I Walked on Mars: A Novel

A realistic near-future novel about the conquest of Mars, written as a human, technical, and forward-looking story. This first volume covers the selection, the training, and then the departure for Mars. * * *David was neither an astronaut, nor an engineer, nor an elite soldier, nor a pilot. He was an ordinary man, selected by Hermès, an artificial intelligence capable of seeing what human recruiters could no longer see: inner resilience, practical instinct, potential, and the ability to survive when procedures collapse. At his side, Stella, an American nurse, carries within her another kind of strength: the one that heals, gathers, protects, and refuses to give in.From one man's will is born a program of space conquest and the colonization of another planet, for the first time in human history. Then come the selection of the first colonists, the first interviews, the psychological tests, and finally the most demanding training sessions. The novel follows the birth of a crew destined to leave Earth and found the first human colony on Mars. But behind the protocols, simulators, spacesuits, centrifuges, and survival courses, another story begins: the story of two people whom everything seemed to separate, and whom a silent AI brings closer with almost unsettling precision.Hermès sees everything. Hermès hears everything. He observes the flaws, the impulses, the silences, the restrained gestures. He does not create love, but he understands before the humans themselves that David and Stella can become stronger together than apart. The mission to Mars then ceases to be merely an entrepreneurial, scientific, or political adventure: it becomes an intimate, human, dangerous trial, where love almost becomes a condition of survival.I Walked on Mars tells the conquest of Mars not as an abstract dream, but as a concrete, technical, perilous, and deeply moving possibility. This book does not imagine a distant future... It tells what our generation could witness in its own lifetime...Book 1 of a quadrilogy.To extend the universe of the novel, a photo book, I Walked on Mars - The Author's Vision, gives faces, settings, and images to this adventure. A technical bible, Arcadia - Manual of the First Martian City, develops the scientific, urban, and forward-looking foundations of the first Martian city.

Pagina's: 717, Paperback, Independently published