The Sirens of Mars Review

The Sirens of Mars review: Inside
the hunt for life on the Red Planet

We once thought Mars had canals built by an advanced
society. We've come a long way since then, but there is still
much to discover, finds Leah Crane
IF YOU look up on a clear night, you might spot a light brighter

than all the others, not twinkling like a star, but floating serene
and reddish-tinged in the sky. Across history, many have gazed
at Mars and imagined what its distant shores might hold. Some
have even sent spacecraft up there to find out.
In her book The Sirens of Mars, Sarah Stewart Johnson tells

the story of the Red Planet and those who have sought to
understand it, from Herodotus and Euclid to NASA and its
Curiosity and Perseverance rovers, with the author herself
slotted in between.
The tale begins before Mars was even understood to be a place,

when it was just a light in the sky. It then moves on to when
scientists thought that Mars could be truly the twin of Earth,
when apparent lines on its surface were taken to be the canals
of an advanced society. Even after discovering they weren’t
canals, people still thought they could be signs of vegetation,
the signature of a green and thriving planet.
At the point Stewart Johnson reaches the first space missions to
fly by Mars and their failures to spot any obvious signs of life,
the disappointment is palpable. The narrative feels as if it is
building towards a big revelation, maybe even the discovery
of living organisms on Mars. Those who have studied the planet
for a long time know intimately the roller coaster of emotion it
has caused.
Stewart Johnson has made Mars her life’s work. She is from a
space-loving family, making her career choice seem inevitable.
The book is part memoir, part history, part education, and the
three flow together so smoothly you might not even realise how
much you are learning about Mars.
At one point, she describes crater walls as “reveal[ing] layers

that had been stacked like the pages of a closed book, one
moment in time pressed close against the next”. She manages
to press moments in time together as closely as the sedimentary
rocks on Mars, revealing its history just as the rocks do.
“Mars may not be quite as arid and dead as we once thought,

but rather it has water hiding everywhere”
As much as that history contains many disappointments, from

the revelation that the canals of Mars aren’t real to the
understanding that there is unlikely to be life on the surface, it
is also optimistic. There are many joyful moments, such as
when scientists realised that Mars might not be quite as arid
and dead as we once thought, but rather it has water hiding
everywhere.
Those moments are what propel the story forward and what
drives Stewart Johnson to keep travelling to some of the most
extreme and barren environments on Earth to grasp at the
possibility that there may yet be life on Mars that looks nothing
like it does here on Earth. “We are still struggling to contend
with the truly alien, to recognize and interpret signs of ‘life as
we don’t know it’, ” she writes.
The Sirens of Mars comes at an exciting time: Mars researchers
have more information now than at any other point in history,
and NASA’s Perseverance rover, scheduled to launch this
month, will surely bring a wave of discoveries when it collects
rock and soil samples in its search for signs of ancient life. Yet
as the interest in Mars grows, with many nations and
companies working on missions to its surface, researchers’
efforts to understand it become increasingly urgent.
As Stewart Johnson writes: “The next decades are thus critically

important for the search for life because the window to explore
an untrammeled planet – a pristine record of the past – is
closing.”
In the end, the book tells you what anybody who has studied
science learns as they move from one school year to the next:
the more we know, the clearer it is that what we thought we
knew before was wrong. However, as Stewart Johnson so
clearly describes, the journey of understanding where we were
wrong propels us ever forward to explore.

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The Sirens of Mars review: Inside

the hunt for life on the Red Planet

IF YOU look up on a clear night, you might spot a light brighter

In her book The Sirens of Mars, Sarah Stewart Johnson tells

The tale begins before Mars was even understood to be a place,

At one point, she describes crater walls as “reveal[ing] layers

“Mars may not be quite as arid and dead as we once thought,

As much as that history contains many disappointments, from

As Stewart Johnson writes: “The next decades are thus critically

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