1950s YA.  The intention here is to encourage British boys to kick-start the Space Age.  You can be a girl too, as long as you can smile and type.  The story (there is no plot) follows Martin Gibson, British sf writer and journalist as he travels to the new British colony on Mars where everyone is incredibly British.  Clarke has taken British culture from 1951 and transplanted it into the near future.  So we have newspapers, typewriters and telegrams.  There’s even smoking on board spaceships, which must make a dreadful mess.  I think Clarke’s point is that the settlement of the planets is not a matter for the far future, but the time is at hand.  Unfortunately it has caused the novel to date beyond use.  It would be funny if it weren’t all rather dull.  Like Britain in the 1950s.  So Gibson has a look about on Mars and there’s a half-hearted attempt by Clarke at some drama, and there’s a scene of mild peril which turns out to be a happy accident.  You know the kind of thing.

Well written on a sentence by sentence basis.  There’s a couple of good mind-bending moments and a couple of passages of poetry.  Don’t expect too much though.