The Sirens of Mars
Allen Lane £20 HB
Surely there is life on Mars – or at least that is what was thought by astronomers from the late 1600s all the way up to the 1980s. But in recent years that statement has taken on a whole new meaning. This book takes us on a voyage through our relationship with the Red Planet and makes us appreciate the tremendous journey it has made in the popular zeitgeist, from a world covered in carefully engineered canals for advanced alien inhabitants, to a lush vegetated haven and finally to the cold, ancient and desolate wasteland we know today.
Looking behind the scenes of life as a modern planetary scientist, The Sirens of
Mars follows the author’s experiences of the lows and highs of many of the most celebrated Mars missions. The linear timeline of exploration helps to anchor Sarah Stewart Johnson’s story to the big question of “Is there life on Mars?”. We follow along with her as she realises the implications of highly acidic material uncovered by Opportunity, sit with her in the Mojave Desert mapping the landscape of alien terrain on Earth, and sympathise with the feeling of isolation and separation from the world as she adjusts to ‘Martian time’ in the control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, monitoring rovers on a distant world.
In many places you will rush to the internet to look up the images and maps described in the book to understand Johnson’s wonder at the discoveries being made. The book would have greatly benefited from including some of these: the original pictures and charts of Mars used to design the Mariner missions that now sit on the author’s office wall, the first image from Opportunity as it approached the precipice of Endurance crater, the Olympic Rings etched forever into the Martian rock by the Spirit rover. Some are easy to find and some impossible, but each is pivotal to the author’s, and the reader’s, relationship with Mars. Although at times not the easiest to follow, this is a must-read for fans of our Martian neighbour and humanity’s longstanding search for life elsewhere in the Universe.
★★★★★
speaking to you (and sometimes even insulting you). If it were a real conversation, though, I’d probably be rather exhausted just from listening and keeping up with the pace. The use of so many analogies – not to mention all the asides – in quick succession (sometimes simultaneously) can be quite tough going.
There are some wonderfully poetic metaphors, my favourite being referring to a black hole’s event horizon as “a wall between two futures”. The narrative lends itself nicely to visualising flying through planetary nebulae, speeding past supernovae or zipping past quasars.
It doesn’t shy away from detail (though there’s not really any maths) and the final section on “speculative threats” (including cosmic strings and wormholes) is not for the faint-hearted. But then again, I guess you’ve got to be fairly serious to be considering doing something so dangerous.
★★★★★
Science writer Paul Parsons’
10 Short Lessons run the gamut from humanity’s earliest desire to explore the cosmos to the realised dreams of today and the untold promise of tomorrow. His down-to-earth witty style is suitably tuned for novice or die-hard space enthusiast alike.
10 Short Lessons in Space Travel traces early ideas of what lay beyond the sky, then delves into our astonishing advances in aviation and rocketry, through times of war and peace, as we took our first footsteps into the Universe in less than a century.
Parsons guides us adroitly through the technical minutiae of his subject matter, condensing complex mathematical equations and theories into easy-tounderstand bite-sized parcels. Handy little box-outs pepper the text, offering potted biographies of key figures – from Johannes Kepler to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Yuri Gagarin to Arthur C Clarke – as well as snapshots of future missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope, the Lunar Gateway and exotic space elevators.
The book tells of our successes and shortfalls in space, with inspiring quotes drawn from such luminaries as Carl Sagan, Martin Rees and International Space Station astronaut Scott Kelly, who remind us that the voyage to Mars and beyond threatens not only enormous expense and technological difficulty, but also the loss of human lives. And yet Parsons, writing at the start of a decade that promises to finally return humans to the Moon, ends on an upbeat note of optimism. “We truly are the lucky ones,” he tells us, “to have a ringside seat for what promises to be the greatest show on Earth.”
★★★★★
Ben Evans is the author of several books on human spaceflight and is a science and astronomy writer