BookOs: This book is listed with stories about Mars at Red Mars. Mary Griffith runs the Empress of Mars a very English pub on Mars. I had feared this was a sword-and-planet approach to Mars, but no a highly original approach, concentrating on a Mars that is of little interest to major world powers and becomes the focus of misguided British corporate enterprise. Was the name chosen in honour of the utopian writer Mary Griffith (1772–1846) who wrote Three Hundred Years Hence?