Book Review: Mars in the Spotlight, Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing the Red Planet

Abstract

MARS IN THE SPOTLIGHT Geographies of Mars: Seeing and Knowing Red Planet. K. Maris D. Lane (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 201 1). Pp. 227. $45. ISBN 978-0-226-47078-8.As nineteenth century turned into twentieth, planet Mars became a sensation. The American and European public resonated to latest findings from a number of astronomers and science popularizers that Mars was inhabited by an advanced civilization of intelligent beings, busily building a vast network of canals to irrigate their arid planet. Although this episode has been previously analysed in many excellent books, Maria Lane, informed by her sensibilities as a historical geographer, brings us a fresh take in Geographies of Mars. In this fascinating book she eschews argument that story can be adequately explained as misguided observations by a few rogue astronomers and instead enlightens our understanding through lens of geography.The central figure in Lane's story is Percival Lowell, Boston Brahmin who in 1894 built a major observatory at a high desert site in Flagstaff, Arizona Territory. Lowell observed Mars in detail and through his popular books and lectures promulgated startling maps showing a complex network of linear features criss-crossing planet. These features had first been seen by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, but it was Lowell who made them real for most of public, as well as for some astronomers. Other astronomers, who could not confirm existence of such features with their own excellent telescopes at other locations, were highly sceptical of Lowell's claims, but their arguments were to no avail outside of professional circles. Mars became aplace, one that was intriguingly both Earth-like (water and vegetation, deserts, polar ice caps, seasons, day and night cycles, an intelligent civilization) and exotic (colder and drier than Earth, populated by strange beings, advanced engineering on scales far exceeding anything on Earth). From this milieu emerged H. G. Wells's War of worlds (1898) and fact that popular culture still today associates the with alien invasions. Lane emphasizes that knowledge production was an intricate dance between (a) consensuses reached in usual professional scientific communications, and (b) assertions inhaled by public in writings of Lowell and other wildly popular astronomy writers such as Frenchman Camille Flammarion.Lane uses tenets of geography, or more exactly spatial relationships in a physical and cultural context, to investigate how it was that Martians became such a widely accepted concept. In end she concludes that the geopolitical moment in which inhabited-Mars narrative unfolded - dominated as it was by European imperialism and American expansionism - produced an intellectual and social climate in which view of Mars as an arid, dying, irrigated world peopled by unfathomably advanced beings was really only interpretation . …