Le sabbie di Marte

Anyone who criticizes this novel for being too old understands little about science fiction!
“The Sands of Mars” is a novel of education, adventure, travel and exploration. No tragic situations, no tension put there to increase adrenaline... Pure and simple narrative of the daily life of a colony on a world that never was but may come to be.
A work that also serves as a social study, of what science meant -think!, big spaceships in imaginative alloys, orbital space stations but not even the idea of using a network of artificial satellites around Mars for GPS or weather, because Sputnik was on the way and no one thought of space stations in that sense, except as big hangars or touristic resorts.
Clarke was thinking of tracked vehicles for Martian soil, explaining their merits and demerits in detail, but without thinking of a system of solar cell-powered ground-based beacons to signal roads, and so on.
That of this novel is a fascinating and optimistic future: the most tremendous of wars had been over for six years, and in science fiction there was a desire to move forward, there was a desire to elevate human exploration. “The Sands of Mars” is a comfortable story to read, coherent, where the inevitable naiveté does not snatch laughs of derision.
It is lovely, because it takes itself seriously without trying to lecture; its theme is ‘where there is a will there are no obstacles,' and the hero can still walk into the dawn with a happy heart and a clear conscience.