Adriana Marais was born 1983 in King William’s Town, South Africa. She was shortlisted as one of the 100 astronaut candidates to establish the first human settlement with the Mars One project.
What’s your earliest memory?
Maybe when my mother was about to give birth to my first sibling, my brother, at home – I was three – and showing the doctor how I could balance along our veranda balcony. And my dad said, “Just because the doctor is here doesn’t mean we need an injury!”
Who are your heroes?
Lewis Carroll’s Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (fictional characters make great lifelong heroes). “For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.”
What book last changed your thinking?
Some books change what you think, some how. Yukio Mishima’s The Decay of an Angel changed the quality of my mind itself. His unique, disturbing and poignant way of seeing the world, and the language used to depict it, leaves me with a different and difficult-to-define state of mind: transcendent and estranged.
What would be your Mastermind specialist subject?
Establishing a Mars bar for researchers searching for life on the Red Planet would be a fairly niche combination of my passions for making cocktails, quantum biology and space exploration.
What political figure do you look up to?
In 1993, I met Nelson Mandela at a ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of a young Mahatma Gandhi being removed from a “whites-only” train in my home town, Pietermaritzburg. We did a ballet dance in the formation of the new South African flag at the station, I was part of the red section. Mandela smiled widely, his hand warm and cushion-like. Witnessing a revolution in my country, just how misguided the status quo can be, and the humility required for leading reconciliation contributed significantly to my character growing up.
In which time and place, other than your own, would you like to live?
As a child, I imagined myself as an Egyptian queen or a Viking warrior – anything but me, at the tail end of the 20th century, stuck at the bottom of Africa. However, I am now convinced that the time in which we are living is the most important of all.
What’s your theme tune?
“Aliens” by Oceanvs Orientalis.
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
“You’ll never regret being too kind.” Not sure where I read that, but I endeavour to follow it.
What’s currently bugging you?
The amount of time our society is spending realising that our current way of doing things is no longer in our best interests… I’m excited to build new worlds!
What single thing would make your life better?
I strive to appreciate how things are, rather than wish for different circumstances.
When were you happiest?
I am generally enthusiastic! I have been living in China for the past six months. It was initially a very steep learning curve, but I’m inspired by a challenge and am finding my happy place in this once very foreign environment.
In another life, what job might you have chosen?
I would have been a jazz musician.
Are we all doomed?
All is just as it should be.
Adriana Marais’s “Out of This World and Into the Next” is published by Profile Books on 10 April
[See also: The Europeans who built Britain]
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?