Fiction. This spare, funny fiction debut offers a playful imagining of the lives of a fictional movie-star couple, Richard and Julia, who are reminiscent of the millionaire and prostitute played on-screen by Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in the Pygmalion update Pretty Woman. While they are involved in shooting the science-fiction movie Martian Dawn, their lives intersect with those of an unlikely assortment of other characters, including a would-be sea captain, a film producer and his therapist, a cosmonaut and her astronaut boyfriend, two members of the Biosphere team, and a Tibetan Buddhist rinpoche. "Reading MARTIAN DAWN is like watching an ultracool comedy of the future where familiar movie types develop into idyllic interplanetary characters in order to make yet more movies. It's as though Star Trek, Pretty Woman, and There's Something About Mary had been sublimated in an unlikely fusion that is both comforting and hilarious"-Harry Mathews.