Special Circumstances

Destination Mars by Martin Caidin and Jay Barbree

This is basically a coffee table book about Mars. The pictures are good but the text is mostly insipid. It's 228 pages long, but can be read easily in a couple of hours. If you haven't read much about Mars before, it is a useful introduction to the topic.

As the subtitle suggests, this book is about the influence of the planet Mars on human myth, literature and art. In myth, the book only deals with Greek and Roman legends. Science-fiction and non-fiction is covered in more depth from early works like "The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells upto "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is also about the various milestones of the scientific exploration of Mars which is covered in reasonable depth for the size of the book. And there are quite a few pictures from the Mariner and Viking missions and from the Hubble telescope. Since the book was published before Pathfinder and the Mars Global Surveyor missions it feels a bit out of date. The writing is erratic and some topics are included which are quite unrelated to Mars and there is the occasional typo. But the pictures are pretty.

The proposed topic of the book is a big one and "Destination Mars" points out all the highlights but does not pretend to be an exhaustive source of information.

%T Destination Mars
%T :in Art, Myth and Science
%A Martin Caidin
%A Jay Barbree
%A :with Susan Wright
%I Penguin Studio
%D 1997
%G ISBN: 0670860204
%P 228
%K science, literature

Review written: 1999/08/21