I loved this book.

The novel follows a middle aged science fiction writer who gets to travel to Mars. On one hand it's incredibly self-aware, and has an incredibly real and thought provoking conversation on the nature of Sci-fi.

On the other hand it made me think of the Expanse, but not in the way you're thinking... the book takes place when we've just begun to colonize Mars and there are ~2,000 people on the red planet. The actions those early scientists/colonists take to ensure not just the survival of their world but to make sure that it thrives make me think about the early stages of the world in which the Expanse takes place. What led to the split between Earth and Mars? How did the Mars colony become a separate entity?

Without giving anything away I'll say I really enjoyed this book, and though "older" sci-fi it does not suffer from the aged feeling of most of its contemporary works. For a novel published in 1951 before the space race really began it's incredible how relevant it is today.