Customer Reviews

The Sands of Mars (Signet)

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3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
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The Sands of Mars is a joy - a lightweight, easy-reading, far-sighted hard sci-fi novel that addresses the broad topics of interplanetary travel and colonization, development and terraforming of the hostile extra-terrestrial Martian environment. One could quibble, I suppose, that the science is slightly dated and there were certainly a couple of predictions that have since been proven incorrect but, for my money, the story is made all the more exciting and amazing for the degree to which it is now, fifty years later, approaching reality and the possibility of achievement!

Martin Gibson, a celebrated science fiction writer, has been invited to be the first and only passenger on the maiden voyage of Ares, the first interplanetary vessel that will be devoted to passenger travel. A simple thesis indeed for a marvelous novel - Gibson's job is to report back to earth on the trip and his perceptions of the progress that the first colonists have made in their establishment of a flourishing base on Mars. Unlike Asimov's "The Gods Themselves" which addresses the philosophical and psychological impact of living in an alien environment on Earth's moon, The Sands of Mars restricts itself almost exclusively to addressing the hard core physical and scientific issues. Not to suggest that makes it less interesting or a weaker novel - that's just the side of the sci-fi coin that turned up when Clarke flipped it, I suppose! There certainly wasn't any shortage of topics - oxygen, air pressure, weather, heat, buildings, local travel (both on the planet and to Mars' moons, Phobos and Deimos), interplanetary travel back and forth to Mars, emergency preparedness, government, effective utilization of limited manpower, biology and zoology (or at least Clarke's rather exciting vision of what is possible), communication and more!

I also appreciated the fact that, while the science was straightforward and not particularly complex, neither was it dumbed down or patronizing. For example, when Ares first left Earth's orbits to begin the long trip to Mars, it was described as follows:

" ... she would pull away out of the orbit in which she was circling and had hitherto spent all her existence, to swing into the long hyperbola that led to Mars."

I haven't been a big fan of Arthur C Clarke's other more open-ended esoteric novels such as "Against the Fall of Night" but I certainly enjoyed this one!

Paul Weiss

I purchased "The Sands of Mars" years ago after I read another novel (The Songs of Distant Earth) which I adored.
I really enjoyed reading "The Sands of Mars". It was an unusual read since Mr. Clarke had written the novel many years ago - when many assumptions at that time about the moon and planets have been proven false today. In fact, Mr. Clarke mentions that in the preface of my book - and asks the readers to see how many they can spot (like plants that grow on the Moon and Mars, to name a few). These distractions should not at all take away from the novel. It's actually a simple and straightforward story. A writer (of Science-Fiction), named Martin, decides to go to Mars - which is still in it's infancy of colonialism. The story then relates of the colony's attempts at maintaining the colony on Mars as well as their attempt at terraforming the planet. It's a good story, that many should enjoy!

I read the book about 23 years ago and have re-read it time and time again. What it lacks sytlistically it makes up for in sheer joy of discovery and achievement by its characters on a Mars that was a valid extrapolation from knowledge at the time (c.1950) of writing. Good SF is about real people in a world that really might be - hence the personal secrets that are discovered along-side the planetary ones as the novel progresses.

Mars officially is a cold, lifeless world, but the author Arthur Clarke has endorsed recent claims of life evidenced in space-probe photos. He might be mistaking hype for science, and geology for biology, but he might also have "The Sands of Mars" in the back of his mind too.

Although not one of his absolute best stories, The Sands of Mars is a classic work of science fiction and one which has held up well over time. It starts out a little slow at first, but once the story gets a bit into the Mars landing part of the book it increasingly picks up steam. Once again, in the climax of the book, Clarke has a seemingly impossible thing happen and describes it in such a way as to make it believable. Maybe that is the mark of a good science fiction writer. Also, the characters in this book, unlike some other works of Arthur's where the characters tend to be flat and somewhat dull, are quite believable and likable. Certainly you should read 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rendezvous With Rama, and Childhood's End first, but if you are an Arthur C. Clarke fan then you should definately pick up The Sands of Mars.

On a sidenote, ignore the reviewer below who refers to this novel as "Part of Clarke's one novel per planetary body pulp series". This is simply a ridicilous statement. First off, ACC DOES NOT have one novel per planetary body, and he, being of the leading and perhaps pioneering practicioners of hard SF, certainly does not write pulp. Indeed, if you read this book as part of the omnibus Prelude To Mars, you will read in the preface to Prelude To Space that that novel took Arthur 20 days to conceive and write, which is a record he has never since come close to equalling. Yeah, sounds like pulp to me. Sure. Forget the negative commentary and enjoy the book.

Arthur C. Clarke's second novel, "The Sands of Mars", published in 1951, differs greatly from his first novel. Whereas "Prelude to Space" was focused on the technical details of space travel, Clarke puts much more effort into character development in "The Sand of Mars". That is not to say that Clarke ignores the technical as much as he did the character development in his first novel. He has some interesting discussions on creating livable conditions on Mars for man, and he floats an idea which he would return to in "2010: The Year We Make Contact".

The story centers on Martin Gibson, a science fiction writer who has been invited to take a trip to Mars so that he can write about it. He is to ride aboard the Ares, which is a ship configured to start taking passengers to Mars. A fair amount of the story takes place on the Ares, as Gibson becomes acclimated to space and Clarke adds several incidents to the trip to keep the reader's interest while developing the characters. Clarke then plants the seeds for the big secret which Mars is keeping from Earth as Gibson arrives and is shown around the largest settlement.

The reader becomes acquainted with Mars through the eyes of Gibson and the events which occur around him. Using these events Clarke builds the reader's expectations for the secret, and also throws a few curves into the story itself, some of which aren't all that believable. In the end, the secret is revealed and along the way the reader has met some interesting characters, but all in all it is not one of Clarke's better works. There are just too many coincidences both in terms of character surprises as well as storyline ones to make it very believable.

Arthur C. Clarke's THE SANDS OF MARS was written in 1951 and almost every aspect of the novel betrays the fact that over half a century has passed since its publication. What we now know about the fourth planet contradicts sharply with what's presented here. The pacing and style of the story are much like other science fiction writings of the period. And, indeed, the very attitude of the book feels very old-fashioned. But any potential reader shouldn't be scared off by the book's age. Clarke is one of "Big Three" of science fiction and his writing is strong enough here that something that would be regarded as a historical curiosity from another author still has a solid enough foundation to interest today's reader.

We're told the story from the point of view of science fiction writer Martin Gibson who has been sent to a colony on Mars in order to better explain what life is like on this new world through written dispatches to the people back on Earth. The Mars colonies are still in their infancy; opinion on Earth is divided between those still excited about mankind's spread across the solar system and others who feel that Mars is simply an unnecessary drain on Earth's money and resources.

Clarke spends far more on world-building and describing his future history than he does on advancing the plot, and the story-line itself never turns out to be anything likely to send the blood racing through one's veins. Indeed, it's one hundred and twenty pages into a two hundred and twelve page book before we get a hint at what the main conflict is. However, to look for an exciting, knuckle-whitening plot is to overlook the real purpose of the book. Clarke is much more interested in theorizing about how space travel will work, how a human colony on a hostile planet could exist and how humanity can flourish in the solar system.

Having a science fiction author as the book's protagonist (and one who had an early novel titled MARTIAN DUST) allows Clarke to make quite a few meta-textual jokes about himself and his genre. At one point he is able to make a sly joke about the science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s by pointing out that "today's" more scientifically literate audience is able to accept the technical details for granted and to simply move quickly into the story. However, from my modern point of view this "quicker" novel still seemed very hung up on scientific explanations and slow to get to the plot (which is not a criticism, simply an observation of how science fiction was told at that time) .

Of course, the other main difficulty to the modern reader will be the fact that very little was known about the red planet when Clarke put pen to paper and therefore many of his working assumptions turned out to be completely incorrect (no fault of Clarke's, of course). For me, the most difficult example of this was the descriptions of the terrain of the fictional Mars. My mind kept visualizing the landscape of Mars as it appears in the pictures we would later see from the Viking and Phoenix rovers. Then my mental image would be jolted by a throw-away mention of the thick, lush vegetation that the characters encountered on the surface. It was occasionally enough to jar me out of the flow of the story, which is a shame but not something that can be blamed on Clarke.

Other things have changed since the early-1950s. I did a double take every time someone would pull out a cigarette and light up -- on a spaceship of all places. This is also a future where typewriters and fax machines are the technology of the day. And for old-fashioned attitudes, there are a number of vaguely disturbing (although faint) echoes of European colonialism in the book's concluding chapters.

Still, it's probably bad form to criticize a book that's old simply for being old. The story may be slow moving, but it is fun and Clarke was at his best when spinning out all kinds of ideas for how scientific knowledge could be applied in practical ways. While it's not as challenging as some of Clarke's more focused pieces, it is a very interesting example of one of his earliest novels. This isn't the best place to start reading Arthur C. Clarke, but if you've enjoyed some of his other novels you'll find things to like here.

For a science fiction book written in the late 1940s, this is an amazingly undated piece of work. Oh, sure, there are a few anachronisms ~ vacuum tubes and the possibility of vegetation on Mars are the most obvious to my non-scientific mind ~ and we are not as close to having a colony there at the end of the Twentieth Century as Clarke expected, but almost nothing else is out of place. The plot itself is impeccable; Clarke has created likeable, fun, believable, cogent characters of whom it is a pleasure to read. Martin Gibson is a Terran writer journeying to Mars to report on the successes there; his discoveries, including the major one that life on a frontier is what he wants. Mars is on the cusp of starting to make itself independant of Earth by the success of a secret project that Warren Hadfield ~ Chief Executive ~ has had scientists working on: Nothing less, in fact, than the complete reformation of the planet is contemplated. There are surprises a-plenty and mountains of pleasure in this, Clarke's first great novel. It deserves more renown than it has.

"The Sands of Mars" is an underrated masterpiece by the master of science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. This is the story of the first human colonies on the planet Mars. In this story Clarke brilliantly weaves the personal saga of the story's protagonist against the panorama of Man's successful colonization of Mars. Clarke's speculations are dazzling, and as always, he weaves a touching personal story into a grander story of Mankind's expansion into the universe.

There are, of course, the inevitable anachronisms in a story written more than 40 years ago. Clarke's protagonist uses a typewriter (typing on actual paper while in a spaceship) and they fax his manuscripts back to earth. Probably they used slide rules too.

If some of Clarke's science in this novel is a bit out of step with what we now know (or think we know) about the planet Mars, it is not so far out as to detract from this story. This one has stood the test of time, and will not truly be dated until humanity has actually colonized Mars. In fact, "The Sands of Mars" accomplishes in a few hundred pages what Kim Stanley Robinsons' Red/Green/Blue Mars series never accomplishes in thousands of pages--Clarke creates a plausible and believable scenario for humanity's conquest of Mars, and tells an interesting story to boot. In Clarke's novel the people seem real, the science seems real, and the story moves along smartly at all times.

The discerning reader will return to this novel more than once. Highly recommended.

This is the first AC Clarke book I ever read. Live on Mars in a bubble, and then unveil a covered up alien device that could create oxegeon. There was a recent movie that was amazingly close to the story of this book. Total Recall?

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a sequence of novels in the 1950's and 60's each had a different celestial body as it's locale.

The Sands of Mars is of course the Mars book in this sequence. It is pulp science fiction in a short novel format.