By Michael Grossberg
This year should be a notable one for author Travis Corcoran.
The two-time Prometheus-winning author, who won for Best Novel in 2018 for The Powers of the Earth and again in 2019 for its sequel Causes of Separation, hasn’t published a major work of fiction in several years.
But that’s about to change.
One of the first novels published by Ark Press, a new SF publisher, will be Corcoran’s Red State Mars.
Scheduled for publication May 29, 2026, Red State Mars is billed as “a sweeping epic of Mars’s fight for freedom—an unforgettable saga of war, family, and civilization on the red frontier.”
CORCORAN’S RED STATE MARS
The 606-page novel, available for pre-order now on Amazon, will cost $29.95 in hardback and $14.95 for the Kindle ebook.
According to Corcoran, Ark Press also is planning a limited-edition, higher-end printing that will include high-resolution maps of Mars as the end papers.
Here is the publisher’s description of the novel:
“For generations, the Newcastles, Mackenzies, Atkinses, Hyltons, and Hollinses have endured the hard red soil of Mars—surviving by individual grit, intense family loyalty, and free market trade. Scarred by World War III and Earth’s long, violent aftermath, they built farms, raised domes, forged alliances, and carried old grudges to a new world. Together, the Martians have forged a frontier society that is complex, ornery, and rooted in the freedom of the Texas soil from which many of the clans sprang.
Trade with the nearby Chinese enclaves brought prosperity for a time. But as Beijing’s reach lengthens, trade becomes tribute—and tribute becomes force.
When Chinese armored columns grind across Karl’s Ramp and convoys are torn apart in the Chaos, Mars is plunged into war. Robinson City’s dome falls in fire and blood. The Burrows holds out under siege until supply convoys break through beneath burning skies. At Lowell and Meltwater, city shields collapse and the red Martian soil melts and flows like blood as the Martian plains are seared with plasma fire.
The clans face an empire pressing down from above and rivalries tearing them apart from within. Senators brawl in council halls, mobs surge through the streets, and old feuds erupt—even on the football field. Out of devastation, a fragile coalition is born: uneasy, volatile, but fierce enough to strike back. Freightliners become fortresses. Drones become weapons. Family honor hardens into resistance.
From isolated domes to the vast Martian plains to the black sky above, war sparks into revolution and a desperate struggle to forge a nation on an alien world men now call home.
A vast chronicle of clans and civilizations, of families too proud to yield, too divided to trust, and too determined to be ruled.”
Corcoran wove in explicitly libertarian themes and rhetoric into The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation – both part of his Aristillus series, which includes several published stories and novellas and two planned upcoming novels.
But his Red State Mars is geared for a different audience.
“The pro-freedom/anti-tyranny themes are less explicit in the foreground than in the Aristillus novels (i.e. characters don’t discuss them), but it’s baked into the worldview and illustrated by the story,” Corcoran said in an email.
Still, Corcoran says Red State Mars is a “deeply political” novel.
“There are multiple different family “tribes” (subcultures) on Mars circa 2150 and they have to work together, despite their political differences, to fight Chinese totalitarian aggression,” he said in an email interview.
Among the subcultures depicted on Mars: Pacific North West / “SpaceX “gray” culture sysadmins and programmers (Mackenzies),” Texan “new south” social / political elites, Appalachian Scots Irish “working class hell raisers,” and upper-middle-class Mexicans in northeastern Mexico.
With its mix of subcultures provoking both cooperation and tribal tensions, Red State Mars is influenced and inspired in part, Corcoran said, by Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise, inducted this past year into the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
His setting and world-building is also interesting.
“Red State Mars is set a century after World War III, which destroyed both the Chinese Communist Party and the current American political system. In the wake of the war, a new and even worse Chinese polity – the Unitary Sovereign State of China – arises, as does a better American polity – a minimalist state hewing close to the original American ideals,” Corcoran said.
“But this new American state can’t defend its borders from Chinese-backed raiders as well as it might like, and so a band of Texans abandons Earth for Mars…but the Unitary Sovereign State of China is expansionist, and eventually harries them even there. The Texan colonists have to overcome cultural factionalization and mistrust born of elitism and anti-elitism to establish a governance structure in order to fight back against an adversary that uses Brave New World style genetic engineering to enslave its subject populations.”
Red State Mars isn’t the only Corcoran novel likely to see publication this year. He’s also writing other novels, including several with a Young Adult focus, he said. So stay tuned – and return to the Prometheus Blog for more author’s updates, including about Corcoran.
For further reading
Check out the Prometheus Blog appreciation by William H. Stoddard of Corcoran’s The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation.
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