Auditions for the Volunteer Mission to Mars is a collection of short stories about migration and displacement. I explore the homelessness or rootlessness experienced by those who are products of globalization, ranging from tourists and travelers to refugees and those indentured by economic or social forces to live in homes that are not of their choosing. I also explore the environmental phenomenon of ecosystem degradation as a result of people's displacement—as humans make new homes in unfamiliar terrain, the landscape is ruptured by their presence. The environmental backdrop serves to amplify the problem of human rootlessness in an uprooted world. The stories attempt to preserve—with fiction serving as a self-aware artifice—fractured places, memories, languages, and ecologies.