The Mars House

"Oh, yes right, my book! Can I remember writing it at all? Ok, so… The Mars House follows a very unlucky man called January, who begins the novel as a lucky person. He is the principal dancer at the Royal Ballet in London about 250 years from now. Unluckily, London is sinking and, at the beginning of the novel, it finally sinks – it is sunken, pluperfect. And he ends up as a climate refugee in the only place that is open to refugees and is safe at the same time: a new colony on Mars called Tharsis. He really struggles, because the gravity on Mars is only 1/3 of Earth, so people who are from Earth are kept very segregated from people who are born on Mars. It’s like having Superman visit, he could hurt people by accident. This is very difficult. There are big cultural differences, and social differences as well – they’ve abolished gender. So there’s a lot for him to get used to. One of the ways that all these issues get explored in the book is through – surprise, surprise – a central romance. January – through various mechanisms that will read convincingly I hope! – ends up in an arranged marriage to a fire-breathing nationalist, a local senator who doesn’t think that immigration should exist at all. And this arranged marriage plays out live on a reality show that is broadcast across the city. There were lots of things… I think over the last five years, there’s been an awful lot in the news that is making a lot of us angry. Whether it is the increasing toxicity of the trans debate, whether it is anything to do with the LGBTQIA community, whether it’s women’s rights, whether it is immigration… And I sat back one morning and thought, if we could all hate each other a little bit less, and just sit down and have a normal conversation about this, like normal people, we could get somewhere. I wanted to enforce two people from opposite sides having a conversation. So January is a penniless working-class refugee. He is Earthstrong. He is obviously a man. He is married to an immensely glamorous tech billionaire who owns the energy source of a planet, who is seven feet tall, Mandarin speaking and gender neutral. They are not going to get along, they don’t at the start. But the whole point is that they find a way to it. And the way they find to it is just a really basic principle, which is chivalry, which is just ‘recognise when you’re strong’. That was what I came out with, in the end – there’s a simple answer to this, and we’ve known it time out of mind, let’s apply it. Exactly. One of the things that I was really interested in was kinds of strength. And I think often at the moment, particularly with the really toxic trans debate, there’s a great focus on physical strength: could this person technically hurt me? Yes, but there are other kinds of strength as well – there is psychological strength, there is soft power, there is money, there is status. How many followers do you have on Twitter, for example? What power does that give you? A great deal! January is a representative of physical strength – he’s a dancer, he has to be strong to be who he is. His partner, whose name is Gail, they are a genius. And they are immensely wealthy, and well born into a hugely influential family. So they have a great deal of power, but it’s a very different kind of power. And it’s about the way that the two of them marry those kinds of power."