"(c) Grassy Planet" by Jared Greenleaf

Idea 1: Shakespears’ “The Tempest”, (see link). This idea was given to me by Jake Wyatt. And I am going to see it through, to the point that it becomes my idea.

Idea 2: Mars + Grass + Ropeway = © “Grassy Planet”.
Two things lead to this: the first being my fascination with Mars (Mars terra-formed), and every sci-fi movie or story that has explored the idea of life on Mars – even David Bowie’s song, mind you, voted as greatest song of all time, was playing a lot on my ipod when I was thinking about this idea. Mars has the deepest and longest canyon in the solar system. It also has the tallest mountain (Mon Olympus).

And I can’t imagine a cooler world than one housing a canyon so deep and long you can clearly see it from space. And a mountain so tall that it breaks through the stratosphere and into space – I mean, imagine that, walking to space.

(Pictured above is Mon Olympus. The central edifice of this shield volcano stands 27 kilometers ( 88,580 ft) high above the surface of Mars-or three times the elevation of Mount Everest above sea level and 2.6 times the height of Mauna Kea above its base.)

Now, I didn’t just think: “Mars, cool, lets do a story on that thing”, it actually came by way of problem solving. And that’s the second (actually the first) thing that leads to this idea. I wanted to do a story about ropeways. I wanted ropeways to be the primary mode of transportation on a planet. But how could I pull that off? Well, I thought if the ropeway were somehow protected, it could allow people to travel over a dangerous surface. A surface with hidden dangers, monsters even.

And that since no one walks the space between cities anymore that everything would be over grown, the planet would be “grassy”. And when I thought of an over grown and green planet, I thought that it would be cool if the planet was once called the “Red Planet”, which lead me to think about a terra-formed mars. Obviously there is a lot more I can talk about, but I’ll end this idea here.