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Drawn to the machinery behind ordinary life.
Mars has spent a career asking what technology makes people believe, who gets to explain it, and where responsibility goes when a system becomes too large for any one person to see.
Language first. Technology soon after.
Journalism turned those interests towards information technology just as computers were moving out of specialist environments and into everyday life. The machinery was interesting. What it was doing to people, organisations and the language of the future was even more so.
Inside large organisations
With his wife, Mars later set up a healthcare communications and custom-publishing agency. They worked with many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, producing publications for healthcare professionals and patients. Mars oversaw much of the editorial work, making complicated medical and scientific information accurate, useful and readable.
The work also offered a close view inside enormous global institutions. Intelligent people could all be doing their jobs properly while responsibility quietly disappeared between departments. Nobody had to be a villain for the outcome to go badly wrong.
Systems, policy and accountability
That interest later found another outlet in Renewable Heating Hub, the publishing and media platform Mars founded. Its journalism, books and broadcasting have taken him deep into government policy, regulation, technical systems and the gaps where accountability tends to disappear.
The book that waited ten years
The first idea for Latency arrived more than a decade ago and refused to leave. Writing a novel remained on the list while work and life occupied the available hours. Two years ago, Mars stopped waiting for perfect conditions and began using the time that actually existed: evenings, weekends, journeys and late nights in bed.
Why Latency?
Latency brings those threads together in a literary science-fiction thriller with philosophical suspense and momentum. Technology matters, but people matter more. At its heart are identity, institutional power and what happens when modern life requires trust in systems no individual fully understands.
It is Mars Mlodzinski's first novel, built from a lifetime spent writing, editing, publishing and asking awkward questions.