Dark Side of the Heart
This one didn't come easily, but the idea was yet another that took hold and downright refused to be ignored. It was a rather simple one, at that: basically, take ERB's classic John Carter of Mars and treat him as Kurtz from Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now, with a former comrade sent across the stars to properly... deal with him. The actual execution of bringing it to life took a bit more legwork, spanning roughly four years to pound out this single 12,000 story. But the initial idea was so compelling, I wanted to take my time and get it right.
Aside from the two most obvious influences, I was also greatly inspired by Norman Spinrad's excellent The Iron Dream, which tells of an alternate history in which Adolf Hitler immigrates to the US after WWI and becomes a pulp science fiction author. Spinrad wrote the novel to illustrate the underlying fascist tendencies present in so many "Boy's Adventure" stories, and that was something I was itching to explore, but reconfigure to fit through the framework of post-9/11/War on Terror anxieties. The title also lent itself to comparisons with the seminal Pink Floyd album, and considering Dark Side of the Moon dealt heavily with coping with a friend's mental illness, it wound up fitting rather nicely with the story's themes. I tried reading it while putting the album on simultaneously, hoping for a little Dark Side of the Rainbow action... I'll leave it up to the reader to decide whether or not that leads to any interesting results.
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