delta-sierra.com
David Salvan: books, essays and projects
Realistic Mars anticipation — Four novels
From the selection of the first settlers to the birth of a society able to choose its own future, the series follows the technical, intimate and political consequences of permanent human settlement on Mars.
Research-led companion pages
The English Mars hub explains the public questions independently—why go, how to survive, where to build, how to govern and how a base could become a city—before offering the books as a deeper continuation.
The quadrilogy is designed as a progression. The first volume asks who might be selected and how people prepare to leave Earth. The second turns arrival into construction and routine. The third shows how a successful settlement attracts newcomers and geopolitical pressure. The fourth asks whether a society built on Mars can remain a distant outpost forever.
Technical constraints remain present throughout, but the central subject is their effect on human beings: trust, intimacy, authority, family, memory and the ability to decide under conditions that cannot be reproduced on Earth.
Book 1
An ordinary man is selected for the program that will send the first permanent settlers to Mars. Between psychological screening, technical training, emerging loyalties and a departure with no guaranteed return, this opening volume tells both the preparation of a colony and the transformation of those who agree to leave Earth behind.
Book 2
The journey is over. The real challenge begins. No finished city is waiting on Mars, and every mistake can threaten the entire settlement. Deployment follows Arcadia’s first year as habitats, power, water, oxygen, crops, workshops and a community must all come into existence together.
Book 3
Arcadia is no longer only a survival base. Its tunnels, greenhouses and workshops have expanded, children are growing up on Mars and new arrivals are approaching. The problem is no longer simply how to live on the Red Planet, but who will control the societies taking shape there.
Book 4
Arcadia has become a society with its own memory, families, institutions and strategic resources. Earth still speaks the language of control. Mars has learned the cost of obedience. The final volume asks when a settlement ceases to be an outpost and becomes a people entitled to choose its future.
The novels use known constraints—thin atmosphere, radiation, cold, communication delays, life-support dependence and difficult logistics—to give weight to the story. They are not presented as a prediction or an official mission plan. Their aim is to explore plausible consequences and make the scale of settlement tangible.
Arcadia can be read alongside the novels or afterwards as a technical map of the city.
In 1952, Wernher von Braun published Das Marsprojekt in Germany; its English translation, The Mars Project, appeared in 1953, one of the earliest detailed engineering studies of a human expedition to Mars. It was not conceived as a symbolic flight. It described a large collective undertaking involving several vehicles, substantial crews and a complete interplanetary logistics system.
After Apollo, major American projects extending human exploration beyond the Moon were sharply reduced by political and budgetary decisions. Von Braun moved to strategic planning at NASA Headquarters in 1970 and left the agency in 1972. It would be historically inaccurate to claim that NASA simply “refused Mars” and that this single refusal caused his departure: the retreat from post-Apollo ambitions resulted from a wider combination of public priorities, funding constraints and institutional choices.
More than half a century later, Elon Musk and SpaceX have placed permanent human settlement on Mars at the centre of an industrial programme. Starship is presented as a system intended to carry crews and large quantities of cargo, with the stated long-term objective of enabling a self-sustaining Martian city.
This transition — from an engineering concept to the possibility that our generation may witness the first departures — helped shape I Walked on Mars. The series imagines how the first women and men would be recruited, selected and trained; how they would travel; how Arcadia would be built; and how a society separated from Earth would make political choices of its own.
NASA — The Mars Project · NASA — Wernher von Braun biography · SpaceX — Mars programme
