The Sands of Mars - Paperback

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by Robert E. Hampson (Author)

Sequel to THE MOON AND THE DESERT!

Saving the Marsbase One mission made Glenn A. "Shep" Shepard a hero. Commanding Marsbase itself might get him killed.

Colonel Shepard--Earth's first fully bionic augmentee and the man who once crossed interplanetary space to pull off an impossible rescue (The Moon and the Desert)--finally reaches Mars. His new command sits under the Eumenides Dorsum ridge on Amazonis Planitia, a city hewn into caverns where life is math and margin: closed-loop ecosystems, strictly rationed propellant, and minutes-long lightspeed comms lag.

While Shepard grapples with distance from his wife and newborn daughter on Earth, whispers of sabotage, industrial espionage, and anti-bionics prejudice begin to erode trust inside the base. Then a rival coalition's colony ship goes off course and slams into the canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, far across the Tharsis highlands.

There's no shuttle landing, no cavalry--only engineering, endurance, and a commander whose augmented body can go where others can't. To pull survivors out of the crash before Mars itself finishes them, Shepard must design a rescue that physics barely permits and politics would rather avoid.

Scientifically rigorous yet deeply human, The Sands of Mars is the high-stakes sequel to The Moon and the Desert--a novel about leadership under pressure, and the price of keeping a frontier alive.

Author Biography

Robert E. Hampson writes character-driven hard SF where space is messy, unforgiving, and achingly human. His fiction blends medical problem-solving, nuts-and-bolts engineering, and the logistics of living off-Earth--from underground Martian habitats to orbital shipyards--with an eye on plausible technology and the true costs of rescue. By day, he's a professor of regenerative medicine, neuroscience, neurology, and biomedical engineering. By night, he digs into Mars geography, mission architecture, and bionics research so the science on the page feels lived-in and true. He is the author of The Moon and the Desert and Across an Ocean of Stars.

Number of Pages: 432

Dimensions: 1.3 x 9.1 x 6.2 IN

Publication Date: September 01, 2026