The Sirens of Mars
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Searching for Life on Another World
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Sarah Stewart Johnson
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Cassandra Campbell (Read by)
Brought to you by Penguin.
As a new wave of interplanetary exploration launches in summer 2020, a talented young planetary scientist charts our centuries-old obsession with Mars.
'This elegantly crafted book conveys what it's like to be a young scientist involved in the quest' Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
Mars - bewilderingly empty, coated in red dust - is an unlikely place to pin our hopes of finding life elsewhere. And yet, right now multiple spacecraft are circling, sweeping over Terra Sabaea, Syrtis Major, the dunes of Elysium and Mare Sirenum - on the brink, perhaps, of a discovery that would inspire humankind as much as any in our history.
With poetic precision and grace, Sarah Stewart Johnson traces the evocative history of our explorations of Mars. She interlaces her personal journey as a scientist with tales of other seekers - from Galileo to William Herschel to Carl Sagan - who have scoured this enigmatic planet for signs of life and transformed it in our understanding from a distant point of light into a complex world. Ultimately, she shows how its story is also a story about Earth: it is a foil, a mirror, a tell-tale reflection of our own anxieties and yearnings to find - if we're lucky - that we're not alone.
'The inside story of the exploration of Mars and the search for life there' Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
'A celebration of human curiosity, passion and perseverance. Superb in its storytelling, majestic in its vision, The Sirens of Mars will give readers a new appreciation for the preciousness of life in the cosmos' Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
© Sarah Stewart Johnson 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
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Imprint: Allen Lane
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Published: 16/07/2020
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ISBN: 9780241474624
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Length: 476 Minutes
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RRP: £13.00
Reviews
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Beautifully written, emotive - a love letter to a planet
Dermot O'Leary, BBC Radio 2
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Elegantly written and boundlessly entertaining
Sunday Telegraph
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Beguiling
The Times
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Johnson's prose swirls with lyrical wonder, as varied and multi-hued as the apricot deserts, butterscotch skies and blue sunsets of Mars
Anthony Doerr, New York Times Book Review
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The inside story of the exploration of Mars. A young woman scientist shows what it is like to be in the thick of exciting and ground-breaking research.
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Professor of Astrophysics, University of Oxford
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Exhilarating, informative, always engaging and at times beautiful in its descriptions.
Andrew Crumey, Literary Review
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This elegantly crafted book conveys what it's like to be a young scientist involved in the quest.
Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and author of On the Future: Prospects for Humanity
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A celebration of human curiosity, passion and perseverance. Superb in its storytelling, majestic in its vision, The Sirens of Mars will give readers a new appreciation for the preciousness of life in the cosmos.
Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
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The Sirens of Mars provides the prospect of great discovery, and an introduction to a writer of the first rank.
Edward O. Wilson, University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
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There's no better guide to what NASA's various Mars missions have revealed ... A true love letter to geology, on this world and others
Nature
