But while realistic, it doesn’t make for a good story. This makes sense, in a way, because he is after all only a novelist, not a scientist. Even towards the novel’s climax, when he makes a world-changing discovery, it’s others to do the real work. In Clarke’s work, the SF writer watching his ‘predictions’ be proven wrong time after time is rarely anything more than an observer.

It’s one of the reasons I never get on well with a Stephen King novel. It’s always difficult to make writers interesting as characters, especially when the writer carries so many of the author’s qualities. There’s an old saying ‘write what you know’, but The Sands of Mars is proof that this is not always a good idea.

It doesn’t help matters that Gibson is a spectacularly bland protagonist. Meals, excursions to the wilderness, and even plane crashes are handled with the same matter-of-fact, understated tone. Even when we get to MArs, the pace barely picks up. And while reading crew interactions passes the time, it’s hardly stimulating material. It takes almost half the book for Gibson to get to Mars, let alone do any investigative journalism. This is a hard review to write for one simple reason: Not a lot happens in this book. But with the GA Masterworks range sitting temptingly on the shelves, I decided this was an oversight to be corrected. Despite being an avid SF reader, and considering myself fairly knowledgeable about the genre, I have never before read an Arthur C. Secrets that will affect not only Mars, but the future of human civilisation. Not that he’s a propagandist, of course.īut Mars is hiding a secret. Science Fiction author Martin Gibson has received special permission to travel to the red planet, to document the lifestyle of the colonists and to promote further investment. In the early 21st Century, humanity has reached Mars.

The secret by arthur clarke