The cottage I was staying in on holiday had a fairly well stacked bookshelf – a lot of which I’d already read, and a few titles that I quite wanted to. Of course, there’s a limit to how much even I can read in a week, so I limited myself to this slender little volume.

More a collection of interconnected short stories, this tells several tales of Mars and man’s attempt to colonise. There’s so much fun to be had from reading such a story as written pre-moon landing: Mars with an atmosphere, the martians themselves. Alas, the damning of human nature still holds all too true.