A realistic anticipation novel about the conquest of Mars, written as a human, technical and forward-looking narrative. This first book follows the selection, training and departure for Mars.
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David was not an astronaut, an engineer, an elite soldier or 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, and the ability to survive when procedures collapse. Beside him, Stella, an American nurse, carries another form 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 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 the most demanding training. The novel follows the birth of a crew called to leave Earth and found the first human colony on Mars. But behind the protocols, simulators, suits, centrifuges and survival courses, another story begins: that of two people whom everything seemed to separate, and whom a silent AI brings closer with an almost troubling precision.
Hermes sees everything. Hermes hears everything. It observes the flaws, 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 and dangerous trial, where 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 deeply moving possibility.
This book does not imagine a distant future… It tells what our generation could see within its lifetime...