Mars in Science and the Imagination
Author : Robert Markley
Pages : 456
Price : $ 24.01
ISBN : 0822336383
Publishers : Duke University Press
For more than a century, Mars has been at the center of debates about humanity’s place in the cosmos. Focusing on perceptions of the red planet in scientific works and science fiction, Dying Planet analyzes the ways Mars has served as a screen onto which humankind has projected both its hopes for the future and its fears of ecological devastation on Earth. Robert Markley draws on planetary astronomy, the history and cultural study of science, science fiction, literary and cultural criticism, ecology, and astrobiology to offer a cross-disciplinary investigation of the cultural and scientific dynamics that have kept Mars on front pages since the 1800s.
Markley interweaves chapters on science and science fiction, enabling him to illuminate each arena and to explore the ways their concerns overlap and influence one another. He tracks all the major scientific developments, from observations through primitive telescopes in the seventeenth century to data returned by the rovers that landed on Mars in 2004.
Markley describes how major science fiction writers, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury and Judith Merril, responded to new theories and new controversies. He also considers representations of Mars in film, on the radio, and in the popular press. In its comprehensive study of both science and science fiction, Dying Planet reveals how changing conceptions of Mars have had crucial consequences for understanding ecology on Earth.
Dying Planet is an impressive achievement—its historical scope, disciplinary range, and exhaustive research are stunning. It begins with an examination of Mars within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century astronomy, and concludes with NASA’s plans to launch a mission to the planet in 2011. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on scientific and literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The book is extensively researched, engaging theoretical quandaries within recent science studies scholarship, while analyzing centuries of scientific debates, interviews with scientists and writers, and a multitude of science fiction novels.
Most of the book is organized chronologically, pairing chapters on science and science fiction within different historical periods.
Interestingly, this structure is consonant with one of the central ideas of the book that of the 'limits of analogy'. As centuries of speculative science and scientifically oriented fiction sought to understand Mars through analogies with Earth and vice versa, they met with the material and epistemological limits inherent within the structure of analogy.
Robert Markley is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of a number of books, including Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740. He is a coauthor of the DVD-ROM Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars and the editor of the book Virtual Realities and Their Discontents.
Review Courtesy: http://www.dukeupress.edu
http://muse.jhu.edu
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