MAPPING MARSScience, Imagination,and the Birth of a...
MAPPING MARS
Science, Imagination,
and the Birth of a World
By Oliver Morton
Picador: 368 pp., $30
There are “moon men” and there are “Mars men.” The choice is made early in a scientist’s life, and the obsession is lifelong. “Mapping Mars” is about the people who have spent their lives dreaming about a future (closer than you think) in which humans build a new world on that seemingly inhospitable planet. It is astonishing how much is already known about Mars.
Mars is seamless; it has no oceans, rivers or continents. There are no mountain ranges, only solitary mountains. There are canyons the size of continents, lava plains the size of Canada. The sky is yellow. There is no soil, only “regolith,” crushed stone. A year on Mars is 687 Earth days. There are two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which give off only 10% of our moon’s light. Mars is smaller than Earth, only 10% of Earth’s mass.
“Mapping Mars” describes how all this information has been gathered and by whom. But even more fascinating is the way that scientists, artists and science fiction writers have, by imagining, visualizing and dreaming, already begun forming a new world. Oliver Morton shows how the layering of available information, going back 300 years, has created an increasingly three-dimensional picture of the world our grandchildren might visit and their grandchildren might live on. Learning about data-gathering devices like the Viking, Pathfinder and Observer landers is mind-expanding, but learning about the process by which “ideas from our full and complex planet are projected onto the rocks of that simpler, empty one” is universe-expanding.
*
PLAYA WORKS
The Myth of the Empty
By William L. Fox
University of Nevada Press:
220 pp., $24.95
A day’s drive away--in Nevada and Utah and our own backyard--are strange formations that fascinate scientists and artists alike. Playas are lake beds in the desert, prehistoric dry lakes, some of which are 1.8 million years old. The ground is white, and while it can be drawn on or sculpted, any creation will wash away in a winter storm. Artists have found this a perfect setting to contemplate ideas of time in the desert and “the mortality of art,” the “arrogance of permanence.”
Inspired by the simple lines of artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Maynard Dixon, as well as the political realities of the Nuclear Age, groups such as Earthworks and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, events such as the Burning Man Festival and individuals like Michael Heizer, Richard Misrach, Jeremy Kunkel, Richard Serra, Richard Diebenkorn and J.M.W. Turner have added their talents to the growing oeuvre of playa art.
William L. Fox, who has written several books about the American Southwest, visits a number of dry lake sites, and in Fox’s descriptions, this topography feels like a brave new world, where the work of the artists requires a pilgrimage farther than the Getty and an imagination that is not daunted by an endless horizon.
*
A NATION LOST AND FOUND
1936 America Remembered by Ordinary and Extraordinary People
Edited by Frank Pierson
and Stanley K. Sheinbaum
Tallfellow Press / Los Angeles:
364 pp., $24.95
Lost? Found? 1936? It takes a while to get the gist of this WPA-style chronicle of a year in the life of America, but once you fall into its rhythm, it is a delightful, cinematic, even musical way to understand the daily lives of Americans at a particularly vulnerable, tottering moment in our history.
Here are the Great Depression, the looming Holocaust, the Munich Olympics, the Empire State Building and all the hope and promise of the FDR years. Here are the men and women you know, dead and alive: Dr. Ruth, Ring Lardner Jr., Oleg Cassini. Here is all the promise of America: growing up in cold-water walk-ups and tenements in New York, getting beaten up for being Jewish, losing your entire family and still, somehow, making it. Here are the working-class people: the quarry worker in Vermont, the farmers and the women who ran boarding houses during the Depression, finding some kind of happiness, some kind of optimism. Some learned a child’s dark lessons--”I was probably my own best company”--and lessons that would last them forever: “to have compassion for all people in their vulnerability.”
Most, if not all, believed in the future and had plans that sprouted amid rotting garbage and sour smells and polio and Hitler. If more history were written this way, we’d have more eager students, driven to the subject with a greater sense of diversity and possibility. We all might have a finer understanding of what freedom means.
