Through the first half of the ’90s I was writing my Mars trilogy, and everything I saw and felt in the Sierra got translated into that project, sometimes quite directly. Indeed the process of terraforming Mars, as described in my novel, was really a matter of turning the Red Planet into something more like the high Sierra. Then in the second half of the ’90s I went to Antarctica, seeing it as a kind of Martian analogue; but here again the Sierra served as my psychogeological benchmark, adding perceptions to my Antarctic experience and my Antarctic novel, and to much of my other fiction from
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