The Caves of Mars: Book One: In the House of Jor-Taq

Ancient Mars. A world of sharp contrasts, of fantastic passions, of violence and desire.

These are the memories of Paul Morgan, a mental patient on contemporary Earth, as dictated to his doctor. Describing a Mars unknown to science or history, they relate the story of Grae-don, he without parents, who rose from the sea on the island city-state of Pella'mir, in the fabled long ago days when Mars had seas, cities, and life. Barbaric, colourful life! Warriors and warlords, pirates, cannibals and monsters, all confront Grae-don as he struggles to survive in this strange, immensely ancient world that existed long before history dawned on Earth--or else only in the deluded mind of a mental patient!

Gregory K. H. Bryant, the eldest son of a Marine Corps Drill Instructor, travelled extensively throughout the western United States during his childhood. Graduating from High School in 1971, he left California in 1974, equipped with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, and two paperback volumes ("The Poems of Emily Dickinson" and "The Sermons of John Donne"). Taking a year to hitchhike across the country to the east coast of the US, he picked up various odd jobs along the way, washing dished, loading trucks, and so on, often sleeping outdoors or under freeway overpasses. He arrived in Washington DC in 1975. In 1978, after ten years working in restaurants and other such minimum wage fare, he began a career with the Smithsonian Institution, starting as a planetarium aide. After thirty five years of service he rose to manage the digitization projects of the Office of the Registrar at the National Air and Space Museum. His poetry, fiction, essays and art appeared widely in the underground small press 'zines of the 1990s, and later in the virtual pages of Schlock! Webzine, where his novel The Caves of Mars was first serialised. He lived with his wife, the artist Llori Stein, in Falls Church, Virginia, until his death from cancer in 2018.