Publisher’s Blurb
How can we achieve a better world? A Happier future? A new understanding of human life? This startling and authoritative book shows how such a society could be built. In so doing it produces a beautiful and grim new myth.
Towards the end of the twenty-first century, a society of men and women a few thousand strong is marooned on our neighbouring planet, Mars. This is a Mars granted its own constitution, a Mars unspoilt, unimproved, a Mars one character calls the ‘Ayers Rock in the sky’. As the Antarctic has been designated a continent for science, so Mars is preserved as a planet for science – a Whit Mars! And while the utopian debate is in progress, the question of alien life enters in a dramatic way. Oh yes, size matters!

The novel throngs with characters. People are important. They must cooperate or they perish. The mover and shaker is Tom Jefferies; on the austere world to which he and his company are exiled, he slowly creates his goal, the humanising of science, the improvement of human existence, the freeing of the mind from its dangerous past.

FIRST EDITION: Little, Brown, 1999

1	Little Brown, London, 1999	Paperback
2	Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munchen, 1999	Hardcover
3	St Martin’s Press, New York, 2000	Paperback
4	Time Warner, London, 2000	Paperback