Skip to main content

Mars - Stephen James O’Meara ****

This is the latest in the excellent ‘Kosmos’ series from Reaktion Books (who clearly have a thing about the letter k). They’re beautifully packaged, with glossy paper and hundreds of colourful images, but the text is so substantial and insightful they can’t simply be dismissed as ‘coffee-table books’. My earlier reviews of the Mercury and Saturn titles, written by William Sheehan, gave both books 4 stars. This new one by Stephen James O’Meara is up to the same standard.

As with the previous books, this one goes into more detail than you might expect on the ‘prehistory’ of the subject, prior to the advent of space travel. The first three chapters – about a quarter of the book – deal in turn with mythological narratives, ground-based telescopic discoveries and romantic speculations about the Red Planet. Some of this is familiar stuff, but there are some obscure gems too. The Victorian astronomer Richard Proctor, for example, decided to name dozens of newly observed features on Mars after other astronomers – but only British ones, forcing him to reuse some of the names up to six times each. Equally eccentric was the Swiss medium Hélène Smith – best known for producing, in a trance state, what she claimed was authentic Martian writing, but the book also includes some of her charmingly naïve drawings of Martian houses and landscapes.

The rest of the book deals with the 60 years of serious Martian exploration, starting in October 1960 with the launch of a pair of Soviet ‘Marsnik’ probes – which in the event never got anywhere near the Red Planet – and culminating with NASA’s highly successful series of Mars rovers. For the first couple of decades there was a real hope that some form of primitive life would be found lurking in the Martian sand, but since then the emphasis has shifted – or more accurately bifurcated. On the one hand, there’s the scientific community searching for evidence of life on Mars in the distant past; on the other the technologists and visionaries hoping to send humans to the Red Planet in the not-so-distant future. 

O’Meara is best known for his writings on amateur astronomy, as opposed to professional science, and to some extent this difference comes across in the present book too. There’s more emphasis on conveying facts than on explaining underlying principles, whether of planetary science, space travel or the biochemistry of life. Nevertheless, the book includes some interesting scientific insights, such as the realisation – as long ago as the 1970s – that if there really is life on Mars then you don’t need to land on the planet to look for it. You just have to probe the atmosphere for any departures from chemical equilibrium – as Venus reminded us just last month.

I don’t normally quibble about typos in a book, but in this one I spotted several that really should have been picked up at the proof-reading stage. For example, Stephen Hawking’s name is spelled correctly on page 131, but it has an erroneous final s on the previous page. The Martian moon Phobos is given the correct translation of ‘fear’ (which is obvious, if you think of phobia) on page 172, but back on page 156 it was mistranslated as ‘flight’. NASA’s InSight lander is mentioned on page 127 of the main text, but omitted from the (otherwise comprehensive, I think) list of Mars missions in Appendix III.

Those trivial points aside, this is an excellent book. I suspect that many of the people who buy it – either for themselves or as a gift for someone else – will be attracted more by its stunning array of photographs than anything else. But it would be a shame if readers don’t get into O’Meara’s text too, because it’s packed with fascinating stuff.

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...