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As a long-term advocate of space colonization I’ve always been drawn to Mars, not by adventure stories but by the idea that ordinary people may someday live there. So this was the theme of my first novel. I wrote it before we had gone to the moon, though it wasn't published until 1970, after my better-known book Enchantress from the Stars. When in 2006 I revised it for republication, little about Mars needed changing; mainly I removed outdated sexist assumptions and wording. Yet the book still hasn’t reached its intended audience because though meant for girls who aren’t already space enthusiasts, its publishers persisted in labeling it science fiction rather than Young Adult romance.
This is a short but comprehensive overview of why we need to colonize Mars and the problems that must be solved in settling it. We would already be there, Petranek points out, if we had preserved and improved the technology that got us to the moon. In his view, NASA has accomplished little of value during the hiatus. But now private companies are making real progress toward turning humankind into a spacefaring species, which is essential both as insurance against disaster on Earth and because “when the first humans set foot on Mars, the moment will be more significant in terms of technology, philosophy, history, and exploration than any that have come before it.” I recommend this book not so much for the information it contains as for the inspiration it offers.
It sounds like science fiction, but award-winning journalist Stephen Petranek considers it fact: within 20 years, humans will live on Mars. We'll need to. In this sweeping, provocative book that mixes business, science and human reporting, Petranek makes the case that living on Mars is an essential back-up plan for humanity, and explains in fascinating detail just how it will happen.
It's clear that the race is on. Private companies (driven by iconoclastic entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson); Dutch reality show/space mission Mars One; NASA and the…
I have an amazing daughter in my life, and I want there to be more books for her to read that feature strong, admirable, and good women in leading roles. That’s one of the things I keep an eye out for in the books I read as well as the books I write.
While The Directorate follows a fairly typical path for sci-fi thrillers, its characters are what stand out. The Earth and human colonies on the moon and Mars have united after years of war and created one military/police force. Lieutenant Theresa Gannon is a loyal, young officer suddenly thrust into stardom as the person who foiled a terrorist attack. But as a broiling rebellion heats up and Gannon is now rubbing shoulders with generals and politicians, she starts questioning where her loyalties truly lie.
The year is 2223. Under The Directorate, established after the Great War of Unification, there has been stability, tranquility, and prosperity for all the citizens of the Triad. One of the keystones of the society is the equality of all the peoples of Earth, Luna, and Mars. Lt. Theresa Gannon and her cohorts in the IDS are committed to preserving the peace throughout all the worlds of the Triad. But Gannon has seen fissures begin to appear when a group of daring Earth-Firsters seek to assert their rights as descendants of humanity's first homeworld. Follow Lt. Gannon as she is…
Also known as “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet,” I’m a Princeton professor who has been embedded with NASA missions for two decades as a social scientist. I’ve observed missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and beyond; consulted with NASA as a sociological expert; and written two books, with a third on the way. Growing up, I always loved science and technology, but not just for the ideas: for the people behind the findings, the passion they bring to their work, and the ways in which culture and politics play a role in how science gets done. Writing about this, I hope to humanize science and make it accessible for everyday readers.
If this book were episodes of Friends, it would include The One Where They Landed On Mars Before the Internet Was Invented, The One Where They Mixed Up English and Metric Units, The One Where A Lander Became A Crasher, and The One Where Everyone Fell In Love with Cute Robots.
Conway is the official JPL historian, so he has unprecedented access to the archives and the people behind NASA’s ongoing quest for Mars, and he lays each mission out with its political stakes and highs and lows in painstaking and rich detail. Reading this book reminds me that exploration is just as much about the people as it is about the machines.
Although the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has become synonymous with the United States' planetary exploration during the past half century, its most recent focus has been on Mars. Beginning in the 1990s and continuing through the Mars Phoenix mission of 2007, JPL led the way in engineering an impressive, rapidly evolving succession of Mars orbiters and landers, including roving robotic vehicles whose successful deployment onto the Martian surface posed some of the most complicated technical problems in space flight history. In Exploration and Engineering, Erik M. Conway reveals how JPL engineers' creative technological feats led to major breakthroughs…
I am a professional artist and musician, and I owe a huge debt to Philip K. Dick. I started to read his works at a very young age (I believe I’ve read most everything he’s written at least twice), and my love of his work has continued throughout my life and he has been the greatest inspiration to my music, writing, and art. I felt so influenced and indebted that a created a comic book to honor him and to tell my stories and ideas that have populated my imagination as a result of his books.
I am a huge fan of dreampunk books and this book helped create the genre. Reading it took me into a dreamworld that lead into another dreamworld and then yet another.
As with all Philip K. Dick books I was left wondering if I ever did return to the reality I believe I live in. I also found the character of Palmer Eldritch himself to be one of my all-time favorites.
In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world.
But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D. But could the permanent state of drugged illusion it induces be part of something much more sinister?
As a long-term advocate of space colonization I’ve always been drawn to Mars, not by adventure stories but by the idea that ordinary people may someday live there. So this was the theme of my first novel. I wrote it before we had gone to the moon, though it wasn't published until 1970, after my better-known book Enchantress from the Stars. When in 2006 I revised it for republication, little about Mars needed changing; mainly I removed outdated sexist assumptions and wording. Yet the book still hasn’t reached its intended audience because though meant for girls who aren’t already space enthusiasts, its publishers persisted in labeling it science fiction rather than Young Adult romance.
Most realistic fiction set on Mars is about small exploratory expeditions. There is surprisingly little available about colonization that doesn't bring in the discovery of intelligent inhabitants or a lost civilization, or at least traces of one having existed in the past. And the few novels with no fantastic elements tend to focus on political controversy. So I was happy to find this recent book that depicts what a colony on Mars might really be like. It's based on the board game "Terraforming Mars," which I haven’t seen, but doesn't depend on any knowledge of the game. The story is part murder mystery and while it’s intended to be entertainment rather than serious literature, it will be enjoyed by readers who are excited by the idea of settling a new world.
Mars is the new frontier for humanity, as we launch an epic saga of inspiring planetary exploration set in the award-winning Terraforming Mars boardgame
Mars, 2316. The recently created Terraforming Committee arbitrates the dramatic development of Mars by powerful rival corporations. When a rogue asteroid crashes into a research center and kills its lone technician, the fragile balance between corporations is shattered. The World Government's investigation into the accident reveals a multitude of motives, while a corporation insider stumbles on a dark conspiracy. Two Martians with very different agendas must navigate a trail of destruction and treachery to uncover the…
A child of scientists, I grew up planning to be a physicist, but became a novelist instead. Since I straddle the worlds of science and literature, I’ve always valued good science writing. It’s a rare talent to be able to inform and excite the general reader while not oversimplifying the science. I particularly thrill to books about exploring other planets and star systems, because when I was a teenager I read a lot of science fiction, and wished more than anything that someday, when I was much older, I would find myself on a rocket headed for, say, a colony on Mars.
Zubrin’s book proposes a tantalizing what-if. Steve Squyres’ Roving Mars presents readers with an exciting and suspenseful blow-by-blow account of an awesome thing that actually happened: the successful landing on Mars of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the jaw-dropping success of those lovable little robotic beetles. It was hoped that the rovers might function for as long as 90 days. Opportunity performed for 15 years. (Spirit, that slacker, phoned it in for only 6 years.) Squyres, an astronomer, was the principal investigator for the mission, and he proves to be an enormously appealing guide: enthusiastic, excitable, grateful, humble. One of the many likable things about this book is that Squyres lets us see how scientists in charge of a years-long multimillion-dollar one-shot mission with a high chance of failure are every bit as superstitious as village peasants: Squyres makes sure to wear his tattered good-luck jeans to every…
Steve Squyres is the face and voice of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. Squyres dreamed up the mission in 1987, saw it through from conception in 1995 to a successful landing in 2004, and serves as the principal scientist of its $400 million payload. He has gained a rare inside look at what it took for rovers Spirit and Opportunity to land on the red planet in January 2004--and knows firsthand their findings.
As a long-term advocate of space colonization I’ve always been drawn to Mars, not by adventure stories but by the idea that ordinary people may someday live there. So this was the theme of my first novel. I wrote it before we had gone to the moon, though it wasn't published until 1970, after my better-known book Enchantress from the Stars. When in 2006 I revised it for republication, little about Mars needed changing; mainly I removed outdated sexist assumptions and wording. Yet the book still hasn’t reached its intended audience because though meant for girls who aren’t already space enthusiasts, its publishers persisted in labeling it science fiction rather than Young Adult romance.
I'm not supposed to list two books by the same author, but they are very different since one is nonfiction and the other fiction, and given the dearth of realistic stories about colonizing Mars I think this one should be included. As Zubrin is an expert on the scientific and technological aspects of travel to Mars, they are described as accurately as our present knowledge permits, though of course the situation on Earth and the details of the envisioned expedition are wholly fictional. What sets it apart from similar novels is its presentation of the idea that merely exploring Mars is not enough—for the sake of humanity's future families must live there, and some people, despite differing and seemingly - irrational grounds for their conviction, will instinctively know this.
When the first human exploratory mission to Mars is left stranded on the planet, five scientists must rely on their own ingenuity and skill to rescue themselves, in a debut novel by the scientist-author of The Case for Mars. Reprint.
The first movie I saw in the theater was Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Since then, I’ve been obsessed with tales of good versus evil and coming-of-age stories that mix futuristic settings with real-world mythology and history. I moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career in hopes of swinging my own lightsaber one day. Along the way trained in martial arts and Shakespeare. Playing D&D with industry friends led to me writing my own sci-fi adventures and mixing elements of all those types of stories I loved growing up.
“Mythology, Shakespeare, Cthulhu, oh my!” Not as well-known as his most famous sci-fi work, Hyperion, Dan Simmon’s Ilium is just as impressive. The book bounces back and forth between characters of Greek myth reenacting the events of the Trojan War on the Martian plains, humans reawakening to their purpose on a post-apocalyptic Earth, and a pair of philosophizing robots, all in the shadow of a dark god coming to devour them all. The first in a duology, Ilium weaves its disparate storylines to a climax where readers solve the riddle of how it is that Lovecraft’s monsters are living alongside Shakespeare’s characters and Homer’s epic poem in a world that has suffered a mysterious cataclysm. Any reader of mythology and literary allusion in their speculative fiction will hungrily devour this book.
Taking the events and characters of the Iliad as his jumping- off point, Dan Simmons has created an epic of time travel and savage warfare. Travellers from 40,000 years in the future return to Homer's Greece and rewrite history forever, their technology impacting on the population in a godlike fashion.
This is broad scope space opera rich in classical and literary allusion, from one of the key figures in 1990s world SF. Ilium marks a return to the genre for one of its greats.
Also known as “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet,” I’m a Princeton professor who has been embedded with NASA missions for two decades as a social scientist. I’ve observed missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and beyond; consulted with NASA as a sociological expert; and written two books, with a third on the way. Growing up, I always loved science and technology, but not just for the ideas: for the people behind the findings, the passion they bring to their work, and the ways in which culture and politics play a role in how science gets done. Writing about this, I hope to humanize science and make it accessible for everyday readers.
If you think you have a crazy schedule, imagine what it would be like to go to work every day on Mars, while living and working on Earth.
Mars’ day is thirty-six minutes longer than ours, so your standing daily meeting at 9am will begin tomorrow at 9:36am, the day after at 10:12am…and eventually, at two in the morning. I loved learning about how the Mars Exploration Rover scientists at NASA ate endless ice cream and checked their Mars-time watches in an attempt to turn their own bodily clocks off and stay awake despite constant jetlag.
Reading about how they turned themselves into robots, especially during our own “Zoom-era” of constant meetings and emails, I wonder how much the demands of our contemporary, hustling, always-on workplaces do the same to us.
An examination of how the daily work of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers was organized across three sites on two planets using local Mars time.
In 2004, mission scientists and engineers working with NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) remotely operated two robots at different sites on Mars for ninety consecutive days. An unusual feature of this successful mission was that it operated on Mars time—the daily work was organized across three sites on two planets according to two Martian time zones. In Making Time on Mars, Zara Mirmalek shows that this involved more than a resetting of wristwatches; the team's struggle…
I have wanted to live on a spaceship since I was eight years old, watching reruns of Star Trek on the local UHF channel. At eight, I couldn’t have told you why. The Enterprise, by the twin miracles of sci-fi tech and TV budget, has the same gravity, air, and people (mostly) we have right here on Earth. Later, I came to understand the appeal: on the Enterprise, the only true enemy is space itself, unfeeling and impersonal in its hostility. The only hate in space is what we bring with us, and the silent, empty gulfs between worlds remind us that we can choose to leave it behind.
For someone who’s read every book in the Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin series, it’s hard to find an age-of-sail book that has anything truly new to add.
Or so I thought until I picked up this book. It asks the question, what if Jack Aubrey could have sailed a wooden frigate to a Barsoomian version of Mars? The obvious answer, of course (and the one in this book) is that Britain would have extracted every plank of Marswood, ounce of Marsspice, and bag of Marstatoes it could get its imperialistic little hands on.
That’s Arabella’s world, where cannons boom in the interplanetary air currents, and spaceships are driven by sail power. As a fan of both sea stories and space operas, I’m there for it.
From David D. Levine comes Arabella the Traitor of Mars, the newest book in the Adventures of Arabella Ashby series.
Hail the conquering heroes!
The tyrant, Napoleon, has been defeated with Arabella and the crew of the Diana leading the final charge. But, victory has come at a tremendous cost. Britain’s savior, Lord Nelson, has not survived the final battle and the good people of the Diana must now return to London as both heroes and pallbearers.
At last husband and wife, Arabella and Captain Singh seem to have earned the attention of great men, ones who have new uses…
