The Sands of Mars by Arthur C Clarke
The introduction says that this is Clarke’s first novel, and it shows. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it was written in the 1940s and it spends an inordinate amount of time describing what space flight is like and how everyone else has got it wrong.
A small colony has been established on Mars, and Earth decides to send Martin Gibson, journalist and author, to experience it first hand in order to “keep the dream alive” for the general population now that the colony is getting very expensive to maintain. I find having an author as the hero of the book irritating as a plot device. Yes, you’re supposed to “write what you know” but really, find something else. I’m not interested in battles with your agent or literary critics or any other inside jokes. It just doesn’t work.
Still, once the book does start moving, about 2/3 of the way into it, it’s not a bad story. All this space travel description stuff has been done to death in both earlier books and contemporary movies. The plot involves life on Mars, but it’s not necessarily what you think. However, it does seem to be a sort of recurring theme in Clarke’s works, for example, with both 2001 and the Rama series.
Some of the book is quite dated in a strange way. All of the women in the book are secretaries or administrators of some kind. Even the cheesiest sci-fi movies of the period had women scientists, why not here as well? The author also did all of his writing on a typewriter with carbon paper. (He often complained how difficult it was to use thin carbon paper in a weightless environment.) This puzzles me as teletypes and recorders had been invented years and years earlier. Surely the man who foresaw communications satelites could have applied a little imagination in this area.
But it doesn’t detract materially from the story. It’s an okay read, good for a hot Saturday afternoon.
