Earlier this week, Gina Minks posted an article called “The 1st Story I Never Wanted to Leave.”  John Price also posted about this today.  I thought the concept was fascinating, and I wanted to share something in this vein.

I was an avid reader when I was growing up.  I was often reading something, and I loved hanging out in the Sci-Fi section of my local Barnes and Noble. 

The book that really stands out to me is Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson.  I don’t remember exactly when I read Red Mars for the first time, but the first book in the Mars Trilogy was extremely immersive.  I could imagine myself riding along with John Boone, Maya Toitovna, and the rest of the First 100 as they explored the red planet and built a new home.  Although this series did continue with two other books, by the time I got to Blue Mars, I started to lose interest in the series as the red planet became more earth-like and the feel of the story changed from colonizing a new world to politics and building a government.

I reread Red Mars earlier this year, and one thing that stood out to me was that there was so much I missed when I read it as a teenager.  I didn’t have the life experience to really understand the characters or the situation they were in.  As a teenager, I saw it as a cool story about people living on another world, but as an adult, I could relate to the characters better and understand the situation they went into.  I could also better appreciate the language that Robinson used.

This book made a huge impact on me, and there are days where I want to sit down and write about intrepid explorers trekking across the surface of Mars.