Most of the astronauts who traveled to the moon 50 years ago, having been asked incessantly What was it like? , wrote books about the experience. We’ve heard less from the many more people who’ve visited Mars over that same half century.

And with good reason. The actual, wheels-on-the-ground exploring is done by robots. But talk to the Curiosity rover drivers who work on another world every day, or listen to the scientists who devoted their careers to past Mars missions like Viking and Pathfinder, and you’ll see the warm-blooded humans behind the machines. Here are some notable books by those fortunate few who ’ ve already, in a sense, become Martians. To quote one of them, Sarah Stewart Johnson, “We’ve built an entire field of science around something we can barely see in the night.”

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