Greetings honored readers. I hope you enjoy reading the adventure story Theodore Grayson and the Devil Men of Mars. The story is set in the early twentieth century. The world of Theodore Grayson differs from the world we live in two important ways. I, the humble author, ask that you suspend your disbelief for these two counterfactuals:
1. In September 1914, the German Army defeats French and British forces decisively in the first Battle of the Marne. World War One as we know it never happens. Germany and the Central Powers are victorious in the brief 1914 War, and the United States remains neutral. Afterwards, Germany and Great Britain remain locked in a cold war.
As a consequence of defeat, France is forced to cede all of her overseas colonies, including the small nation of Gabon on the west coast of Africa. There German scientists find evidence of a natural nuclear reactor that formed from uranium ores and ground water many millions of years in the past.
2. The planet Mars is closer to that imagined by American astronomer, Percival Lowell, than Mars as we know it today. Around the turn of the twentieth century Lowell published several books with detailed drawings of the Red Planet made from his telescope observations showing canals on the surface. In these books he proposed that only intelligent Martians could have created the structures he claimed he observed. Until space probes made close observations beginning in the 1960s many scientists believed that Mars indeed harbored abundant life as did Earth.
