Steven McCullough, a CEO for a financial services company in Des Moines, was always interested in science-fiction novels, but one day he decided he was tired of reading the same thing over and over again.

“I am a big fan of sci-fi but thought a lot of it was retread, and I can be very critical of other sci-fi, so I thought I’d stop being just a critic,” he said.

So McCullough wrote “Returning to the Garden,” a novel that predicted the recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander and gives some interesting explanations for NASA’s failures to successfully land on the red planet.

The book uses facts from NASA and other space programs, McCullough said, as well as a large amount of speculation and imagination to create a story centered on the “apparent” loss of the Mars Polar Lander.

McCullough’s book seems to coincide with the current high level of interest in Mars. McCullough said he did his own market analysis and decided interest in Mars exploration was growing.

Now, with two Mars movies set to be released in the coming months, McCullough believes he’s hit the nail on the head.

“Mars is a real hot topic, and even Hollywood has taken an interest,” he said.

McCullough, who will be promoting his work at a book signing at the University Bookstore on Feb. 25, describes his two main characters in “Returning to the Garden” as average people who stumble upon “what may be the greatest cover-up the world has ever known.”

McCullough said his main character is the builder of the Sojourner Rover for the Pathfinder Mission, and when it makes an unbelievable discovery, the U.S. government immediately swoops in to cover up the truth and keep the main character from finding out what it means.

Although he said he didn’t know what to think about the actual disappearance of the Mars Polar Lander, McCullough noted the plot of “Returning to the Garden,” which outlines a deep government conspiracy and a connection between Mars, human evolution and spirituality, is not meant to read as non-fiction.

Russell Lavery, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, agreed that the thought of the Mars Polar Lander’s disappearance actually being a government cover-up would be pretty hard to believe.

“Are we really supposed to believe that a lot of people, I mean these aren’t just military and government people, a lot of them are scientists, that they would all just shut up?” Lavery asked.