HIGH
Menu

A science-fiction thriller

HIGH

ADAM ROBERTS

A daughter taken to Mars.
A mother determined
to bring her home.

An extraction specialist. A billionaire’s fortress.
No obvious way home.

The assignment

Beyond the reach
of Earth’s courts.

Elleke Boerhaave has left one of the wealthiest and most dangerous men in the solar system. He has taken their eleven-year-old daughter, Patt, to Mars.

There, no custody ruling on Earth can touch him.

So Elleke hires Hi. His job: cross interplanetary space, break into her husband’s fortified compound, and bring her daughter home.

He’ll collect his fee when he returns.

Life on the red planet

On Mars, freedom
is expensive.

The rich live in pressurized mansions. Below them, workers crowd into settlements carved into the canyons, paying off debts that can outlive them.

In Deadwood, Hi recruits Che Siti, a mother separated from her own children. She has no combat training. He needs her for something else: getting a frightened girl to trust them.

For Che Siti, the job offers a way home, too.

The approach

They know
he’s coming.

Boerhaave’s men watch the arrivals. His compound bristles with surveillance, weapons and guards. Outside its walls, the cold and thin air can kill just as efficiently.

Hi and Che Siti will make the approach on foot.

Getting inside is only part of the problem. Even if Hi reaches Patt, every conventional route back to Earth leaves them exposed.

Hi seems remarkably untroubled by this.

Screen adaptation

For film
and television

Logline

When a billionaire kidnaps his eleven-year-old daughter and takes her to a fortress on Mars beyond any Earthly extradition treaty, the girl’s mother hires extraction specialist Hi to cross interplanetary space, penetrate the compound, and somehow bring the child back to Earth.

AttachedStefano Sollima

ScreenplayElijah & Ezra Bynum

Rights and PDF inquiriescontact@neotextcorp.com
  • An action lead with a dry, unsettling wit.Hi meets overwhelming odds with meticulous preparation, resourcefulness and unnerving calm.
  • A world that changes the action.Low gravity, fragile habitats and the lethal atmosphere shape the dangers—and the solutions.
  • Human stakes beneath the spectacle.Two mothers separated from their children give the mission an emotional center.
  • Science fiction with another layer.Roberts builds a larger mystery beneath the extraction story, with discoveries that transform what we think we know.

The novella

Read
the book.

A seemingly impossible rescue. A mercenary with more than one reason to take the job.

Enter Adam Roberts’s ruthless, darkly funny vision of life on Mars.

Read the book
HIGH by Adam Roberts — the original pink, ochre and blue book cover

About the author

Adam Roberts

Adam Roberts is the author of Salt, Gradisil and Yellow Blue Tibia, all shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His honors include the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the BSFA Award for Best Novel.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

NeoText

Contact NeoTextcontact@neotextcorp.com