By the year 2080, the US-Mars program has had a functional self-sustaining base on Mars for about 20-years. Cargo ships move back-and-forth with goods, a journey that takes just more than a year. Our hero is adventurous cargo-pilot Guy Reisling. The novel spans this five year period, during which time the Eastern Russian-Islamic/Ukrainian/Hindustan space-program alliance on Earth, secretly launch their own ships to Mars, to take control of the US base there by force, and provide for themselves. The US Mars-base operations, with about 300 people who live and work there, is peaceful and scientific, for research-only. The base has no weapons, and functions year-round in the hot-and-cold, very thin, almost non-existent Mars atmosphere, an air tight high-tech fortress at the feet of the towering Tharsis-Montes mountains. Guy Reisling and his crew, with Vandenberg Mars program director Lynn Rodgers-Smith, Mars-base commander Bojji-Than, and other colorful characters, have a year to prepare for the advancing Russian-Islamic ships. Earth-based Russian program launch site commander Rudolph Terchenko, Mars attack leader Prokov Keeje, and 300 soldiers in 'walker suits', are also pitted against the US-Mars ships sent to save the base, led by experienced space-pilot Winton 'Kick' Berle, but arriving months later. At the same time, international intrigue back home on Earth, creates an East-West conflict between the competing space-programs, to shut down further hostile Eastern launches.
About the Author: Michael Julian Phillips is a 54-year old retired journalist-artist, a Fifth-generation Californian whose career has included many projects for film-video, stage, numerous children's books, newspapers and magazines, and music. Julian was born in 1957, at Saint Mary's Hospital in Long Beach, California, the son of John William Phillips, an Army Radio Man who served in World War 2 and the Korean Conflict, and his young German born bride, Brigitte, an orphan girl whose childhood included witness of Hitler's murderous rule, and Russian military incursion into East Germany. Julian's grandfather, Edward Julian Phillips, known as 'Jules', was a Salinas area farmer and crop scientist, who was schoolyard pals with famous California writer John Steinbeck. Julian has worked in freelance and small newspapers since about 1973, and was editor of a countywide weekly tabloid newspaper, year 2000 to 2003, in San Luis Obispo County, California, where he spent most of his life, and grew up on ranches and farms. The writer earned a BA degree in Journalism/Communication from San Jose State University in 1981. Julian has been married for 25 years to his wife, Carol Lynn, and his son Preston Laverne Phillips is now an art student in San Francisco.