We Will Become Mars by A J Dalton

sunlight breaking over orange and yellow mountains

Note to reader: this piece looks best when viewed on a larger screen. Some formatting may not display correctly on mobile.

The refugees of Mars settled the Earth fifty thousand years ago
crashed ontheflatunforgiveness&broken—they emerged raggedly,
arms swinging into trees and primeval forests, lost without their sci-tech,
many injured and quickly dying in the inhospitable thicknesses,
poisoned by creatures and wrong fruit.
Yet a few survived, alone, huddled in caves, fires out front,
sharing stories and strange memories of homes way up in the skies
where there’d been a heaven of old gods.

Bio

A J Dalton is a UK-based SFF writer. He has published the Empire of the Saviours trilogy with Gollancz Orion, and various collections with Kristell Ink and Luna Press. He also runs an online storytelling community on behalf of Middlesex University—all welcome! He lives with a monstrously oppressive cat named Cleopatra.

Author's note

I produced the prose poem 'We Will Become Mars' as a response to how I fear we're stripping the Earth of all its natural life, just as Mars may once have been stripped. We will end up as space-refugees searching for a new planet...perhaps as Martians were once refugees who came and settled Earth. How many planets must be exhausted like this before the cycle is broken? It's a story as old as our origins, one that is told anew as 'mythology for the modern day' (Carmina's tagline).