New Mars

Lately, Mars has been the focus of many attractive coffee-table books with generous illustrations and, for the most part, absolutely useless content. Can MARS by Heather Couper and Nigel Henbest do any better? Stuart Atkinson investigates…

Mars, by Heather Couper & Nigel Henbest

I know most book reviews begin with a snapshot of the book’s subject, but I’m not going to talk about the planet Mars here; if you’re on New Mars then you’re obviously already into Mars, and you know what an amazing planet it is, and are just checking out this review because you’re wondering to yourself if you should fork out for yet another Mars-related book; wondering if it has anything new to offer you, if it’s different to any of the other books about Mars sitting there on your shelf…

Well, let me set your mind at rest. Yes, you should write that cheque or give that credit card number; yes, MARS has a lot of new material and information to offer you. And yes, it is different to most of those other volumes gathering dust on your shelf. So different, in fact, that if you buy this new book, you could even reclaim yourself some shelf space by giving most of your existing Mars library to Oxfam, because if you buy MARS then you won’t need any other Mars book for quite a while.

MARS basically takes a deep breath and draws a line under everything we’ve learned about Mars to date. Spaceprobes, telescopic observations, they’re all in there. The Big News - the existence of water, past and present, on Mars - is covered in great detail of course, as is the fascinating but hair-tearingly frustrating ‘Search for Life’, either in-situ, by the Viking experiments, or at long range, by peering into the (in)famous ‘Mars Meteorite’ ALH84001. And thankfully the book discusses the different possibilities and debates both sides of the argument. No biased reporting here.

One of the things I liked most about MARS was that it’s a very human book: everyone who is anyone in the Mars exploration community is profiled or at least mentioned in between the covers. Read this book and you’ll see all those names on the JPL websites etc as real people, I promise you. Your favourite Mars-fiction writer will be in there too, as a real person, not just a dropped name.

But what makes the book special - and I don’t use the word lightly - is its tone. When you read MARS, it’s like having the two accomplished authors sitting there in your front room, talking to you personally, giving you an audio-visual presentation on the Red Planet. Like a pair of Martian Michael Palins, Couper and Henbest travelled the world to write this book, it’s a labour of love, and reading it takes the reader on a journey around Earth, and then on into space, to learn about Mars. In that sense it’s more of a Mars-related travelogue than a reference book, the only thing missing from MARS is a closing chapter which begins with “And so, after all our travels, here we are, on Mars…”

Still, give it twenty years, and reprint #5 will correct that I’m sure.

As is expected from high profile science titles now, the artwork and photos used to illustrate the book’s informal, chatty text are all first class, and even I - a rampant ‘Red’ opposed to terraforming - have to admit that some of the artwork of a future ‘Blue Mars’ is quite lovely. (And no, I’m not going soft, I’m just a sucker for a nice picture, that’s all)

When I saw MARS on a shelf in my local bookstore here in Cumbria my first thought was “Wow, that’s a big book…” Having bought it, and read it, in fact devoured it, I still think that. But it’s not just big physically, it’s big in terms of ambition, and emotion too. It has heart. Unlike the authors of many other books sitting on my shelf, which talk about and treat Mars effeciently but coldly, the authors of this book clearly love Mars, it’s a real world to them. In short, they ‘get it’, they feel the same way about Mars as you, me, and everyone else who clicks daily on the New Mars entry in their Favourites list.

What more can I say? I like this book, it has class written all over it and it’s hard to put down. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it’s taken to Mars by one of the crew members on the first expedition.

Filed under: Reviews on January 2nd, 2002