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Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton (Fourth Estate, 2002, 351p, £18.99)

As scientific knowledge about Mars has grown apace, so the science fictional depictions of the red planet have evolved from unfettered fantasies to chronicles of gritty realism. After the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli compiled one of the first maps of Mars from telescopic observations, the eccentric Mars enthusiast Percival Lowell suggested that the network of long, linear features Schiaparelli called ‘canali' (channels) might well be irrigation canals dug by an ancient, water-hungry civilization, an imaginative bit of mistranslation that inspired the bellicose Martians of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and the romances of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, and Ray Bradbury. Although the brief glimpses of a seemingly dead, cratered Moon-like world transmitted by the first Mariners as they zipped past Mars briefly killed off SF's interest in things Martian, maps produced from the orbital photographs of Mariner 9 and the two Viking missions revealed vast, strange geological wonders and traces of dry, ancient rivers and catastrophic floods, and led to a resurgence of Mars-based fiction in the 1990's, dominated by Kim Stanley Robinson's massive trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. And more detailed orbital observations by the latest Mars probes have informed and enriched a secondary wave of realistic fictional descriptions of what it might be like for human beings to live and work on Mars.

The story of how Mars has turned from a point of red light to a place ‘measured in detail, and properly mapped' is told with great verve by Oliver Morton in Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World (Fourth Estate, £18.99). Morton is a science journalist who appears to have attended every scientific meeting about the planet in the past decade, read every important scientific paper and piece of Mars fiction, and talked to almost every scientist, artist, and cartographer currently involved with the interpretation of photographs and the making of maps of Mars. All of this research has been distilled into a fluid, wide-ranging narrative crammed with telling details and sly debunkings (for instance, recalibration of the Viking colour cameras has revealed that the surface of Mars isn't rust red after all, but orange-beige, and the sky isn't pink but a dull dun). There are evocative descriptions of Mars's fantastic landscapes, including a fifteen-page global tour that's as exhilarating as any in science fiction, lucid accounts of NASA's exploration of Mars and the techniques by which lines of latitude and longitude were accurately laid across the Martian globe, vivid sketches of the work and personalities of leading Mars scientists (such as Mike Carr, who wrote the definitive book on Martian topography, and Patricia Bridges and Jay Inge, who turned Mariner 9's photo mosaics into the astonishing 1:5 million shaded-relief scale map of the entire planet), and meditations on how human imagination and collaborations between artists and scientists have fleshed out an entire world from raw scientific data. Morton's overview of science fiction about Mars is not comprehensive – he overlooks the influence of John W. Campbell on the move towards more realistic depictions of Mars in the 1950s, and, perhaps understandably, elides the more fantastic Mars novels, from Burroughs to Ian McDonald. But his account of how maps of Mars have informed fictional treatments of Mars is well-argued and wide-ranging, noting, for instance, that the geography of Robert Heinlein's Red Planet was based on Lowell's maps, while Arthur C. Clarke's The Sands of Mars made use of the charts of Eugène Michel Antoniadi, and that Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's 1986 graphic novel Watchmen was one of the first fictional treatments of the Martian landscapes revealed by the Mariner 9 and Viking probes.

Although the camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor can pick out individual boulders on the Martian surface, the planet has not yet yielded all its secrets. Morton's discussion of the two major unanswered questions -- whether significant amounts of water exist somewhere under the planet's surface, and the controversy over the discovery of what could be (but probably aren't) microfossils in the most famous piece of Martian rock on Earth, ALH 84001 -- are scrupulously even-handed. Probes already on their way to Mars will undoubtedly answer some questions and uncover further mysteries; meanwhile, this eclectic and beautifully written book is a landmark synthesis of our current understanding of Mars, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in planetary exploration and the symbiosis of science and imagination.

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