A Princess of Mars • The Martian

Books

Call me weird, call me crazy, call me sentimental:
But I've always dreamed of the day I'd get to go to Mars. For twenty- five years, I've thought of almost nothing else.

I remember the day that I started down this path-the day, or night, rather, that the dream first came to me.

I was five years old, sitting in the back of my mom's rusted red Honda Civic, the one we'd just driven from Cortez, Colorado, to Colorado Springs.

 It was late, and I was wearing a Darth Vader tshirt that was supposed to be for little boys (totally normal, right?) because it was the only thing spacey that I had, next to my Star Wars pajamas. Dad was working late at his new job, and mom had decided to take me to something called the Space Foundation Headquarters, a place that was right near our new house in Colorado Springs.

 I was excited- I'd never been to a place like that before. Mom lead me in, squeezing my little hand as we went inside. I couldn't even read yet, but once I got inside, I knew I was going to love living near this place.

Everywhere there were model rockets, space suits in display cases, all sorts of diagrams and interactive exhibits, all about the stars and planets, stuff I'd only seen in some small charts in a book on the solar system that my mom had read to me.
 From that day on, my little sticky hand pressed against the glass of the display case that held a spacesuit, like Darth Vader I knew I had arrived- this was who I wanted to be when I grew up

 No, not Darth Vader, but the next best thing- Neil Armstrong. Once I found out that people had already been to the moon- which was super cool- and that a woman had already been to the moon, I figured that I would have to be the first girl to go to Mars.  In the years that followed, the staff at the Space Foundation and Lockheed Martin center got to know me and my parents on a first-name basis, that's how often I was there. It was almost once a week that I begged to go, or at least, was successful in my begging attempts. As I got older, my parents started taking me to some of the observatories in Colorado, so that I could study the sky and learn as much as I could, as long as I kept my grades up in school.  My friends at school through junior high thought it was funny that I didn't care if I got called a "nerd" or a "geek", because I was so focused on my goal. No parties in high school, no track team or field hockey, or anything. Just martial arts, studying, and reading books, keeping my grades in top condition so that I could join the  Air Force as soon as I was old enough.

But all that time, through my childhood, and through my time in  college and in the Air Force, one thing stayed with me that I'd been reading  ever since I first learned how to read- a leatherbound hardcover copy of Edgar Rice Burroughs "Mars" series- A Princess of Mars, John Carter of Mars, the Chessmen of Mars, on and on. Next to that, it was Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" an eerily accurate in description  (hey, it was 1865, okay?) of mission control somewhere near Houston, Texas, and launching from Tampa (not Cape Canaveral) Florida, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

 But A Princess of Mars was my favorite. I had determined long ago, that when I became one of the lucky few astronauts to go to Mars, I would take my copy with me.

Now, aboard the Hermes on the Ares 3 mission, I did not get to live out that part of the dream, but I can't say I'm really all that disappointed. The hardcover weighed like, eight pounds, eight pounds that would have to be accounted for in the engineer's calculations to blast our not- sorry rears all the way to the red planet, and back again. Instead, I was given a fancy new e-reader, thin, light, and sponsored by Amazon itself. They made me do a commercial and everything with my cute little story. I'll bet their aired it during "read a book month" or whatever they call it. I wouldn't know, I'm so far out here with  six other people who are just as crazy as I am, if not crazier.