I Walked on Mars — Book 1
A realistic anticipation novel about the conquest of Mars, written as a human, technical and prospective narrative. This first volume covers selection, training and then departure for Mars.
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David was neither an astronaut, nor an engineer, nor an elite soldier, nor a pilot. He was an ordinary man, selected by Hermes, an artificial intelligence capable of seeing what human recruiters no longer saw: inner resistance, practical instinct, potential, the ability to survive when procedures collapse. Beside him, Stella, an American nurse, carries another kind of strength within her: the strength that heals, gathers, protects and refuses to give in.
From one man’s will is born a program of space conquest and 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 then the most demanding training. The novel follows the birth of a crew called to leave Earth to found the first human colony on Mars. But behind protocols, simulators, suits, centrifuges and survival courses, another story begins: that of two beings whom everything seemed to separate, and whom a silent AI brings closer with almost disturbing precision.
Hermes sees everything. Hermes hears everything. It observes the cracks, the impulses, the silences, the restrained gestures. It does not manufacture love, but it understands before the humans themselves that David and Stella can become stronger together than apart. The mission to Mars then ceases to be only an entrepreneurial, scientific or political adventure: it becomes an intimate, human, dangerous trial, in which love becomes almost 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 overwhelming possibility.
This book does not imagine a distant future… It tells what our generation could see within its lifetime...