What occurs when humanity lastly builds a civilization on one other planet, and instantly repeats its outdated errors? That query drives ‘The Second World’, the sharp, satirical debut from author Jake Korell. Set in opposition to the rise of a breakaway Martian nation, the story follows Flip Buchanan, son of the colony’s strongest chief, as he navigates two chaotic a long time of scientific breakthroughs, political theater, and cultural rising pains on the Purple Planet.
Korell grounds his humor in actual near-future science. His Mars is not a distant fantasy however a logical extension of the conversations occurring proper now in house exploration, from private-sector enlargement to the ethics of off-world settlement. By protecting the know-how believable and the human conduct all too acquainted, Korell creates a world that feels each futuristic and uncomfortably recognizable.
Area: ‘The Second World’ makes use of Mars as each a literal and symbolic frontier. What drew you to Mars particularly, and the way did you stability actual space-science plausibility with satire and speculative fiction?
Korell: I’ve all the time beloved something associated to outer house. It prompts the farthest reaches of our creativeness—the vastness, the bizarre physics, the unknown. The longer term has that very same built-in sense of marvel, the identical limitless prospects. However in storytelling, if you happen to push too far forward or veer too far-off from what we have truly noticed within the universe, issues can grow to be summary and fewer relatable. A near-future Mars felt like the right center floor, particularly since persons are already planning to colonize. It is a complete different planet, however nonetheless our next-door neighbor—comparatively talking. Constructing a world on the Purple Planet gave me immense inventive freedom whereas protecting all the things tethered to our personal expertise…
My purpose was to maintain the world scientifically believable, then bend it simply sufficient to make it humorous. One thing which may sound absurd to us now, however would really feel fully regular to the characters residing in that actuality.
Space.com: Your story imagines a newly sovereign Martian nation grappling with political identity, culture, and legacy. How did real conversations in space policy, colonization ethics, and planetary nationalism influence your worldbuilding?
Korell: Worldbuilding has always been my favorite part of the writing process, and I love taking real issues from our world and weaving them into a place that’s entirely invented. When you start looking at space policy and colonization ethics, you realize how unsettled everything still is. No one “owns” Mars or the Moon. Even on Earth, we have borders and land because we say so, and the authority only comes from the ability to enforce it. Things are more nuanced now, but that’s still the foundation everything rests on. And in early America, colonizers took land from Native peoples simply because they could.
My Mars colony quickly emerged as the perfect allegory for the thirteen colonies, and the void between planets just became a much, much bigger Atlantic Ocean. The pattern was familiar. In colonization, first come the explorers, then the investors, then the politicians. A SpaceX-like corporation will almost certainly reach Mars first—acting as both explorer and investor, in this case. And the eventual Martian independence movement will be more like a corporate revolution. A union strike in spacesuits. But it’s all the same pattern, just with different branding…
Space.com: The book spans decades of technological and societal evolution on Mars. What future tech, space-travel concepts, or colonization challenges did you feel were essential to ground the story in believable near-future science?
Korell: Twenty years is a long span to cover, and technology can change dramatically in that window. That’s part of why I grounded the story more in the characters than the gadgets. Human behavior is the one constant. If the people feel real, the future around them can stretch a little without breaking.
I also didn’t want to bury the story under pages of scientific exposition. It’s harder to land a joke between equations and formulas. The future tech used in the story is based on ideas already theorized in scientific and sci-fi circles: holograms, space elevators, VR, alien contact, cloning, even faster-than-light travel through a spacetime distortion bubble. I certainly bent some rules and twisted others, but the foundation is always something plausible within speculative science.
Throughout the book, I poke fun at certain technologies, but I’m really satirizing the sci-fi storytelling tropes more than the science itself. The first Mars colony certainly won’t be a giant glass-dome biosphere, but it’s such a classic visual that it carries a kind of cultural shorthand. Using these sorts of things allows the reader to orient themselves quickly so the satire and story can take center stage.
Human nature—specifically greed—is the biggest obstacle. We can take humans off Earth, but we’re still bringing our instincts, anxieties, and ambitions with us. You can’t code that out of a species.
But my view isn’t totally pessimistic. If you look at history, we’ve improved ourselves quite a bit, little by little. Focusing specifically on the United States, putting politics aside, most of us can agree that the Founding Fathers creating a democracy was a major step up from living under a monarchy. And we’ve been refining and adjusting ever since. Mistakes were made, and continue to be made. It’s not perfect. And most likely, no futuristic space society will be either. But we’re improving.
Progress requires a marketplace of ideas. And for that to exist, people can’t all be cut from the same cloth. Diversity of thought brings innovation… along with bad actors, dumb ideas, and the occasional catastrophic oopsie. You get the full spectrum. You have to take the good with the bad.
The “bad” in that equation is almost always greed. If the incentives in space aren’t aligned with building a better world, if profit outweighs purpose, we won’t suddenly become enlightened just because we’re on a new planet. Whether it’s Earth, Mars, or some asteroid we’re mining, the challenge is the same: if the money doesn’t point us toward a utopia in space, it’s not going to happen.
Space.com: Your influences range from grounded sci-fi voices like Andy Weir to more absurdist storytellers. How do you approach blending scientific realism, speculative imagination, and humor while still respecting the seriousness of space exploration?
…I fully believe that a space settlement is inevitable. Humans have always been explorers, searching for better places, better materials, better systems—in other words, progress. Throughout history, people have fought progress, but they always lose. The people who invested in horse-drawn carriages weren’t thrilled about automobiles, but cars weren’t going to disappear just to protect the carriage-industrial complex. There was a much more lucrative automobile-industrial complex to consider. In the same way, settling Mars isn’t hypothetical. It’s in motion. People are actively working toward it right now. And once we settle Mars, we’ll look to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. After that, we’ll start eyeing planets outside our solar system. It’s just a matter of time horizon.
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