‘Our man on Mars’

“WITH fiction you can allow your inner thoughts to roam into uncharted waters without apology and without losing your friends because, well, it’s only fiction.”

Keith Cornwell, a member of Dirleton Kirk, East Lothian, is feeling a little ‘out of this world’ at the moment.

That’s because his book, Our Man on Mars, has just been published and is receiving quite a bit of attention.

“I’ve always been interested in ‘other worlds’ in every sense,” he said. “The similarity of the sandy regolith, a layer of rocky material that covers bedrock, on Mars, to the desert outposts I visited in the UAE, made me wonder about life in a Martian Colony.

On another planet, the idea that ‘God so loved the world’ would have to be revised well beyond the confines of our traditional beliefs. The two great questions, where do we come from and where do we go, become alarmingly real when the earth is a wee speck in the evening sky.”

Our Man on Mars imagines life on the first human colony on Mars, and how a slightly maverick Church of Scotland minister, Steve McKay, who applied for a posting to a ‘remote parish’ gets a bit more than he bargained for.

It’s a very human story, but with Keith’s background, there are lots of technical details that add a strong layer of realism to the book. You won’t find spaceships blasting each other, or strange aliens trying to befriend humans in it. It’s a much more humanity orientated imagining of the first colony, full of people from different races and religions, and how they find ways to exist and work together for the betterment of all mankind.

Keith firmly believes that space colonisation will become a reality for mankind soon.

“We are only a few years away from the time when the first humans will travel to Mars to establish a colony there. That’s a mind-blowing step for humanity with repercussions for us all and not least the religions of the world. As an engineer and scientist schooled in the art of logic, I’ve been following the technical aspects of space travel for some years and believe a visit to Mars is now achievable.”

“What’s not been addressed are the human issues and the pressures extended space travel will put on human beings. Will they kill one another, will their remoteness turn them into robots with no soul or sensitivity? Even though experiments have been done where people have lived together in a secluded environment, no one really knows how people will react to life on a different planet, years away from Earth.

“Exploring the development of this first colony using the same art of logic but through the eyes of an ordinary person, albeit a fictional Christian minister, leads to revelations for us all. I am also fortunate in having a son in the USA responsible for electronic aspects of space flights and a daughter working on human aspects of computer science to keep me up to date.”

“Steve, the first Chaplain to the colony on Mars, is recommended for the post by the Church of Scotland partly because in a moment of enlightenment they wish a presence there and partly because Steve is a somewhat troublesome recruit,” laughs Keith.

“In his ‘remote parish’ he has to deal with all these questions and in so doing discovers he is not alone but on a path of revelations which leads to surprisingly practical discoveries about the presence and diffusion of God throughout the universe. He is also no saint, decidedly naughty indeed, and this gets him into all sorts of trouble much to the concern of the terrestrial authorities (‘what on Earth is he up to now?’). As a result, life on Mars becomes a reality, but not quite in the way that the scientists imagined, and this raises fundamental decisions about the future of humans on Mars.

“However, in the end, his ministry to the colony becomes its saving grace and establishes the need for a minister.”

Keith was born in Abingdon, Berkshire.

“I don’t have any particular or strong memories of Abingdon, as our family frequently moved around in the South of England,” he says. “My father was a school headmaster and, together with my home-loving mother, life revolved around school and work in the week and Baptist Chapel on Sunday.

“School was enjoyable because I was happy to drift along somewhere near the bottom of the class. ‘Could do better,’ parents and teachers kept saying, but I saw no advantage in doing so.

Keith Cornwell

We are only a few years away from the time when the first humans will travel to Mars to establish a colony there. That’s a mind-blowing step for humanity with repercussions for us all and not least the religions of the world.

“I can see now that this must have really annoyed them because their work ethic was centred on life being a competition, one I was expected to join. Indeed, having failed the so-called 11-plus, I later took a 13-plus and entered Rickmansworth Grammar School.

“I left immediately after O-levels and started a five-year apprenticeship at a local engineering company. I really enjoyed this period, cycling five miles to work, clocking-in each morning and making good friends.”

Chapel was not such a happy experience, though.

“Chapel, on the other hand, was less enjoyable and consisted of obediently sitting through two long services in our reserved pew. I felt I was living two lives; one in the real world with banter and pub darts (something I was quite good at), and the other listening to long sermons by venerable old men, always men, on the ‘right’ way and the fate of so-called ‘worldlings’.”

He admits though, you could always find a silver lining.

“It occasionally had its lighter side,” he says.

“Chapel services were the essence of religion. Normal and loving family life with its support and kindnesses was played out in the real world beyond the reaches of the Chapel. My father, like his father before him, never saw a Sunday without hearing a couple of sermons.”

Keith found himself thoroughly enjoying his engineering apprenticeship, much to his delight.

“The apprenticeship included day release to attend Watford Technical College where I surprised myself and even more my parents by winning the class prize.

“I was offered a place at City University, London on a so-called thick sandwich degree course with alternate years rather than short periods in university.

So I became a proper student on their Engineering with Philosophy course living in a hall of residence with all that that implies and had a great time.

“Chapel was not a part of it any more, but it did lead to me meeting my wife, Sheila, when on holiday with chapel-going family friends, whom I accompanied one Sunday out of respect. My studies went well although I was the only one in the class to continue philosophy. A particularly interesting part of this was called ‘studies in logic,’ a discipline that has declined over the years but was extremely useful to me in my career and life in general.”

Keith muses: “I suppose I should have stayed with the company who had seen me through the apprenticeship and degree course but I was lured away by a job offer in research on heat transfer which then led to a PhD in London at which time I branched out into an academic career.

“Four years later, armed with my new doctorate and accompanied by Sheila and our baby son, Robert, I moved to Scotland as a lecturer at Heriot-Watt University. We settled well in East Lothian and loved the countryside and being part of the community in North Berwick and Gullane. The family grew with the arrival of our daughter, Tessa, and among a wide range of busy family activities we included church.

“The Church involved at the time was the former Blackadder Church (now merged with St Andrew) in North Berwick where Steve in the story had lived. Our family settled in well with its lively younger groups and kindly minister, Dr Donald McAlister, all so different from the strict Baptist chapels of our youth. I was invited to became an Elder and joined the Session without, to my discredit, thinking through all the implications.

“I believed in God but my acquaintance with the discipline of logic led me to some concerns about the auxiliary concepts to which I seemed to have signed up. For the moment though this was immersed in the practicalities of Church ‘duties’ and helping with the youth group.”

Keith’s career though, was starting to take off.

“My academic career progressed along the well-worn path with development of a research team, international conferences, publishing a textbook, professorship, Dean, and such things. As the cutting edge of my early research faded and the brain cells started to drift I moved into management heading one of the University’s Schools and later their new campus in Dubai.”

“This assignment by the university to head up the new campus was instrumental in seeding the concept of the book. Dubai has every culture and religion possible wrapped up in an ultra-modern city where anything goes. Sheila, having many local commitments, decided to stay in Scotland, so I had plenty of time to get to know Dubai and folk from other cultures and religions. It was there I realised that God, the mind of the universe, is all-pervading, way beyond the limits we so easily impose.”

It seemed though, that Keith had found his own version of a ‘remote parish’.

“Oddly enough,” he said. “While in Dubai I attended on Friday mornings (their ‘Sunday’) one of the dozen or so churches in Jabel Ali, an area allocated by the authorities long ago for the Christians to worship.

“Starbucks, knowing that most Christians are coffeeholics, offered free coffee after the services so I met folk from every denomination. At the time I was also Session Clerk of Gullane Church back in Scotland as the Session had declined my resignation on the grounds that my assignment to Dubai was only for a couple of years. Consequently I arranged everything including all the church duties remotely by email and it became a sort of virtual church for me.”

Photo: iStock

Our Man on Mars could probably be described as a‘ lockdown’ book, even though the idea had been bubbling away in Keith’s mind for a long time.

Our Man on Mars could probably be described as a ‘lockdown’ book, even though the idea had been bubbling away in Keith’s mind for a long time.

“The book has been several years in coming and could no doubt be improved, but, with its completion during lockdown and heightened awareness of the possibilities of visiting the planets in the future, it seemed the right time to publish,” he says.

As any author will know though, the road from page to print can be a long and frustrating one.

“Actually, getting it published involved a long haul emailing the draft manuscript to publishers who were unsure whether it was science fiction or not – the characters involved were just too ordinary! Eventually Austin Macauley came up trumps although Covid delayed it several months.”

“Living in the wee village of Dirleton, with its friendly community, being members of its beautiful Church (portrayed on the cover with a rather large image of Mars behind it) and receiving its kind and caring ministry is an idyllic base from which to philosophise.

“I began to wonder – would I leave such a peaceful and pleasant existence and go to Mars? To face who knows what? To be six months of travel away from the Earth and to be entirely dependent on the engineering ability of man to keep me alive, or even breathing?”

Pragmatically, Keith realised his answer was yes.

“Yes,” he said. “I enjoy a challenge, but maybe because we all have to leave this Earth sometime in the future, and, as Steve, the Church of Scotland’s man on Mars eventually discovers, it’s for a very different but very homely existence elsewhere.“