The Last Wolves of Mars: New Edition

Man pictures himself the center of the universe. When he imagines the future, it is two-footed intelligences that rule. But what about the past - before man arrived to dominate? What about four-footed intelligence? For that matter, what about intelligence with no feet, no body? Take Mars, for example... The Last Wolves of Mars takes up that story, from the middle of a long history of four-footed civilizations. Life was not easy on our cold sister planet, even back then - but there was life and conflict...especially between brothers. And life itself had enemies. Read the first of The Wolves of Space trilogy to find out what happened to the Great Wolves of Mars.

About the Author :
As in the childhood of countless other boys and girls, an early memory is standing on the roof of my house, looking up to the purpling evening sky. I hold my arms up and hope desperately a flying saucer will come and take me away. This book was born out of a dream I had at that time. In a life of twists and turns, I have written comedy, stage and screenplays, a poetry collection, and books of humor. I have devoted the principal hours of my last 30 years to worldwide charitable activities. The inspiration for this book was, believe it or not, the Opera (see the Prologue.) This was an actual dream. In the dream, I am walking into a vast and echoey opera house chamber, carved from stone in the Great Cliffs of the Great Canyon on Mars. The most distinct part of the dream is my commiserating with myself, "How unbelievably bored I am, having to go to the opera!" The dichotomy of image and emotion (opera on Mars vs. bored out of my brains) was enough to wake me up with my own laughter. I immediately wrote down enough to be able to later reconstruct it. My dream vision was not wolves, but other Martian creatures, which I later decided to shape as Wolves. It was many years later (decades) before I actually began to write the book. The writing took a long time because the characters kept demanding to speak with their own voice, to determine their own destinies, which did not at all align with my deliciously elegant and pre-considered plot. As other authors will surely attest, battles with your book characters do not have clear winners and losers. They end usually like World War I with a failed League of Nations and an Armistice which spells big trouble. That is, all the parties get in their Word, but the sum result is a mishmash, a schmegana. (If that word does not exist in Yiddish, it should!) The Great Author intends as his conclusion something clear and definite: 'The Napoleonic Wars conclude, Napoleon sent off to a distant island, and the Allied Forces remain in glorious command of the field.' Oh, if it were only like that. Instead, the Small Author (me) gets... 'Venusians have flown in at the last moment in the Mother Ship which takes out the Allied cavalry, and they substitute a Venusian for Napoleon.' Now what does one do? Thusly, our characters, our creations, bedevil us with their questions and constant conniving for room, for limelight, for the Last Word. Publication of a book then must be a kind of 'binding arbitration.'