“The Helmet Game” has now been published in James Gunn’s Ad Astra, and should ring a bell with anyone who took part in daft dare games when they were students.
If Earth people had to breathe Martian air, I think they’d make more effort to look after their own. For one thing there isn’t much of it. You’d have trouble getting it into your lungs in the first place. And once there, it wouldn’t do any good. There’s plenty of oxygen, but it’s all bound with carbon, which isn’t going to let it go to keep humans alive. You could last a few minutes, and few more if you had time to prepare, but you’ll suffocate soon enough.
“Would you like to see the body, Ms. Connors?” asked Commander Walberg.
“Amanda,” I said. I was one of the few people here without an academic or military title. Only the students matched me in this. I felt as if my name were paraded naked as a mark of shame. “And I know what a dead body looks like.”
Max Weill suffocated two metres away from his helmet. His gloved hand was outstretched, as if he were trying to pull the ground towards him. He asphyxiated before he froze.
“His footprints were found between the helmet and his body,” Walberg said. “As far as we can tell, he took it off himself, then walked away from it.”
And “The New Air” has been published in Penumbric:
“You were working with Ellia on new air.”
“Supposedly.”
“You don’t believe in the concept?”
Gravia put her hand to her helmet. It was the gesture of someone who did not live in a suit full time; she had expected to straighten her hair or scratch an itch, and had not expected to find the face-plate in the way. “All our research suggests it’s impossible. The respiration systems of Resenbergians and Balarians depend on two different gases. Simply mixing the two together can keep a subject alive for about half an hour, but after that the impurities in the air, necessary for the survival of one race, become a fatal toxin to the other. This was thought of as insurmountable, until Ellia discovered the secondary respiration system.”
And my story “War Food” should soon be appearing in parABnormal Magazine.
Recent publications
“Into the Drear Oblivion” is still available on the Headland site:
I unlocked the door—I didn’t take risks anymore—and checked on Elisabeth. She lay in bed as if she just couldn’t face the weather. She wasn’t breathing but she wasn’t pale enough to be dead. It was her eyes that made her seem so—no matter how long I watched, they were still. There was no rapid movement and therefore, no dreaming. I remembered no dreams from my own hibernation. As far as I could tell she had fallen into oblivion. I wished that I could join her.
I went downstairs and put on the battery heater. She would wake up, I told myself. In the spring. She would return. They all would. In the meantime, I could keep busy. I wasn’t completely alone.
Randolph had saved my life, as far as I knew. Either that or he’d tried to kill me.
“Our Foul Ancestors” can still be read in the Third Flatiron “Offshoots” anthology. The story wonders what future Martian colonists will think of the custodians of the wrecked planet they left behind.
I was fiercely proud that I was no Earthling. It was hard to feel sorry for them, knowing that the death of their world was deliberate; or if not quite deliberate, they had known what they were doing. The world to which my parents had returned was wildly overheating, flooding, choking. New diseases took to the wing, filling the lungs of those who could scarcely breathe anyway. In the meantime war reigned happily, every bomb or missile an act of mercy. The population had halved, dying off at an ever-increasing rate, while politicians continued to insist that the ecosystem would stabilise when there were only seven billion, six billion, five billion. Entire countries had offered their services as cemeteries, the land no longer needed for food.
And they had known what they were doing. No, I was not one of them, and they would not get the chance to do the same to Mars.
Don’t forget
You can buy my novel On Wings of Pity from Amazon, and my collection The End of the World: A User’s Guide for only £7.99.
[Last update 3 June 2026]
