For the Love of Mars
A Human History of the Red Planet
Matthew Shindell
University of Chicago Press 2023
Hb, 248pp, £20, ISBN 9780226821894
Peter Matthew Shindell is a curator at the US National Air and Space Museum, and his aim in this book, as he explains in the introduction, is to survey the changing ways in which Mars has featured in human culture over the centuries. But the rather surprising message I came away with, and maybe not the one that Shindell set out to convey, was just how little interest people took in Mars prior to the 20th century. If humanity can be said to have any kind of “obsession” with the Red Planet, it’s something that’s really only picked up in the age of space travel.
At the other extreme, the first chapter, dealing with astrological beliefs in ancient Mesoamerica, China and the Middle East, hardly mentions Mars at all. It seems to have been viewed simply as a kind of “LED of the Gods”, which, depending on how dim or bright it was, indicated how well or badly things were going to go on Earth. Shindell doesn’t deign to talk about Ancient Alien theories, but if he had, this view seems to negate any notion that the ancients understood other planets to be worlds like our own.
The first glimmering of this only emerges in the 12th century, when a French philosopher named Silvestris described a fictional journey into space. His version of Mars features “seething and sulphurous waters”, which may be the earliest description of the topography of another planet in history. By the 17th century, after the first telescopes had shown that Mars really is a world of its own, Athanasius Kircher gave a more vivid description of the Martian landscape as “rocky, jagged, mountainous and covered in fireball-spewing volcanoes”.
Such speculations remained few and far between until the end of the 19th century, when fiction like HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds and astronomer Percival Lowell’s erroneous observations of canal networks on Mars, began to persuade the public that it might actually be inhabited by intelligent beings. This led to a golden age of Martian fiction, which only came to an end with the first robotic voyagers to the Red Planet in the 1960s and 70s.
Ironically, for a book that’s supposed to be about history, it’s only in the last couple of chapters, dealing with events that are well within living memory, that the focus really shifts squarely onto Mars, rather than the more general cultural background in which Mars plays a relatively minor role.
Andrew May
★★★