Over at Science Fiction Trails, I got the stupid idea to try something a little different and do a special Martian issue. I thought it would be fun. That didn't work out as I had hoped. Writers have always had a tendency to spew stuff out without much
regard to the editorial needs of a publication, but this time I was simply astonished. We said we wanted Martians, as opposed to little green
men. We got a bunch of stories with little green men–not one of them even
mentioned Mars. We said stories needed to address the reason the Martians were
invading Earth (if that was the concept), but not one of them did. And we told
people to put "Martian submission" in the subject line of the email–not one of
them did. And the writers all seemed to think they were going to get
published–not one of them did.
And we could also point out that nobody even tried
to do anything original, like going TO Mars [ala Jules Verne] or deal with
microbial life from Mars [which is a real scientific theory]. No, just spew out
some mindless crap.
We were not amused with the sad pool of
submissions. Some projects just don't work out. This time, we thought Mars
stories would be fun and different. We were wrong.
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