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

Amazon.co.uk 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 make an impact on 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 neighbor'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 organizing 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 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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Mapping Mars is both a chronicle of the technology that has taken us to the threshold of another planet and a history of the growth of human understanding. It introduces the small band of scientists who are trying to understand the forces that have shaped the face of Mars, to tease apart the earthlike from the alien in these familiar yet distorted landscapes. They are driven both by scientific curiosity and by a more primitive desire to discover what this distant place is really like; of what it would be like to stand under its dusty skies and know it for what it is. They are opening up a new world to the imagination." "Their world is a dramatic one. On Mars the volcano Ascraeus Mons climbs to more than twice the height of Everest; the impact basin Hellas, as wide as Western Europe, plunges deeper than the Pacific; the canyons of Valles Marineris form a scar as broad as a continent. Our maps fill the emptiness with the names of ancient and imagined lands - Olympus, Arcadia, Hesperia - and departed friends - H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan." Only on Mars does Utopia have a latitude and longitude. This is the story of how its measure was taken, and of the men and women inspired to explore it and, eventually, to bring it to life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Well-known British science writer Morton, a contributor to Wired, the New Yorker and Science, traces scientists' efforts to map and understand the surface of Mars. Because much of the planet's surface material is basalt, which is porous, Morton explains, it is very probable that water from Mars's now dry canyons long ago sank into underground aquifers and froze. Mars has often been regarded as the planet most similar to Earth, but the author describes graphically how startlingly different its topography is. Mars is a planet with mountains larger than whole American states and plains the size of Canada. Our Grand Canyon would be dwarfed by the massive erosion canyons that surprised us a decade ago with their implication that titanic floods once rushed across the planet's surface. Olympus Mons, its largest volcano, is taller than two Everests, contains more than four times the total volume of the Alps and has a circumference larger than the distance between the northern and southern tips of the home islands of Japan. Morton writes eloquently and displays a breadth of knowledge not often found in science writing. He summarizes how science fiction authors have imagined Mars as well as how pre-computer artists used airbrush techniques to depict Mars's monstrous contours. The book might have benefited from being more tightly focused, but astronomy and geology buffs will be sure to snap it up. 16 color photos not seen by PW. (Sept.) Forecast: News services have recently trumpeted the discovery of underground water on Mars, so this book is sure to appeal to astronomy fans excited by this long anticipated and eagerly awaited event. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

English science journalist Morton reconstitutes the Mars myth for the Net generation, showing how our mapping of the Martian landscape has brought into focus the "blotchy but beckoning" planet observed by 19th-century astronomers. Morton, who covered the failed Mars mission in 1999 and has reported on the informal network of enthusiasts known as the Mars Underground, takes a retrospective look at the mapping of the Red Planet. While the televised face of Mars exploration is well known, he notes, the public has never accorded the glory it deserves to the process by which exploratory probes have provided data for more and more exact maps of the planet. Upon this cartographical substratum, Martian sciences (whether of geology or speculative astrobiology) have erected their hypothetical structures. Mariner 9 in 1971 and subsequent missions, as Morton details, gave rise to many controversies, which range from whether the atmosphere is colored yellowish gray rather than the popular pink to how much water remains under the Martian surface. Parallel to the science of Mars is the science fiction of Mars. Enthusiasm for Mars among SF writers waned in the 1970s as it became apparent that the landscape had been shaped by geological forces that essentially stopped billions of years ago, but interest revived as the initial shock of a barren Mars gave way to a more complex vision of the planet. As geologists began to trace faint remnants of what could have been an ocean, SF writers, led by Kim Stanley Robinson, have been constructing a new, more sober Mars meticulously congruent to the landscape revealed by the maps. The final sections report on such Mars Underground luminaries as Bob Zubin, a MartinMarietta engineer who has created a prototype for a direct mission to Mars. Not for beginners, who will find William Sheehan's The Planet Mars (1996) a better place to start. But for enthusiasts: this will be the Mars book of the year.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Mapping Mars is a wonderful work of intellectual history and a permanent addition to the Mars bookshelf. (Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Mars Series and The Years Of Rice And Salt)  — Kim Stanley Robinson

I couldn't stop reading this book! Fascinating, truly fascinating. (Douglas Preston, author of Dinosaur In The Attic and The Cabinet Of Curiosities)  — Douglas Preston