Sands of Mars: A New Interplanetary Novel.

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 story was published in 1951, before humans had achieved space flight. It is set principally on the planet Mars, which has been settled by humans and is used essentially as a research establishment. The story setting is that Mars has been surveyed but not fully explored on the ground. J. Francis McComas, writing in The New York Times, declared Sands of Mars to be "a careful, thoughtful projection of the problems of government. . . . written with a quiet realism." Galaxy reviewer Groff Conklin described the novel as "genuinely good reading." Boucher and McComas found it "first-level science fiction for the intelligent and literate reader."