The Big Book of Mars
How obsessed are we with the Red Planet?
Author: Marc Hartzman Publisher: Quirk Books Price: £19.99 / $24.99 Release: Out now
Marc Hartzman’s latest literary work could be described as a kind of alternative history of Mars observation. It’s not a stuffy chronology of scientific discoveries through the eyes of Hershel, Galileo and astronomers from antiquity – although there is a bit of that just for context.
Instead within these pages Hartzman likes to focus on the fun stories from Mars astronomy, many of which are much more likely to be heard in a university sociology lecture than a secondary school physics class, like the 1912 theory that Mars is a vegetable with an eyeball that watches over it, for example, published in the Salt Lake Tribune. Or the 19th-century proposal to communicate with Martians by burning messages onto the surface of the planet with a giant magnifying glass. Crazy science today, but not so much for its time.
There’s a very apt prelude to this apparent nonsense where Hartzman explains how he was researching the efforts of Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineering pioneer of Tesla coil fame, to communicate with our planetary neighbours, when he discovered Hugh Mansfield Robinson. This chap snatched the author’s attention away from Tesla with his utterly bonkers belief that he was able to communicate, telepathically, with the Martian race via a two-metre-tall Martian woman called Oomaruru. Robinson’s theory would be relegated to the crackpot fringes today, but in the 1920s, when it was still believed that the network of lines criss-crossing the Red Planet were canals dug by Martians, it held weight with the public imagination, if not the scientific community.
The author links through to the modern era with the formation of NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), when Jack Parsons, inspired by the wildly fantastic science-fiction stories of 19th-century novelist Jules Vernes, decided to build rockets with a few fellow students. Between his increasing occupation with the occult and becoming friends with Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, he helped launch the US space program.
Hartzman has clearly enjoyed researching and writing The Big Book of Mars as much as we’ve had reading it. As an extracurricular read, you’ll learn a lot of very surprising things about our centuries-old relationship with the Red Planet and have a lot of fun in the process.