute and brutal facts. Why does the dog live? Because he’s not lying to himself.
Those of us who read fiction know the value of what John Gardner termed “the vivid and continuous dream.” Those of us who write fiction know the challenges of shaping that dream in someone else’s mind. Many living creatures dream. Humans fall into dreams. With no effort at all, whether asleep or awake, we arrive in or build lands of fantasy. We dream of love. We dream of heaven and hell. We dream of success and of terror and of soaring above the world.
Every story is about someone who is not us while it is also absolutely about us. Additionally, a lot of stories are about stories, how we shape them and how they shape us.
Whether the stories we are telling ourselves now—founded on hope and founded on fear—propel us forward or undermine us, only time and tide will tell.
These Martians I’ve imagined seem to me more awake to the present moment than humans. They don’t slide so readily into fantasy. That’s the historical moment in which we find them, but I think the constant scent of all those other minds keeps them grounded.
What happens when such minds open themselves to fantasy? That’s a follow-up question for a third story. I and my amenable Martians are already investigating.
