The Sirens of Mars : Searching for Life on Another World

£20.00

As a new wave of interplanetary exploration launches in summer 2020, a talented young planetary scientist charts our centuries-old obsession with Mars. ‘Beautifully written, emotive – a love letter to a planet’ DERMOT O’LEARY, BBC Radio 2Mars – bewilderingly empty, coated in red dust – is an unlikely place to pin our hopes of finding life elsewhere. And yet, right now multiple spacecraft are circling, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium and Mare Sirenum – on the brink, perhaps, of a discovery that would inspire humankind as much as any in our history.

With poetic precision and grace, Sarah Stewart Johnson traces the evocative history of our explorations of Mars. She interlaces her personal journey as a scientist with tales of other seekers – from Galileo to William Herschel to Carl Sagan – who have scoured this enigmatic planet for signs of life and transformed it in our understanding from a distant point of light into a complex world. Ultimately, she shows how its story is also a story about Earth: it is a foil, a mirror, a tell-tale reflection of our own anxieties and yearnings to find – if we’re lucky – that we’re not alone.

‘Elegantly written and boundlessly entertaining’ Sunday Telegraph’Beguiling’ The Times’Johnson’s prose swirls with lyrical wonder, as varied and multi-hued as the apricot deserts, butterscotch skies and blue sunsets of Mars’ Anthony Doerr, New York Times Book Review’Elegantly crafted’ Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal

Out of stock

SKU: 9780241216002 Categories: , ,

Description

Sarah Stewart Johnson (Author)
Format:Hardback 288 pages
Publisher:Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN:9780241216002
Published:16 Jul 2020

Reviews

There are no reviews yet.

Be the first to review “The Sirens of Mars : Searching for Life on Another World”

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

(0)