I find cosmology in general quite fascinating – after all it has told us many large truths about the universe and there is more to come. In the night sky, I always look up to see if I can see bright Venus & Jupiter or the pale red Mars. Light pollution in the cities increasingly makes this a less pleasurable experience though.

This book packs a wealth of information about Mars – how the planet formed, what it has gone through since and what can we look forward to. The length of a day on Mars is very close to Earth, a year is much longer and gravity is far weaker. While understandably, quite a bit of it is speculative, the book does well to point out the difficulties in current theories in explaining Mars evolution. The section on the dust which gives Mars its distinctive red shade makes for very interesting reading.

The last section on the future of Mars and our potential relationship with it is very pragmatic and sensible. I have seen very casual writings about establishing colonies, terraforming Mars as if these are simple things to do.

This book has some excellent information on our neighbouring planet. The writing is a bit dense though and I had to labour through many sections.

Recommended for the interesting & comprehensive information it packs.

This is the story of Mars. Told with a narrative and like the unraveling of a story, The Red Planet will take you through a journey of its formation, origins, it’s early life, to now and to its future.

The book is very immersive and lyrical and entertaining to read. It isn’t just interesting with its descriptive facts and informative writing but lovely to read with the way it was written. I liked the flow of this book, which seem to stream effortlessly and really worked with the style of writing.

It’s very atmospheric and easy to place yourself into the Martian world as you navigate around it’s early atmosphere, it’s craters and it’s geography.

There’s so much information in here, it’s packed to the brim with Martian geography and details and information about its formation. It would definitely need a second read for all of the writing to sink in and be remembered. It’s definitely an overwhelming subject when thinking about planets origins and creations and how it came to now but so interesting.

It’s very thoroughly and technically written and one of the best in depth accounts of Mars that I’ve read. A great read if you’re interesting in the red planet.

Simon Morden is a science fiction writer by trade (and a PhD in Geophysics) and he brings those skills to bear brilliantly on this non-fiction “biography” of our mysterious sister planet, Mars.
The red planet poses many questions - Why is the northern half of the planet significantly lower than the southern half? What happened to its atmosphere? Where did all the water go? Simon Morden answers, or in some cases, attempts to, all these questions, and more.
But this is no dry textbook - the opening chapter is stirring and evocative, describing dawn on Mars as “you” - us, the reader as intrepid astronaut? - explore the planet in a rickety rover. Other excursions await you sporadically throughout the book, on water and ice.
Morden takes us on a journey from Mars’ earliest beginnings in the nascent solar system right up to the present day and speculates on what the next 100-200 years might entail for Mars. Relating the multilayered history of Mars he lets the planet tell its own, ambiguous story. Deftly explaining the various Martian features and their colourful names, Morden quickly makes you feel like you could pass yourself off as an expert on the red planet. Chapters are short and snappy even though they relate a story across billions of years. Shorn of waffle, Morden keeps the information concise and digestible.
Thanks to Morden’s skills as a fiction writer, this book is a comfortably easy read; quite the page-turner in fact. It deals with some very complicated science but you barely notice. It is a complete(ish) history of Mars, insofar as such a thing could exist, and is a joy to read. I’ve read a lot of books about Mars but Simon Morden’s effort has become one of my favourites.