Was it ever the actual Mars that I wanted to live on? I always had this affinity with Mars. First of all, it was my name. The ‘g’ is silent, which was one of the first things I was taught when I learned my alphabet. I also spent quite a lot of time reading science fiction.

Mars was always the space that I could dream about, and pour my dreams into. It was almost empty and unknowable. It had infinite space for my imaginings. In fact, the thing I’ve loved most about Mars – all my life – is its being that great, empty space in the mind. It’s a brand new drawing book. A colouring book with only a few lines drawn: canals and faint tracings. The paper is heavyweight, fine grain. Tinted slightly pink.

It was never the actual planet I had dreams about. I don’t think so, anyway. Whenever they took photos or sent funny little robots I was always a bit hesitant to look at the results. I didn’t want the sketchy pictures in my mind contradicted by plain, brute reality.

But the bits and pieces of desert landscapes and coppery shale looked all right, it turned out. The snaps sent back from Mars were looking quite a lot like the Mars in my head.

But it wasn’t the Mars of HG Wells, with its slimy, tentacled, aggressive inhabitants, skipping about in the dunes and building their war machines with tripod legs. And it surely wasn’t the Mars of Doctor Who, complete with underground pyramids, sleeping gods and green Viking warriors. The Mars that scientists have been learning about in recent years surely can’t be anything like the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, unfortunately: no six-legged blue beasties and swords and sorcery. Nor even the generations of settlers and colonists envisioned by Ray Bradbury.

The news from Mars was always going to be quite matter of fact and straightforward, I thought. The place would be dead, rocky, airless, empty and nowhere anyone would actually be able to go. I assumed they’d never find anything to make a dreamer like me take notice.

But in recent years it’s seemed like a more exotic Mars has been getting closer. I loved the pictures that came out a few years ago of those strange, lumpy formations that looked exactly like squinched-up eyes in the desert sands. Eyes wearing loads of mascara and looking like they were about to fly open and stare right back at us.

And now the rumour of water has been confirmed. Trickling into our consciousness comes the idea of possible living matter on Mars. Creatures, plants, people. If there’s water, why not them, too, and all the things that water brings?

These are thoughts relegated to childhood, maybe, and the province of people such as me and places such as my books – where I am happy to populate my planet with walking, talking robot sunbeds, wicked witchy Grandmas and pteradactyls and Martian ghosts who guard long-buried secrets beneath the crimson sands.

With the scent of brackish water, trickling down the mountainsides of Mars, others are waking up to the old, tantalising “what if’s” and ideas about what life might be like on our closest neighbour.

Currently I spend most of my time there. I have spent the last couple of years building my own lifelong ideas of Mars into an inhabitable landscape. I already live there quite happily, and when I write about the Mars that my characters Lora, Peter, Toaster, Karl, Grandma and Da inhabit I’m inviting people to a Mars that probably has nothing much to do with the Mars we’re slowly discovering in real life.

But I’m haunted by the thought of those darkish streaks running down the mountainsides. Saltwater on Mars. Tears that dry up and start running again. Lakes and rivers flowing underground, looking for somewhere to emerge. What might the fish look like? What kind of swimmers might float into view?

I’m boggled by the spokespeople who talk about what realms this opens up for exploration of Mars and its usefulness to the people of Earth. And while I’m listening to this, amazed, I’m also hoping that they leave it all well alone. For the sake of our imagination and its boundlessness, but also for the sake of the possible Martians, who are springing back to life even as we wait for more news.

Buy Paul Magrs’s Lost on Mars at the Guardian bookshop