Staying Alive

The author of this novel is English and, if you aren't English, you might be puzzled by some of the words she uses. If you remember that "nowt" means "nothing" and "owt" means "anything", you'll have no trouble.

Lex Simms seems to be a typical twelve-year-old. He lives near Leeds, in Yorkshire. Actually, he's an alien, like the rest of his family. His Outer Space relatives live in Dao Valley, near the rim of enormous Hellas Basin on Mars. Although they are related, they look nothing like each other. The Martians are descended from ancient reptiles - tiktaaliks - who, with their necks and primitive limbs, formed the link between fish and reptiles long, long ago.

Martians can do things that normal humans can't. For instance, they can change their bodies into any other creature's shape at the drop of a hat. Plus they can fly through Time and Space by detaching their spirits from their bodies. However, the one, critical thing they can't do is to produce the fresh water they need to stay alive.

Preemo, the Martian leader, detached and flew to Earth many times in his long life, eyeing our planet as a good place for his people to live. In 1965, he sent six members of his family here on a mission to breed with humans and produce children who would build spaceships, come to Mars, and terraform a small area of Hellas Basin.

This is where Lex comes in. He and his older cousin, Ryan, learn that they have barely twenty years in which to persuade the right people to start work on Mars. If it takes any longer, there won't be any Martians left to benefit from the terraforming.

Lex's mission is taking shape but then the Gods of the Cosmos play dirty and try to halt his progress. They toss a comet into Space. The icy rock spins at dizzying speed towards Mars and looks like hitting it in 2014. Even if there is no impact, astrophysicists fear that a near miss could draw the Red Planet's atmosphere away, making Mars even more uninhabitable than it is now. The Martians are doomed. How can it be otherwise seeing that, instead of twenty years, Lex has fifteen months at the outside in which to rescue them?

Ah, but the Gods of the Cosmos forgot he is not your average human. Lex risks his life in his attempt to bring his folks to Earth where they can safely stay alive.