Thomas Kent Miller is a former employee of NASA and a retired magazine editor. Most of my life I’ve had a great passion for Mars movies—invasions from Mars and trips to and explorations of Mars. Due to my interest in many different film genres, I picked up numerous books focusing on the those genres: I have books about dinosaur movies, mammoth widescreen epic spectaculars, spaghetti westerns, Japanese science fiction movies in general and Godzilla movies in particular, Sherlock Holmes movies, Hammer horrors, and so forth. But I always hoped for a volume solely about Mars movies.

           Finally after decades of waiting patiently, I decided I’d write one myself.  As it turns out, my Mars movie book, which is entirely about movies devoted to Mars (as opposed to sci-fi movies) was the first ever such book published in the 106-year history of Mars movies. My interest in Mars movies began in 1953. I was eight years old and in third grade. Two marvelous things happened that year. My older brother took me to two movies, the sum experience of which affected my life dramatically. In February we saw The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms at the Manor Theater on 25th avenue in San Mateo, California. I’d never seen anything like this! A giant dinosaur destroying a city right in front of my eyes! The movie was magical to my child mind because even then I was pretty clear that everything around me was ordinary and prosaic, and a giant monster destroying a city was certainly not ordinary. Then came October and The War of the Worlds. If seeing a dinosaur destroying a city in black and white so thrilled me, can you imagine how I felt about Martians destroying the whole world in brilliant Technicolor?

          I've have published three novels and numerous short stories, novellas, and literary essays on both sides of the Atlantic My interests include cinema, Victorian and Edwardian history and fiction, 19th-century Hudson River School landscape paintings, and multi-speaker home theater. I live in Southern California.