Skip to main content

The Search for Life on Mars - Elizabeth Howell and Nicholas Booth ***

From the book’s enticing subtitle, ‘The Greatest Scientific Detective Story of All Time’, I was expecting something rather different. I thought the authors would kick off by introducing the suspects (the various forms life might take on Mars, either now or in the past) and the kind of telltale traces they might leave, followed by a chronological account of the detectives (i.e. scientists) searching for those traces, ruling out certain suspects and focusing on others, turning up unexpected new clues, and so on. But the book is nothing like that. Continuing with the fiction analogy, this isn’t a novel so much as a collection of short stories – eleven self-contained chapters, each with its own set of protagonists, suspects and clues.

Some of the chapters work better than others. I found the first three – which despite their early placement cover NASA’s most recent Mars missions – the most irritating. For one thing, they unfold in a way that’s at odds with the cerebral ‘detective story’ nature of science. It’s closer to the lowbrow end of crime fiction, where the protagonist rushes off without stopping to think, gets hit on the head, wakes up to find a new lead, chases off after it, and so on until finally stumbling on the solution. That’s not the way science works, but it’s how the narrative plays out in parts of this book. For example, when the Curiosity rover detects a methane spike on Mars, that’s the first mention of methane in the book. For many journalists, it may also have been the first time they learned that methane was a potential indicator of life – but not for the scientists, who were eagerly seeking it for that very reason. Telling the story in the correct order – idea first, discovery second – would have been a truer reflection of the way science works, as well as delivering on the ‘detective story’ promise of the book’s subtitle.

The other thing making these early chapters tough going – for me, at least – is that much of the exposition is via direct-speech quotations from the numerous scientists and engineers involved. This kind of thing works well in a TV documentary, where the viewer can see the person speaking, but it’s fairly pointless in a book where all you see is the written word. This prevalence of quotations works better in later chapters – when we go back to earlier events – because it’s more likely that a single interviewee can tell the whole story, without the need to keep jumping between speakers.

It’s at this point, where we get into the history of the subject, that I started to enjoy the book. Chapters such as those on the Viking landers and the ‘Martian meteorite’ ALH 84001 may cover familiar ground, but they’re still first-rate treatments of two great moments in science. Less familiar, but just as good, is the chapter on Donna Shirley and the Sojourner rover – probably the most effective use of the authors’ penchant for interview soundbites.

Of all the chapters, the one that comes closest to the ‘detective story’ format promised by the subtitle deals with water on Mars – and it’s another of the book’s high points. This one has a satisfying ending too, because we can say for certain that the Red Planet had flowing water in the past, and still has plenty of ice today. But there’s no neat ending to the book itself, since the question of life on Mars remains as unanswered as ever. So the story ends with a cliff-hanger – preparations for the launch of NASA’s next rover, Perseverance, later this year, and the various other missions intended to follow it.

The book’s authors are professional journalists, and the result is noticeably journalistic in style. I don’t mean that as a pejorative – they’re academically qualified and write seriously, so think New Scientist rather than Daily Express – but it accounts for their focus on events and personalities, rather than the underpinning ideas and logical reasoning. If I was mildly disappointed by the book, it’s because I was hoping to see more on the latter.

Hardback:    
Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Andrew May

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...