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.

"A Richard obviously based on Gere and a Julia obviously based on Roberts are called back to work reshooting — on Mars — the botched ending to a science fiction movie, Martian Dawn. Julia, in an earlier life an exotic dancer at the Baby Doll lounge in Phoenix, has just finished work on Cat Fight at the OK Corral, the story of 'supermodels on the loose in Manhattan.' Richard, a devout Buddhist, has been following his dharma (and his spiritual teacher, Rinpoche) around the country, bedding women on the side. Meanwhile, two of the sequestered inhabitants of a self-contained biosphere experiment in the Arizona desert are sneaking out at night for pizza, while Russian and American astronauts, two women and two men, orbit overhead flirting with each other. And elsewhere in the comically off-kilter universe of this larky debut novel from poet Friedman (Species), a man in a bar is obsessed by Monstro, a pet baby whale who has been freed into the Atlantic. Friedman (by day a commercial law attorney in Denver) skewers Hollywood pomposity, environmental idealism, spiritual empowerment — and the surprising banality of a human outpost on Mars — with prose that's a marvel of economy, sardonic without excess sarcasm and rife with deadpan humor. Slight but sly, this is a scrumptious literary trifle." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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