Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination

Robert Markley is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of a number of books, including "Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740." He is a coauthor of the DVD-ROM "Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars" and the editor of the book "Virtual Realities and Their Discontents."

"This is both a complete literary history and an exemplary exercise in modern science studies, tracing how a particular science works over the generations to incorporate new technologies, create paradigm shifts, and understand the universe a little more accurately. By combining these in one study, Markley clarifies a great deal about the poorly understood but very important relationships between science, literature, culture, and reality. He also gives us all the latest news from Mars, which keeps getting more interesting. It's a fascinating story, and Markley is the first to tell it."--Kim Stanley Robinson "Dying Planet is a work of meticulous scholarship documenting the scientific controversies and literary representations of Mars from the early Renaissance to the present. Its comprehensiveness will make it a valuable resource for literary scholars, cultural critics, and scientists interested in the cultural history of this fascinating world."--N. Katherine Hayles, author of My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts "In Robert Markley's wonderfully nuanced reading of the red planet's cultural history, Mars is a "liminal world" caught between death and life. "The 20th century's favourite site for interplanetary science fiction" has a lot to say about our relationship with technology and our own planet. Ever since H.G.Wells's War of the Worlds (1898), "Mars has imposed the ecological constraints of a dying planet on the imaginations of writers and readers". The astronomer Percival Lowell described it as a cold, arid world and argued that Earth was "going the way of Mars". Ever since Mars has become a warning of what might await our own planet: "to imagine gazing across the Martian landscape in 1905 and 2005 is to confront the possibilit y that one is looking ... at the future of the human species." Markley's admirable aim is to show that "the discourses and practices of science cannot be hermetically sealed from their sociocultural environment"...