Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, the famous English scientist, writer, futurist and inventor, is deservedly considered the founder of the “hard” trend in science fiction. Many of his novels were awarded prestigious literary prizes, and the author himself received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. The collection “Sands of Mars” consists of four novels. In “Prelude to Space” (published in Russian for the first time), six years before the launch of Sputnik, the creation of the first spacecraft and its flight were reliably described. The second novel, the title one, is about how humanity’s dream of returning life to a neighboring planet is coming true. “Islands in the Sky” (published for the first time in full translation) is one of the writer’s early and least known works, about a young astronaut exploring space full of mysteries and mysteries. “Childhood’s End” tells how aliens blocked earthlings’ path to space exploration.