In the meantime, Spencer has formed an attachment to Irene, Hadfield’s daughter. Gibson discovers that Spencer is his son. This project, and related others, are being kept secret from Earth. It is later revealed that the plants are being cultivated by researchers to enrich the oxygen content of the Martian atmosphere. They appear to have limited intelligence by human standards and are vegetarians, living on native plants. They explore the nearby area and discover a small group of kangaroo-like creatures, the unsuspected natives of Mars. On a trip by passenger jet to an outlying research station, Gibson and the crew are forced down by a dust storm. He discusses the future of the colony with Hadfield, who is keen to make Mars as self-sufficient as possible, given the vast distance that materials have to come from Earth.

Gibson meets the Chief Executive of Mars, Warren Hadfield, and Mayor Whittaker, who run the colony from the base at Port Lowell. On Mars, Gibson and the crew go their separate ways.

He also reveals that he had an affair at university but that he and his girlfriend broke up and that she married another man, had a child and later died.

After psychiatric treatment, he had become an author. Gibson tells him about his early life, revealing that he had to leave Cambridge University because of a nervous breakdown and never completed his studies. The youngest crew member, Jimmy Spencer, who is still in training to be an astronaut, is assigned the task of answering his questions about the technology of space flight, and they become friends. After arriving at Space Station One, in the orbit of Earth, from which all interplanetary journeys start, he begins the three-month trip to Mars. Martin Gibson, a famous science fiction author, is travelling to Mars, as a guest of the crew of the spaceship Ares. The Sands of Mars was Clarke's first published novel. The story setting is that Mars has been surveyed but not fully explored on the ground. It is set principally on the planet Mars, which has been settled by humans and is used essentially as a research establishment. The story was published in 1951, before humans had achieved space flight. While he was already popular as a short story writer and as a magazine contributor, The Sands of Mars was also a prelude to Clarke's becoming one of the world's foremost writers of science fiction novels. The Sands of Mars (also titled Sands of Mars) is a science fiction novel by English writer Arthur C.

Mars trilogy