Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination, and: Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars (review)

Robert Markley’s Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination and the DVD-ROM Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars (co-authored with Harrison Higgs, Michelle Kendrick, Helen Burgess, Jeanne Hamming, Dan Tripp, and Jeannette Okinczyc) offer an intellectual feast of ideas about the scientific and popular fascination with Mars over the last three centuries. Both works offer significant contributions to science studies, science fiction studies, cultural studies, and environmental humanities as they chart the intersections among science, literature, and popular culture.

Dying Planet is an impressive achievement—its historical scope, disciplinary range, and exhaustive research are stunning. It begins with an examination of Mars within sixteenth- and seventeenth-century astronomy, and concludes with NASA’s plans to launch a mission to the planet in 2011. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on scientific and literary texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is extensively researched, engaging theoretical quandaries within recent science studies scholarship, while analyzing centuries of scientific debates, interviews with scientists and writers, and a multitude of science fiction novels. The chapter on the canal controversy alone emerges from an examination of over 200 entries published in Nature between 1894 and 1916, tracing the interconnections between this infamous scientific controversy (i.e., if there are “canals” on Mars, did intelligent Martians construct them?) and its social, philosophical, theological, and ecological contexts. The next chapter argues that as scientists were speculating about the existence and meaning of “canals” on Mars, science fiction writers were using the planet as a site for speculating about “the interactions among a hostile environment, evolution, and intelligent beings—human or inhuman—forced to cope with an ecological catastrophe” (p. 115). These fictions manifest profoundly different, and sometimes disturbing, environmental–political conceptions, from evolutionary theories dressed in anthropocentric and Eurocentric clothing, to Orson Welles’s Darwinian “anti-teleological materialism” in which Martians are superior to earthlings, to the (ironically) “fervent anti-environmental ethos” of Alexander Bogdanov’s utopian socialism in which the natural world “becomes a reservoir of potential value awaiting capital and labor” (p. 141). The study as a whole establishes Mars as a rich site for investigating the question of the role of speculation in science, the relations between science fiction and science proper, and the relations between ecological and socio-political ideas. Markley’s readings of the scientific debates are especially notable for the way in which they demonstrate the force of such ostensibly nonscientific values as narrative coherence and aesthetics. He explains, for example, that even as “the ‘best’ interpretations for scientists are the simplest” (p. 16), the notion of simplicity itself is bound up with “larger conceptions of order—aesthetic, philosophical, and theological as well as ‘purely’ scientific,” and “[e]mploying Occam’s razor . . . requires unpacking a whole shaving kit” (p. 17).

Most of the book is organized chronologically, pairing chapters on science and science fiction within different historical periods. Ironically, the structure seems to mirror that of the primary relation under investigation—the sense of Mars and Earth as separate though (imaginatively) parallel planets. The structure itself implicitly raises questions about methodology within science studies, and, especially, the study of literature and science. Markley calls the project “cross-disciplinary” (p. 2) (rather than interdisciplinary), as it “draws on work in planetary astronomy, the history and cultural study of science, science fiction, literary and cultural criticism, ecology, and astrobiology” (p. 2). Anticipating questions about the structure, perhaps, he explains that its purpose “is not to divide ‘science’ from ‘fiction’ but to pursue the internal logic of developments in each genre as well as to explore the ways in which their concerns overlap and interpenetrate” (p. 23).

Interestingly, this...