In his introduction to this remarkable book, Oliver Morton writes that it is 'about how ideas from our full and complex planet are projected onto the rocks of that simpler, empty one'. Projection, Morton believes, has determined our thinking about Mars from the outset. The planet had attracted its complement of myth well before the Milanese astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made his new map of Mars in 1877, and its features, dimly discernible through inadequate telescopes and often obscured by dust storms, had already acquired fanciful names. Schiaparelli's was a better map than any before, and he drew his names from the classics. He also saw features on the planet that he termed canali, or 'channels'. He refused to decide whether they were natural or artificial, but his disciple, the American astronomer Percival Lowell, was in no doubt. Alone among the planets, Mars seemed vaguely Earthlike, if smaller and terminally arid, so he reasoned that its autochthones must have built a network of canals.

LRB 22 August 2002 | PDF Download