Synopsis "Mars Shall Thunder Audio Script"
Longform (5 hour) audio drama created by Wolf DeVoon, adapted from his novel Mars Shall Thunder. It might be 1% of 1% that want to hear five hours of a sci-fi audio drama, no matter how nicely the show is produced. The 1% of the 1% is also the basic story of Martian colonies, put there by the wealthiest people on Earth. Fifty years from now, they wanted a place to escape population growth and the threat of social instability. Surely it is modeled on today's thinking among the super-rich who built private fortresses in multiple redoubts around the world. But conceive a world of 20+ billion people in the predictable 21st century. There won't be a square inch of security or social stability on Earth. Combat of one kind or another will be daily grisly routine. Plutocrats won't tolerate that kind of world. They will escape it. The 1% of the 1% control quite a bit of money, about 1/3 of liquid world wealth stashed in government and investment-grade corporate bonds. If they wanted to, they could leverage those bonds into a $2 trillion project to build a colony on Mars, far from Earth and its taxes, wars, crime waves, collateral damage and waves of starving migrants. The first thing to build on Mars is an industrial mining colony, to produce water, steel, plastics, heat. Make it spartan but adequate for 1000 workmen who we hope will grow in number by bringing 1000 women to farm, feed and bed the men. Order production of construction materials for a new dome, a shining capital on a sunlit mesa, about 50 miles from the first colony. Connect them with a railroad line. Send dome-spinning robots to assemble a nine square mile geodesic shell. Furnish it with every luxury imaginable. Wide avenues. High-rise condos. Mansions. Gardens. Golf course. Pools and fountains. Refined formal shopping centers with hairstyling, tailors, and advanced medical care. Mars is a carbon copy of Earth in 1999 (a modern "Gilded Age"). A fawning, overfed middle class in Big Red serve plutocrats who own everything. The sullen working class drink and gamble and fight over women in a ghetto 50 miles away. Militarized cops control travel of laborers who commute from the mining colony and return each night after long construction shifts, topping out another luxury skyscraper in Big Red. Might have gone on forever like that, an extremely pleasant city for rich people and a dark dust blown valley for dirty workers who have no manners. But suppose there was a miscalculation about proved water resources, and M Corp can't pay interest to leveraged bondholders because exports have to be stopped. The plutocrats on Mars might lose control of their sunlit citadel in bankruptcy. So, they order minions to fake a disaster - wrap the planet in a layer of radioactive debris. Screw the bondholders and Space Command. Shoot down whatever they throw at us. It's action adventure when you mix in an undercover Federal Marshal sent to investigate reports of something strange happening on Mars. The 1% must stop him -- but the woman who falls for him is a greater threat. As a team they're unstoppable.
