Zsolt Bugarszki's Blog: Stories That Shape Us - Posts Tagged "science-fiction"

When I started writing Icarus, I knew I wasn’t just imagining spacecraft, pressure domes, EVA suits or Martian dust storms. Those things fascinated me, and I spent years reading about habitat design, planetary science and future-tech concepts, but none of it was the heart of the story. What truly stayed with me was a simple question: What kind of people will we become if we reach for the stars?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the real drama of space isn’t found in exotic landscapes or sophisticated machines. It’s found in people, in their hopes, fears, conflicts and fragile attempts at building something new in a place that is deeply indifferent to them. Mars may be a frontier, but humanity carries its past wherever it goes.

This idea became personal for me during my university years. As a student, I took part in a self-help group led by a psychiatrist. One day, she made a remark that has stayed with me for more than two decades: “We all play ancient Greek dramas again and again. The actors change, the technologies change, the world changes, but the drama stays the same.”

That insight shaped the entire foundation of Icarus. It’s no accident that the book takes its name from a Greek myth. Even on Mars, even surrounded by cutting-edge machines and futuristic ambitions, we are still the same humans we were two thousand years ago, repeating the same emotional patterns and moral struggles. The landscape is new, but the inner conflicts are ancient.

This, more than anything, is why I write: to explore what happens when timeless human nature is placed in completely unfamiliar worlds. Space doesn’t transform us. It simply reveals who we have always been.

When I wrote Icarus, I made a deliberate choice: the technology of my story should feel as real as possible. The book is set in the 2090s, close enough to our time that readers can sense the continuity with today’s world, yet far enough to imagine a dramatically transformed everyday life. I often thought about the difference between the 1920s and the 1990s, two eras separated by seventy years of explosive progress, and then imagined a similar, perhaps even faster acceleration between our present and the near future of Icarus.

In this imagined future, humanity has maintained a fragile foothold on Mars for about thirty years. Travel between Earth and Mars is routine but still demanding, with ships making the journey in roughly four months. Launch windows open only every twenty six months during the Hohmann transfer window, the period when the two planets are positioned optimally for travel. This small detail matters because it shapes everything: logistics, relationships, supply chains and the psychological reality of distance.

Life in the Martian settlements is advanced but not limitless. The four settlements holds only two to three thousand people altogether, mostly scientists, engineers, miners, doctors, logistics crews and a cohort of brave tourists. The technology they rely on is sophisticated but grounded. Habitats are reinforced against radiation, vehicles are designed for dust storms, medical devices are adapted for low gravity and manufacturing systems turn local resources into essentials. And yet, despite all this progress, Mars remains a frontier where death is never far away. The air is toxic, the water is extracted through complex processes, the oxygen is manufactured and every bite of food is the result of engineering rather than nature.

These conditions shape everything about human behavior. On Mars, precision is not optional. A mistake can cost lives. Protocols are strict, responsibilities are clear and the value of life, fragile and hard earned, becomes far greater than we can easily imagine here on Earth. Under such pressure, relationships form differently. Conflicts carry more weight. Trust becomes a survival tool. Even ordinary moments take on a different tone when the environment itself is constantly testing the limits of human resilience.

This tension between advanced technology and unforgiving nature is the social backdrop of Icarus. I wanted a future that feels plausible, a world where human ingenuity has brought us far but not far enough to escape who we are or the risks we must face together. For me, that balance between realism and imagination is where the best science fiction comes alive.

When I began shaping the world of Icarus, I knew I did not want to write a political thriller. I was not interested in taking sides or commenting on today’s conflicts. The world is already full of real tension, and I had no desire to mirror it directly. Instead, the geopolitical background in the story serves a different purpose. It builds dramatic pressure, gives weight to the characters’ decisions and creates a sense of realism in a setting that is otherwise far from our everyday experience.

To make this possible, I chose to push some elements beyond the boundaries of our real world. In the book, China is not the modern nation we know, but a dynastical empire, something closer to an alternate timeline than a prediction. This exaggeration was intentional. By changing recognisable reality, I wanted to make it clear that Icarus does not portray contemporary politics. It is a work of fiction, shaped by imagination rather than by real world agendas.

At the same time, the entire story is deeply political in a broader sense. Not the politics of governments and headlines, but the politics of human nature. The tensions between settlements, the unwritten rules of survival, the fragile alliances, the grudges, the sacrifices and the moral choices that come with living in a hostile world. These are the places where the story becomes political, because human relationships always carry the echoes of power, fear, hope and responsibility.

Mars, in Icarus, is a harsh world. That harshness exposes our old dramas in a new environment. The geopolitical tension is simply a frame that raises the stakes, while the core of the story remains focused on people: their loyalties, their conflicts and their struggle to protect something meaningful in a place where everything is fragile. My goal was not to recreate the divisions of Earth, but to explore how those ancient patterns of human behavior follow us wherever we go, even to the red planet.