The era during which Mars might have been most likely to have hosted habitable conditions is the first one, indicated by the presence of phyllosilicates. If indeed living organisms formed, these clay minerals could be the sites in which this biochemical development took place. The low level of the further surface alteration, in perennial cold and dry conditions, under a tenuous atmosphere, could have preserved most of the record of biological molecules, structures, or other diagnostic features in clay-rich surface or subsurface rocks. These areas of high habitability potential offer exciting targets for future in situ exploration.
Back here Earth, I spent much yesterday on various busynesses, but also managed to begin the new Dancy piece, a vignettish thing which will be published as a chapbook to accompany Alabaster (free to those who order the once-again-available limited edition). It's called "Highway 97" and is set a few days before Dancy's arrival at the old church south of Bainbridge, Georgia. Despite the fact that I was initially reluctant to write another Dancy story, I'm actually quite excited about it. The whole of the story occurred to me yesterday, as I was listening to Nick Cave's soundtrack for Warren Ellis' film The Proposition. Likely, I'll write the entire thing to that CD (which is quite awesome, by the way).
I wish I could say that I'd be spending all of today working on "Highway 97," but, unfortunately, this isn't the case. Instead, I need to spend it working on the cover copy for Daughter of Hounds. My editor at Penguin sent it to me a week or so ago. She wasn't very happy with it, and when I saw it I was very unhappy with it. The chief problem is that whoever wrote the copy (people get paid to do this, I suppose) was trying to present it as a genre horror novel, which it isn't. It might fairly be called dark fantasy, with some emphasis on the dark, but it's not whatever people mean when they say "horror". So, anyway, I have something like 150 words to try and synopsize/describe a very complex novel that's almost 700 typescript pages long. 150 words to accurately convey the plot, the mood, something of the central characters. And I have to have it e-mailed to my editor before five p.m. this evening. I'd much rather spend the day with Dancy. Or Martian mineralogy. Or wedging my head into the bowl of the Worst Toilet in Scotland, for that matter.
Yesterday, Sonya Taaffe (
There were wonderful thunderstorms just after sunset last night, and there will likely be more today.