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Twenty years ago I started a journey that’s taken me halfway across the solar system.

It was 1988. I had a contract to write a novel about the first humans to explore the planet Mars. I wanted it to be a very realistic novel, absolutely accurate in its scientific background, as detailed as the latest NASA reports on the red planet. I wanted my readers to feel as if they themselves were on that distant, utterly cold and arid world.

But I couldn’t get started writing it.

I didn’t have writer’s block, exactly. I’ve been a professional writer since I was a teenager. I earn my living by writing. Writer’s block is an affliction I can’t afford. I’ve often quipped that the only writers who have writer’s block are those who’ve found somebody else to pay their bills.

But I couldn’t get started with my novel.

My perspicacious wife and I were living in Connecticut then, although we were traveling to Southwest Florida every winter.

Starting to feel desperate about my inability to get started on the novel, I suggested we spend a few weeks in New Mexico. Parts of the southwestern desert reminded me very much of the photos sent back by NASA landers of the bleak surface of Mars.

Of course, the desert southwest is a blooming Garden of Eden compared to Mars. The red planet is a frozen wasteland, from pole to pole. While daytime temperatures in midsummer along the Martian equator may struggle up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the overnight low will be near 100 below zero. There is no liquid water on the surface. The top layers of the ground are loaded with superoxides, like powdered bleach.

Not a good place to expect life to exist.

We went to New Mexico anyway. It was as close to Mars as I could get.

The rugged lands of the Navaho were fascinatingly beautiful in a stark, harsh way. I began to appreciate how these people could not only survive, but thrive, under physical conditions that would drive others away. I learned that the Navaho had been pushed off their native land by the U.S. Army, led by Kit Carson, and sent off to Oklahoma. But they persevered and eventually got the federal government to allow them to return to their home grounds.

They wanted to live there! As much as the physical setting of the southwestern desert impressed me, the strength and tenacity of the Navaho people impressed me more.

And then I realized why I couldn’t get started with my novel. The character I had created to be the story’s protagonist, the novel’s central figure, was all wrong.

I had created an American geologist, a young man with a background much like many of the scientists I had known and worked with. But that was wrong, I realized. My protagonist was a young geologist, all right: but he was half Navaho.

Thus was born Jamie Waterman, the son of a full-blooded Navaho father and a mother who is descended from the Mayflower. And the entire novel fell into place. Mars and Earth, the red world and the blue world, represent the two conflicting parts of Jamie’s soul.

For the next two years I went to Mars every morning, pecking at my keyboard, building the novel “Mars.” The novel was published in 1992; it received wonderful critical reviews and is still selling quite nicely. It’s become something of a classic.

But that was only the beginning of my 20-year-long odyssey through the solar system. I found myself writing a pair of novels about the creation of the first permanent human community off-Earth: “Moonrise” and “Moonwar.” Then “Return to Mars,” which continued the story of Jamie Waterman and the human exploration of the red planet.

Eventually I wrote novels set at the planets Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn. My readers dubbed the series “Bova’s Grand Tour of the Solar System.” But worried friends pointed out that there are only nine planets in the solar system (this was before Pluto was demoted to the status of minor planet). They feared I’d run out of story material.

Not to worry. I wrote a quartet of novels set in the Asteroid Belt. There are millions of asteroids floating through the solar system. No fear of running out of settings.

Besides, novels are about people, no matter how intriguing the background setting. And Jamie Waterman stayed in my mind, even after two novels about him, his work, his loves, his dreams and problems.

So now I’ve done a third novel about Jamie and Mars. Its title is “Mars Life.” It was published last week by Tor Books.

With all the discoveries that the Phoenix lander and other robotic spacecraft are making about Mars, I’m happy to say that the scientific background of my three Mars novels holds up very well. But the novels go further than current knowledge. That’s where the excitement is: going beyond the known, into the unknown.

In my Mars novels, the human explorers find the remains of intelligent Martians who were wiped out in a massive asteroid strike millions of years ago, just as the dinosaurs were extinguished here on Earth. The Martians were intelligent, but their culture had just reached a Stone Age level when the cataclysm struck them.

That is fiction. But no one can prove it’s wrong. Not until we explore Mars thoroughly can we say whether or not life — or intelligence — once existed on the red planet.

“Mars Life” deals, among other things, with the way people react to the fact that intelligent life arose on Mars long before it did here on Earth, only to be wiped out in a cosmic disaster.

How do the explorers on Mars deal with this tragedy? What does the pope in Rome think of it? Or religious ultraconservatives who try to deny Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution?

How would you feel about it?

“Mars Life” is Naples resident Ben Bova’s 119th published book. Bova’s Web site address is www.benbova.com.