What I loved about “Pioneer” was the sense of life, family, and humanity standing up to the most daunting hardships. This is a story of Mars exploration that continues past catastrophic losses, of a family that endures tragedy, understands the power of dreams, and stands up with the perseverance needed to succeed. What models in your own life helped you understand these values?

Live long enough and everyone has lost someone they love but sometimes loss comes far too early and whole families can be swept away. My father died suddenly and unexpectedly when I was a boy of five. I was the youngest of seven children. Some dark years followed but my mother and siblings pulled through. We took care of each other.

We grew up in a small Scottish fishing town; we were poor by the standards of the day but so was almost everyone else. We learned that you could travel continents one step at a time. Hard work was honest work and low pay was better than no pay. Learning was hard work too, and honest work. And the amazing thing was anyone could learn by just picking up a book. The local library was a quiet, warm, dry and safe oasis of learning and security when I was a boy. It was my secret garden.

When you think about manned missions to Mars, do you think we’re looking forward to limited science missions much like international research teams on Antarctica today, or, in a century or two, will some humans consider themselves Martians?

I think where we are with Mars right now is the equivalent of when Vikings reached North America. It’s just the beginning. I think it’s a certainty we will colonize Mars. And it will be the first pure colonization of its kind. It will become a Golden Age of colonization because no peoples will be exploited or displaced when it happens. And most definitely, people on Mars will think of themselves as Martians. Perhaps they will be dark and golden-eyed. But they will be different: shaped by the New World with the best of the Old World within them.

I hope to see people on Mars in my lifetime. That’s a dream worth keeping because it doesn’t cost the Earth.

You had mentioned to me that you loved Ray Bradbury in your youth, but that you had trouble feeling the same connection with his books today. Did “The Martian Chronicles” ignite your interest in Mars? In your own writing are you trying to evoke the same experience you had as a teenager reading Bradbury?

Yes, it’s true. When I was a boy of 10-11, I started reading Ray Bradbury’s stories and was just swept away. I read every book there was. When I realized there were Ray Bradbury books in the adult section of the library, I made special pleadings with the librarian and she allowed me to take those out too.

I sort of sensed that Ray Bradbury’s writing must be special for other readers too, but I felt an intense and individual connection. I didn’t hear an American accent when I read his stories. It never occurred to me. Our English teacher in school was fond of his stories too and would read then aloud to the class. So, I grew up hearing Ray Bradbury with a Scottish accent!

I remember when the TV series of The Martian Chronicles was broadcast ( I was still a young teenager); how expectant I was and how disappointed I became when I watched it and then how elated I became when I realized why I was disappointed – because it was the language I was in love with. The metaphors and the music of the words. Worlds that could be conjured with a few beautiful phrases.

There’s no doubt Mars was ignited in my imagination by the book “The Martian Chronicles”. And my love of language and metaphors was all the fault of Ray Bradbury; his stories were catalysts for my imagination.

I struggle to have that same immediate emotional connection with his work today. I have plenty of his books on my shelves and I encouraged my two young sons to read him and I did read some of his stories to them when they were very young. But theirs is a different sort of childhood.

I have a feeling that you had to be a certain kind of reader at a certain kind of time in your life for the Bradbury alchemy to work. You had to have been a lonely reader. You had to have been a kind of romantic, a dreamer, and you had to have believed there was mystery everywhere. That summer was carnival electricity and soft winds, and soon rains would come, crossing the wheat fields like ghosts, and the laughter of hurried invisible children would chime. A world at rest. A world enchanted.

To be able to have that connection I really have to strive to conjure… time. I have to make myself young again. Ray Bradbury is my youth.

But when I write short stories, I always hope I find at least one image or metaphor Ray Bradbury would like enough to laugh and pluck it from the air, shake it around in his fist, blow some magic into it and let it fly into the air again, a whole new bright-winged creature…

Tell us about how the character in “Pioneer,” mission specialist Max Grade, figures into your larger works and writing plans, as well as a bit about Max himself. What should we know about him and where can we look for more stories?

Max Grade is Scotland’s first astronaut on Mars!

I figured, rather than waiting around for NASA or Elon Musk to get there, I better put my own team on Mars, so I’m not too old to appreciate it.

Max is the hero of my future-historical novella The Mars Dilemma, now itself part of a larger collection of stories (or unpublished short novel if you want to be kind), called ‘SAVED FROM THE FIRE – the Mars Dilemma and other chronicles’

Max does not see himself as a hero, but he is forced by extraordinary circumstances on Mars to be a hero, along with some other characters and an AI android called Quant, who happens to be Max’s best friend on Mars.

The trouble is the Mars team (apart from Max) think Quant has gone HAL, and that causes more complications and misunderstandings and adds to the drama.

Max reveals in a personal log what happened to his family. It’s very tragic but it is also part of what has driven him to become an astronaut. A promise he made. An unwritten contract. The ties that bind can also lift you up.

And even though I say I find it hard to make that connection as a reader with Ray Bradbury, I’m still hugely inspired and influenced by him – one of the linked stories is a homage to Ray Bradbury, featuring a terrifying city on the edge of Europe where brutal Librarians burn books and kill anyone who reads books.

If the book is ever published, I will fly back to Scotland, get a train to my hometown, walk the backroad along the park and take the quiet tree-lined street to our small local library, open the door and find the science fiction section and hopefully I will see my book there. Or better still, a young boy or girl reading my book, sitting where I used to sit, in a quiet corner, oblivious to all else, in a world within worlds.

That’s a personal dream worth keeping.

This is our Writer’s Spotlight, so the last spot in this interview is yours to do with as you wish. Tell us something you would like our audience to know; ask us a question, promote a project, or just pontificate on the fate of humankind. The floor is yours:

Did Ray Bradbury ever see SpaceX make a Triple Rocket Landing? I hope he did.