Analyzes scientific, literary, and popular works of the last century to offer a cross-disciplinary reading of Mars as both an object of scientific study and as a site on which humankind has projected its fears of ecological devastation

Robert Markley is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of a number of books, including Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740. He is a coauthor of the DVD-ROM Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars and the editor of the book Virtual Realities and Their Discontents.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. "A Situation in Many Respects Similar to Our Own": Mars and the Limits of Analogy 31
2. Lowell and the Canal Controversy: Mars at the Limits of Vision 61
3. "Different Beyond the Most Bizarre Imaginings of Nightmare": Mars in Science Fiction, 1880–1912 115
4. Lichens on Mars: Planetary Science and the Limits of Knowledge 150
5. Mars at the Limits of Imagination: The Dying Planet from Burroughs to Dick 182
6. The Missions to Mars: Mariner, Viking, and the Reinvention of a World 230
7. Transforming Mars, Transforming "Man": Science Fiction in the Space Age 269
8. Mars at the Turn of a New Century 303
9. Falling into Theory: Terraformation and Eco-Economics in Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian Trilogy 355
Epilogue: 2005 385
Notes 389
Works Cited 405
Index 435