Old Mars

David D. Levine is a lifelong SF reader whose midlife crisis was to take a sabbatical from his high-tech job to attend Clarion West in 2000. It seems to have worked. He made his first professional sale in 2001, won the Writers of the Future Contest in 2002, was nominated for the John W. Campbell award in 2003, was nominated for the Hugo Award and the Campbell again in 2004, and won a Hugo in 2006 for his story “Tk’Tk’Tk.” A collection of his stories, Space Magic, won the Endeavour Award in 2009. In January of 2010 he spent two weeks at a simulated Mars base in the Utah desert, which led to a highly regarded slide show and The Mars Diaries, a self-published hardcopy collection of his and his crewmates’ blogs. His story “Citizen-Astronaut,” a science-fiction novelette partially based on his “Mars” experience, won second prize in the Baen Memorial Contest, was published in Analog, and came in second in the 2011 AnLab Readers’ Poll. David lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Kate Yule, with whom he edits the fanzine Bento. His website is www.daviddlevine.com.

Here he takes us to Mars in a way that NASA probably never thought of …