Jack of Harts

Jack Hart’s grandmother is proudly noted as being named Amanda Carter, and in my stories is the first governor of Mars in the 21st century. Yes, that was an allusion to the John Carter of Mars stories. It is also a nod towards Stargate SG-1, where Amanda Tapping played Samantha Carter. You might say that I crossed the streams of fandom a bit when I created that name and character. She was never what you called a face character. She did show up in some stories I wrote, but was never the main character. I kept writing her as the profession astronaut or the reserved governor as her siblings or children were getting into all kinds of trouble. And in some of my stories, the cybernetic intelligence Dixie talks about all the trouble her Carter boys got into, and basically tells Jack that he’s a chip off the old block. The key thing is that the Carters were generally offscreen or secondary characters, cousins and aunts and uncles that Jack remembered vacationing with on Mars. I never intended to have any of the Carters be what you might call main characters. Oh, the tangled webs we weave for ourselves.