Skip to main content

Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars - Kate Greene ****

The easily-overlooked key words in the title of this book are 'Once Upon a Time'.  Because Kate Greene's memoir is doubly redolent of that fairytale opening that puts us in a world that is somewhat removed from reality. First, her book is concerned not (of course) with actually living on Mars, but spending four months in an environment that partially simulated what it would be like to be on Mars (but was actually on Hawaii). And secondly, although there is quite a lot about what happened on that experiment, this is not so much a book about exploring outer space as inner space: it's far more a narrative of how Greene feels the experience affected her than it is a conventional narrative.

What it reminded me most of was something that seems (literally) worlds away from a space mission: Down in the Valley, the posthumous set of recollections by Laurie Lee of his early life in Slad, a Cotswolds village, in the 1920s. Lee's book (taken from recordings) is about life in an isolated location, and gives us scraps and reminiscences, rather than a structured memoir - and, similarly, Greene does not give us the linear story of life in the HI-SEAS mission, where six pseudo-astronauts lived in close proximity and isolation, but rather snippets that dart around in time, driven more by themes and feelings, and incorporating a considerable amount of material about Greene's family life outside of the experiment.

Along the way we hear more about the importance of food on the 'expedition' (one of the main themes of the experiment), boredom, what makes an astronaut, being a guinea pig, isolation and the effect of being on the mission on her subjective experience of time. Greene shows us how much the four months changed her - not always necessarily for the better. In parts it's quite raw: this is mostly not a book about the science and NASA (though both feature). However, if you are interest in insights into what it is to be human it's a fascinating and sometimes moving account. There are several parallels drawn in the text with Shackleton's disastrous Endurance Antarctic expedition - in one sense, HI-SEAS had none of the peril, but certainly plenty of the impact of close confines, isolation and boredom.

At times, the author's introduction of philosophical material can feel to be verging on the pretentious. We get, for example, Roland Barthes' comment on the Apollo 'Earthrise' image 'The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused and transformed.' which makes me more inclined to snigger than be impressed by its depth. I felt Greene was also a bit heavy on SpaceX, taking a negative view on the use of a Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload for their Falcon Heavy test - of course it was a publicity stunt, but it was brilliant and far better than just putting up a lump of bland metal. (The book also incorrectly suggests the Roadster is orbiting the Earth - it's actually orbiting the Sun in an orbit that crosses the orbit of Mars, which is much more interesting.)

There's a lot packed into Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars. Come to it with an open mind, and a strong awareness of how much the gaze is inward, not looking out to the red planet, and it should be a truly interesting experience.

Hardback:

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Meteorite Hunters - Joshua Howgego *****

This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geology tends to be one of the least entertaining scientific subjects but here (I suppose, given that geo- refers to the Earth it ought to be astrology... but that might be a touch misleading). Here, though, there is plenty of opportunity to capture our interest. The first part of the book takes us both to see meteorites and to hear stories of meteorite hunters, whose exploits vary from erudite science trips to something more like an Indiana Jones outing. Joshua Howgego takes us back to the earliest observations and discoveries of meteorites and the initial doubt that they could have extraterrestrial sources, through to explorations of deserts and the Antarctic - both locations where it tends to be easier to find them. I, certainly, had no idea about the use of camera networks to track incoming meteors, which not only try to estimate where they wi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016. There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent ob...
Post a Comment
Read more