Caitlín R. Kiernan’s novella The Dinosaurs of Mars is not extinct

A recent entry in the LiveJournal of SF&F author Caitlín R. Kiernan reveals that her stand-alone novella The Dinosaurs of Mars, a work-in-progress for which award-winning artist Bob Eggleton did a concept sketch in mid-2007, is not extinct and may be completed in 2010. Meanwhile, here’s a humorous excerpt from an October 2006 entry in Kiernan’s journal:

Yesterday was pretty evenly divided between e-mail (of which there was a veritable hillock) and The Dinosaurs of Mars. I'm trying to actually begin writing the novella, but I keep getting sucked into additional research. I spent a couple of hours yesterday reading the various crack-pot assertions posited by Richard C. Hoagland via his The Enterprise Mission website. I think I spent the most time on the pages devoted to "proving" his claim that Saturn's moon Iapetus is an artificial world. All this stuff is directly relevant to The Dinosaurs of Mars, but I still feel like a fool reading it. I actually find myself feeling sorry for Hoagland. It's obvious that he believes these things, and he believes them with passion, and they are wonderful fictions. If these things were true, if there was the science to back him up, what a wonderful lot of marvels we'd have. I can forgive his desire to believe, just not his sloppy logic, self-delusion, and endless ad hoc reasoning as he tries to dodge falsification. Also, it should be noted that Hoagland has abused the ellipse, both in print and online, as no other person writing in the English language has ever dared.

Richard C. Hoagland is the author of The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever (5th ed., 2002).