Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World - Hardcover

Morton, Oliver

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184115668X ISBN 13: 9781841156682

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2002

Synopsis

A narrative history of the men and women who have explored Mars and mapped its surface from afar, and in so doing conditioned our understanding of our nearest planetary neighbour.

When Columbus first reached his new found land he had no idea what he might find: doubters still believed that he might discover nothing more than the edge of the world just before falling off it. The situation that greets the first man or woman to walk on Mars could not be more different. Mars is the most intensely observed and imagined place that humans have never been. Human names glitter on its surface, commemorating astronomers and physicists. Classical mythological identities have been stamped on its most prominent geographical features.

Oliver Morton has written a stellar narrative of Mars exploration not merely to laud the bravery and technical daring of the cosmologists and rocket scientists, but to examine how the process of exploration in space, of mapping, conditions what we discover there. Hence our understanding of the surface features of Mars is in part a product of the fact that a specialist in water movement and its erosion comes from Malham and sees on Mars a version of the limestone Yorkshire cliffs.

Our appreciation of Mars, made possible by ever more powerful telescopes and digitised signals, has increased far ahead of our ability to fulfil the benefits of all the Mars-gazing. But in our imaginations we have all but colonised the red planet: the work of Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson has filled the landscape with human potential and gloried in the grandeur of the scale of Mars's natural palaces. Olympus Mons, its biggest volcano is more than three times the height of Everest and contains enough rock to cover the whole of Texas in a layer five miles deep. It's that sense of awe that has gripped the troupe of researchers and astronomers who have held their sights firmly on Mars. Oliver Morton describes their glorious fixation, as they have come gradually to know and to understand and to colour the maps of Mars.

About this title

Review:

As Oliver Morton shows in his superb new book, Mapping Mars, Mars has clouds, winds and shorelines. It has river valleys, mountains, volcanoes and even glaciers. Even were it lifeless, it could support life, albeit of an almost unimaginably marginal kind. What Mars lacks is places. There are no "theres" there, nor will there be--until our feet impact its soil.

Oliver Morton has a sense of place and a hunger for Mars, and a thrilling manner of communicating both. His account of our nearest neighbour's history, geology and human potential is exhaustive. Morton touches on just about everything, from soil composition to survival techniques; from Martians to maps (maps, above all: they are his abiding subject, metaphor and organising principle). His artistry is to hide his daunting range of interests under a passionate and gripping human narrative: this book is about what Mars has meant, means and may one day mean for us. And he has a wide-ranging definition of who "we" are. Like a good military historian, Morton knows to pay attention to the poor bloody foot soldiers of science, as well as to the achievements of their celebrated masters. He understands how different the sciences are from each other, and how rivalries between them arise. Further, Morton understands where these people and their institutions sit in the general culture. He understands the crossover between science and science fiction, between space advocates and space fans.

All of which makes Morton's book something more than just "the story of Mars". It is, in addition, an astute study of how we go about exploring our world.--Simon Ings

Review:

"A wonderful work of intellectual history and a permanent addition to the Mars bookshelf" Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the RED MARS trilogy and THE YEARS OF RICE AND SALT.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 184115668X
• ISBN 13: 9781841156682
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368