Women in STEM fields are still outnumbered by men. I like reading about them because it gives me a hopeful feeling about the pace of change in our world. Once upon a time, Vera Rubin and Lise Mitner and Henrietta Swan Leavitt were just...not talked about, invisible in our public discourse about Science. Now, there are books and movies about the women who have always practiced in the STEM fields like Hidden Figures to educate us on this erased history.

About time, too.

What that doesn't do is tell us anything about the women actively working in the STEM fields, about their motivations and curiosities, their ideas about what the field they're working within is and should be doing. This book's main appeal to me, then, was to tell me about a woman's journey to, and progress within, planetary science—a field I find endlessly fascinating.

I get the whole enchilada here, the story of why the author became a planetary scientist...spoiler alert, the centuries-long Romance of it all had a lot to do with it...as well as her own précis of the state of modern research into the past and present of our neighbor. The reasons we should care about Mars and its past aren't stinted, either.

What I enjoyed most, I think, was her palpable pleasure and excitement as she tells us about the atmosphere of tension and the sense of relief in Mission Control as probes and rovers are launched toward and land on Mars. The description then weaves in the results, the science, that is the reason for all this highly educated and trained labor focusing on this place. Her narrative voice never descends into gee-whizzery. She is definitely writing out of passion and fascination but doesn't become a total fangirl squeeing her way around the world she is privileged to inhabit.

Since that's exactly what I'd do, I was impressed by this restraint. Of course, her long training in the field does instill a certain sense of remove from the raw passion of the fan. It's taken her a lifetime of learning to get to where she is. It wasn't, and isn't, easy to fully dedicate yourself to a passion. The compromises made are always hard...being away from family, the strains on one's marriage...and she deals with all those honestly.

An extensive Notes section offers the non-scientist a roadmap for further reading and discovery. As this is a personal story, a memoir of a woman who chose to serve her passion for science, it isn't a read I judge by how well-sourced her information is. I just went along with this intelligent, erudite guide as I visited the world of a practicing planetary scientist.

You should, too, whatever your sex or gender. Also a good last-minute ebook to gift to your high-school aged girl giftee as a proof that aspirations are very much achievable.

I want to thank NetGalley, the publisher and the author for giving me the opportunity to review this book. I admit in my joy at joining NetGalley I may have been overzealous in my requesting numbers. As this book has already been published, I am choosing to work on the current upcoming publish date books in my que. As I complete those I will work on my backlogged request and will provide a review at that time. I again send my sincere thanks and apologies.

A mixture of science and non science. This book is partly a look at humankind's interest with Mars, partly a memoir and partly a book about what our obsession with the other planets tells us about ourselves. This is an interesting and engaging book. I learned a lot. It is very well written, deftly balancing memoir and planetary science.

Move over, Shark Week: it’s Mars Month. From now through (hopefully) the end of the month, three missions are set to launch to go to Mars. The United Arab Emirates’ first Mars mission, an orbiter called Hope, is set to launch Wednesday morning (Tuesday afternoon US time) on an H-2A rocket in Japan. Next week is the likely launch date for Tainwen-1, China’s first full-scale Mars mission that includes an orbiter, lander, and rover. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, carrying the rover Perseverance, is now scheduled for launch July 30 after some launch vehicle and spacecraft processing issues delayed the launch from July 17.

That broad interest in Mars is driven in large part by the planet’s potential to have once been habitable (see “Review: The Search for Life on Mars”, The Space Review, June 29, 2020). How that drive is reflected among scientists, past and present, is the subject of The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewart Johnson, herself a planetary scientist at Georgetown University involved in the search of life on Mars.

The book is part history of Mars exploration and part memoir tracing her own interest in the planet. The former is a fairly straightforward review of the highs and lows of studies of Mars, including Percival Lowell’s observations, the disappointments of the early Mars missions that made Mars to appear to be a dead world, and the resurgence of interest in recent years as missions have provided new evidence that early Mars was at least habitable, and possibly inhabited. That’s interleaves with Johnson’s own experience, dating back to college at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied under a leading Mars scientist, Ray Arvidson, as an undergrad.

It was during a college field trip to Hawaii that Johnson had the moment that set her on the path of becoming a planetary scientist. Near the summit of Mauna Kea, she stumbled across a single fern, “impossibly triumphant” in the cold, arid terrain of the mountaintop. “It was then, on that trip, that idea of looking for life in the universe began to make sense to me,” she writes. “In finding than fern, I also found something small, fragile, and worth cultivating deep inside myself.”

She provides glimpses of that career path throughout the book, including both participating on the science teams of missions as well as field work on Earth, from Antarctica to Australia, studying life in extreme conditions that could yield insights into life on Mars. That’s balanced with a personal life that includes marriage and children: she initially looks forward to being at JPL for the landing of Curiosity until she finds it’s the same day as the due date of her first child.

While the other thread of the book—the history of Mars exploration—covers familiar ground, she does a good job profiling many of the people involved. This includes not just famous figures, like Lowell and Carl Sagan, but lesser known ones like Wolf Vishniac, who led the early development of experiments to search for life on Mars, only to have cost overruns force his design off the Viking landers. He died a short time later in Antarctica doing fieldwork. She also profiles Maria Zuber, who worked to get a laser altimeter instrument to Mars, only to lose it on Mars Observer; another version of the instrument flew successfully on Mars Global Surveyor. (Zuber was also Johnson’s PhD advisor at MIT.)

Unlike another recent book, The Search for Life on Mars, Johnson’s The Sirens of Mars is more about the science than the engineering; spacecraft (primarily US ones) are discussed primarily as a tool for achieving the science, rather than going in depth into their design and development. That makes sense: spacecraft are a means to an end, something often forgotten in the stories about their technological challenges or the policy battles to get them funded. That end, as Johnson describes in the book, is searching for evidence of life on Mars, and in the process better understanding our own place in the universe.

Sarah Stewart Johnson, in her book The Sirens of Mars, recounts her experience as a planetary scientist traveling to largely uninhabitable parts on Earth to better understand the challenge of exploring Mars. But while that alone makes for scintillating content, the focus of her book is on chronicling the studies that have yielded the information we have gleaned on the red planet thus far, the labor of love from the researchers who facilitated these missions, both interplanetary and earth-based, and what the Mars data reveals about Earth's present and future.
The Sirens of Mars treks through the centuries to trace the history of hypothesizing and disproving various theories about the potential of Mars, the innate limits to exploration and the innovative genius that tried to overcome those limitations, the science required to build the spacecrafts and the evolving modes of exploration in the Space race, a virtual competition between NASA in the US and the Russian teams vying to be the first to land on and pioneer the territory. In thrilling narrative-nonfiction style, Johnson offers biographical sketches of major players like Carl Sagan whose mentor blackballed him and Wolf Vishniac who died on a mission in Antartica but left behind a bag of desert stones for a fellow scientist which later revealed that life could survive within rocks, yielding a brand new field of study aimed at understanding the limits of life on Earth. Other stories that are just as engrossing and informative introduce Schiaparelli, Flammarion, Percival Lowell and a scientist named Pickering who sailed to Jamaica in 1911 to view the night sky from a high plateau in the mountains there and proposed that the canal-like observances visible on the Mars surface with the technology available then, were, "marshes teeming with life in an otherwise silent landscape". As his conjectures were later disproved and replaced by better-informed ones, so Sirens records the collaborations and rivalries that plagued the relationships between contemporaries meanwhile they worked on their own individual giant leaps for mankind. Eventually, Johnson also incorporates her own memoir, sharing her story as a female scientist in a formerly male dominated field, projecting the future of the search for life on Mars but also the more inclusive future for life on Earth. And it is this reflection of what Mars reveals about Earth that is truly the theme of this book - the evolving motives, the changing research methods, the shifting focus to utilize new data. In the prologue, Johnson writes,
The story of Mars is also a story about Earth: how we've sought another stirring of life in the universe, and what that search has come to mean. Mars has been our mirror, our foil, a telltale reflection of what has been deepest in our hearts.  With so few landmarks, guideposts, or constraints, all is possible: without data that could be used to cabin our inquiry or limit our imagination, Mars has been a blank canvas. And tenderly, our human seeking has rushed to fill it.
Although The Sirens of Mars is heavily scientific, Sarah Stewart Johnson is careful to write for the average reader and explains all the technical jargon at first use so the book is easy to read regardless of the reader's experience with the topic. The tidbits of life beyond the telescope moor the narrative to an easily relatable space even as the book describes otherworldly adventure that is perhaps out of the scope of personal experience for most potential readers, but definitely enjoyable to experience vicariously. High praises for a book about science that gives credence to the scientists, and teaches novel concepts while it shows how various disciplines merge to elucidate previous findings and create a springboard to acquire future knowledge. Yet, through it all, The Sirens of Mars remains at its core, an immensely enjoyable read.

Interesting book about the exploration of mars. Well written and very well researched i would recommend for any lovers of science or good books

In honor of today’s launch of the Perseverance Mars rover, I bring you “The Sirens of Mars: Searching For Life on Another World” by Sarah Stewart Johnson (thanks to Crown Publishing for the #gifted #netgalley eARC)

This book is the exact kind of nonfiction I like: a deep dive into a science-y topic with some memoir bits thrown in, to add the human element. Not since Lab Girl by Hope Jahren has a book struck just the right balance for me, not until The Sirens of Mars.

Despite my love for all things space, my knowledge of the early years of space exploration was sadly lacking. So learning all the history of planetary science through this was deeply fascinating! My generation has almost always known a world where a manmade object was roaming the surface of the Red Planet, there was a time in the not-distant last when the prevailing idea was that there were irrigation canals on Mars. One of my favorite factoids in here was how science fiction writers of the time reacted to the new data. “Why didn’t we think of craters?” Isaac Asimov reportedly said when Mariner 4 images came back.

So not only did this feed the trivia nerd part of my brain, but Sarah Stewart Johnson’s prose made the experience a breeze. She is a planetary scientist who has worked on past Mars rovers, so she brings both personal experience and her passion for space exploration and this planet to the book.

The way she describes the yearning to know more, the urge to explore was infectious. And she’s not alone: it’s no wonder why the pope said this upon seeing the first Mars images: Vidimus et admirati sumus - “we saw and we gazed in wonder.” She admits: “I am searching the darkness because there is a universe out there awaiting discovery. It is exciting to live with such possibility,.”

So safe travels, Perseverance 🚀 find some answers for us!

“The wild strangeness of the planet, with its tawny air and relentless red deserts, calls to us: With each mission, we grapple to understand a world that’s at once recognizable yet at the same time indescribably foreign. We return again and again, and the mysteries deepen.”

I became slightly obsessed with Mars this summer (no thanks to listening to Gimlet’s The Habitat with a long-distance friend 🎧✨) This personal and historical account of the search for life on the red planet was what I needed to break away from this world for a little bit. Definitely check this out if you’re into Mars and the search (rather than finding) for new life there or anywhere. Hope abounds.

From the very first paragraphs of <i>The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World</i>, Sarah Stewart Johnson displays a remarkable ability to paint a visual landscape with a vivid palette. She opens with her personal experience of running tests in the Australian desert; practice for how and where scientists hope to find life that once lived on Mars. She then begins to narrate her own personal story, starting with her father and grandfather in rural Kentucky. Even in this remote part of the country there was tremendous excitement in July of 1965 when <i>Mariner 4</i> beamed back 21 photos of Mars.

Johnson then goes back further in time, much further, to the ancient recognition that the sky held 5 wanderers, or “planets.” Galileo first deduced that Mars was another world, illuminated by the Sun. Over centuries scientists learned more about the size of Mars, the length of its day, and the weather, and the idea began to take shape that Mars was another Earth. Once this rubric appeared it continued to gain footing, up until the images from <i>Mariner 4</i> revealed that Mars was pockmarked with craters. Craters were a sure sign that there was no water, little or no wind, and no life.

Like numerous books by Mary Roach or Bill Bryson, Johnson deftly weaves her own personal story of discovery and adventure with the history of the exploration of Mars. Her own wonder and awe at identifying geological features while still a student is told alongside the discoveries of Percival Lowell, who built a telescope near Flagstaff and changed what the world thought of Mars. Johnson talks of the “genius” of Carl Sagan, specifically his ability to talk to non-scientists, without I think realizing that she too has this tremendous gift; an ability to captivate an audience without drowning them in technical jargon. The chemistry of the polar terrain of Mars, for example, was described as the “...kind of soil you might grow asparagus in.”

Johnson makes it abundantly clear through her writing that she deeply loves her research. When the landing of the Mars rover <i>Curiosity</i> coincides with the birth of her first child, this, too, is seamlessly woven into her narrative. With a family at home she describes leaving work for the day as, “One love tearing me from another.” As a first book, <i>The Sirens of Mars</i> is a powerful opening salvo of Johnson’s combination of skill, knowledge, and storytelling.

I'm still reading the book, but have been pleasantly surprised by how very well Sarah tells the story of the Red Planet and our exploration of it. I look forward to reading more.

It isn’t often that I wish for a longer book; in fact, it’s almost always the opposite. But that’s just what I found myself doing upon finishing Sarah Steward Johnson’s Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, which is about exactly what you would think given the title — a history of out attempts to suss out if life exists on our red-hued neighbor, from speculations about ancient civilizations creating Schiaparelli’s “canali” to Johnson’s own work with NASA’s Mars missions. It’s an excellent book throughout, but it also feels like it could have gone into material in more detail in some places and ends so quickly that I had to doublecheck on Netgallery to make sure I hadn’t gotten an excerpt rather than a full version.

Johnson is both a writer and a scientist, which isn’t always the case in popular science books. Most do an excellent job of conveying information, but the stylistic aspects range from poor to adequate to good to, well, Johnson. The more typical non-fiction elements, whether it’s the historical descriptions involving early astronomers like Schiaparelli or Lowell, or the more scientific/engineering-level descriptions of various orbiters, lands, and rovers, are always crystal clear, easy to follow, and placed in a clear timeline of exploration. In short, Johnson is quite good at the explanations.

But where she truly shines in when she waxes more personal and/or lyrical, her stylistic strengths resulting in some truly gorgeous passages. Here is the opening to chapter one:

In July of 1965, as a tiny octagonal spacecraft swooped across the Martian surface, my father, who had just turned eighteen, was standing tall on a humid, hardwood forested hill in Appalachia. There on the edge of Viper, Kentucky — below a hundred kilometers of nitrogen and oxygen, under the Karman Line, the exosphere, and the Van Allen belt, beneath the great, vast vacuum of space — a small natural-gas company had sent a bulldozer up a holler and had set about carving out a flat spot for drilling.

I knew right away I was going to thoroughly enjoy this book. Everything is here. The science of the atmospheric layers. The memoir element of her father, her Kentucky background, that regional “holler.” The mix of space, sky, and earth, of the wondrous and the pragmatic. The subjective voice describing the spacecraft as “tiny” alongside the more technological voice of “octagonal.” The vivid language— “swooped,” “standing tall,” — and the poetic alliteration of “humid, hardwood, hill” and “vast vacuum.” Here’s another nicely lyrical passage from later in the book describing a sunset photograph from one of the rovers:

The sunset glows an eerie, baffling, incandescent blue. The color makes no sense. It rattles the mind. It rips at the seams of the physical world. Scientifically, I understand it — the properties of the light, the microphysics of the system. There is no mystery to behold. And yet the mystery, like many others in our universe, is profound, nearly incomprehensible. That blue. So recognizable, yet so foreign. Shining in a halo around our shared star, calling us like a siren.”

Johnson works on several tracks as noted. In one she covers the history of Mars study from the early Babylonians noticing its weird movement in the sky through the first years following the invention of the telescope, into the days of large land-based scopes like Lowell’s in Arizona (from which he launched a campaign pushing the idea of ancient Martians digging a massive canal system to feed themselves on their drying-out world), to the first fly-by missions, then the orbiters followed by the tense lander missions (Mars is the graveyard of interplanetary missions with nearly half failing), and wrapping up with a look forward to planned missions in the next few years.

The second track is her intersection with the above, beginning with her childhood interest in the night sky, reading about the Pathfinder rover as a seventeen-year-old about the leave home for college, and then a pivotal trip to JPL to observe work on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. This was supposed to be a few days’ interruption of her graduate work at MIT, but she was so captivated she “decided then and there that I’d do whatever it took to convince the team to let me stay.” She did and it wasn’t for months that she returned to her school apartment to find the “mug of tea I’d made for myself the morning before I left . . . as if it had been fossilized.” Johnson worked on several Mars missions after that, her work interrupted by the birth of her first child, which prevented her from being at JPL when Curiosity landed in August 2012. She tells us of how she “followed the mission from afar,
momentarily trading my immediate world for the depths of space . . . I sometimes felt a pang of sadness that Mars might be slipping away. Opportunities only came around so often. The planets aligned and then swung back apart. They waited for no one . . . it wasn’t obvious to me that’d catch up.”

Sirens of Mars is an excellent book, and my only complaint is that I wish there were more of it. Johnson is such a good science writer that I would have liked to have delved more fully into each of the missions, into the nitty gritty of the biology and the engineering, into more of the failed attempts. And she is such a good memoir writer that I also would have enjoyed more about her personal life as she worked, more about her life as a mother (she has a lovely few passages about her children playing near Vera Rubin’s old work site). Maybe I’m just greedy. Highly recommended.

This was so better than I thought it was going to be because some of the exploration of Mars and places on Mars actually happened I love this was part narrative nonfiction, meditation, science and the fate of the Earth plus a savior of humanity for possible colonization (hope we don't screw up the Earth before that happens). The failed missions definitely kept my attention and It had me thinking about the planet's demise which is happening quicker than expected. This book was written like it was a stream of consciousness; enjoyed it.

Thanks in advance to Netgalley, the author and publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I think I will but the hardcover when it is available.

Available: 7/7/20

Part memoir, part history of humanity's interest in Mars, part meditation on what it would mean for us to find life outside of earth - and whether we would recognize it if we did. Johnson's writing is both cogent and lovely, introducing me to a history of exploration first via wondering, then telescope, and finally rover. The saga of missions that failed had me holding my breath. The anecdote that will probably stick with me the longest is a story by Voltaire that I had never heard of, about a 120,000 foot tall being that visits Earth and nearly misses the variety and value of the life that exists here. The references to literature, to great thinkers and philosophers, and the deep musings about how much we know and how much more we don't give me much to think about for a long time to come. The immensity of the space program really became real to me during this read. I know we've sent men to the moon and rovers to Mars, but realizing how complicated that really was, how far away it really is, and how much we can learn from these efforts is really awe-inspiring. Thanks to the publisher for a NetGalley early reader's edition. I read this during COVID-19 lockdown, a time during which I have found it challenging to focus on reading at all, but I absolutely couldn't put this down.

I was lucky enough to win a electronic ARC of THE SIRENS OF MARS through a Shelf Awareness giveaway. Thank you so much for the chance to win, and stay safe out there!

Although an interesting book, it just was not very compelling and I found myself a bit bored while reading. The facts were good but they were not brought together in an interesting way and I was disappointed.