I was born in the West Midlands, England in 1979. I add the year as I think it’s relevant here. Growing up in the 80s, with the selection of science fiction films that we had (plus the ones that came before then, of course) helped to shape the genres and cultures that I would come to love. Films such as 2001, Star Wars, Back to the Future, E.T. and Close Encounters. I could go on forever.
Anyway, to add to those influences, in roughly ’89 to ’91, I had what I can only describe as my own close encounter. Me, a friend and my younger brother, looked up when playing out and saw an object in the night sky. It was quite high up, but not as high as a jet. I would estimate with my ten or eleven-year-old brain, that it was around the height that the average helicopter might hover. It was silent and still, and it looked like a double-decker bus, as in it was two rows of white lights against the black sky. It hovered for a few minutes—enough time for myself and my friend to sing ‘God Save the Queen’. Then it zipped off, diagonally up—disappearing from view faster than anything I have ever seen. To add to that even further, my dad would often tell us about his close encounter, which would have been in around ’77. I go into more detail on this on my blog (see the end of this post). But the interesting thing is, his experience was only two streets away from my own encounter. Both UFOs were in Walsall, not far from Junction 10 of the M6.
So, with all of these influences rolling around in my already strange head, fast forward to me arriving at forty. It was 2019, coming up to the festive period, and out of nowhere, I decided that I wanted to write a book. I would stare out of my back door at my garden. At the bottom of which is a school. And I would long to see another UFO. I would wonder what would happen if something landed in my garden or behind our fence at that school. And from these thoughts, my book started to grow. Of course, come March time of 2020, COVID hit us, giving me more time during furlough leave to work on my writing and learn all I could about the craft. For almost three years, I worked on my book.
The Mars Migration is an action-packed story through time and space. It starts off with advanced pieces of technology crashing to Earth from the skies above the UK and Canada. Abductions of two ordinary young people take place (based loosely on my son and daughter). Protective fields have been erected, pausing time in a huge area of both countries. It explains the problems facing both ordinary people and the governments, inside and outside of these invisible prison anomalies. We follow our main two characters as they wake up in a strange dark world inside a black hole, and are told that they will not be returned home due to the energy required to do so. There are factions at war, people frozen in time. Problems regarding Mars in the past, deals to be made, and sausage muffins are all in here to form the ride that is The Mars Migration.
The Mars Migration is available to order at any bookshop of your choice and, of course, Amazon. It is free to read if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.
