Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination

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, Kim Stanley Robinson, Philip K. Dick, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. "A Situation in Many Respects Similar to Our Own": Mars and the Limits of Analogy 31 2. Lowell and the Canal Controversy: Mars at the Limits of Vision 61 3. "Different Beyond the Most Bizarre Imaginings of Nightmare": Mars in Science Fiction, 1880–1912 115 4. Lichens on Mars: Planetary Science and the Limits of Knowledge 150 5. Mars at the Limits of Imagination: The Dying Planet from Burroughs to Dick 182 6. The Missions to Mars: Mariner, Viking, and the Reinvention of a World 230 7. Transforming Mars, Transforming "Man": Science Fiction in the Space Age 269 8. Mars at the Turn of a New Century 303 9. Falling into Theory: Terraformation and Eco-Economics in Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian Trilogy 355 Epilogue: 2005 385 Notes 389 Works Cited 405 Index 435

About the Author :
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 :
"This is both a complete literary history and an exemplary exercise in modern science studies, tracing how a particular science works over the generations to incorporate new technologies, create paradigm shifts, and understand the universe a little more accurately. By combining these in one study, Markley clarifies a great deal about the poorly understood but very important relationships between science, literature, culture, and reality. He also gives us all the latest news from Mars, which keeps getting more interesting. It's a fascinating story, and Markley is the first to tell it."--Kim Stanley Robinson "Dying Planet is a work of meticulous scholarship documenting the scientific controversies and literary representations of Mars from the early Renaissance to the present. Its comprehensiveness will make it a valuable resource for literary scholars, cultural critics, and scientists interested in the cultural history of this fascinating world."--N. Katherine Hayles, author of My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts "In Robert Markley's wonderfully nuanced reading of the red planet's cultural history, Mars is a "liminal world" caught between death and life. "The 20th century's favourite site for interplanetary science fiction" has a lot to say about our relationship with technology and our own planet. Ever since H.G.Wells's War of the Worlds (1898), "Mars has imposed the ecological constraints of a dying planet on the imaginations of writers and readers". The astronomer Percival Lowell described it as a cold, arid world and argued that Earth was "going the way of Mars". Ever since Mars has become a warning of what might await our own planet: "to imagine gazing across the Martian landscape in 1905 and 2005 is to confront the possibilit y that one is looking ... at the future of the human species." Markley's admirable aim is to show that "the discourses and practices of science cannot be hermetically sealed from their sociocultural environment"... this is a masterly exploration of the "interplanetary sublime".--THE GUARDIAN, 5 November 2005 "[A] compact, well detailed synopsis of the science and a insightful critique of the literature to provide an in-depth resource for understand how Mars impinges on our human psyche."--Mark Mortimer,Universe Today "Markley writes about Mars as a knowledgeable outsider, weaving in cultural history and science fiction... [T]here are many historical, literary, political, and cultural nuggets..."--David Grinspoon, Scientific American "Dying Planet is a must read for all Martians and Marsophiles."--Thomas J. Morrissey, SFRA Review "[E]xtraordinarily well argued and well researched... Especially strong is Markley's cogent discussion of the culturally contingent nature of scientific knowledge; especially valuable to sci-fi literary study is his comprehensive coverage of 20th-century science fiction concerning Mars, from the work of H.G. Wells et al. to Kim Stanley Robinson's monumental Mars trilogy. This is a unique and invaluable work. Essential."--R. J. Cirasa, Choice "[S]cholarly and meticulous; a valuable resource."--David A. Hardy, Popular Astronomy "Dying Planet is an excellent and detailed book. For anyone seeking to understand the fascinating intertwined histories of science and science fiction, and how a ball of rock, just six thousand seven hundred kilometres in diameter and several tens of millions of kilometres away, has exerted such an astonishing influence on our imaginations, it will be well worth reading."--Charles S. Cockell, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews "Dying Planet is an excellent and detailed book. For anyone seeking to understand the fascinating intertwined histories of science and science fiction ... it will be well worth reading."--Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 2006