Saturday, March 03, 2007

Mike Carr's Mars, 2007 edition

The Surface of Mars by Michael Carr was originally published in 1984, based largely on data and imagery from the Viking orbiters and landers. In Mapping Mars, Oliver Morton talks about this book and its author in a chapter called "Mike Carr's Mars," noting that the book was still considered the best single-author scientific work on the subject even into the late 1990's, and that it was a major inspiration for Kim Stanley Robinson's classic SF Mars Trilogy.

I read a recent article about Mike Carr today at the Air & Space Magazine web site and learned that there is a brand-new 2007 edition of The Surface of Mars. At $135, I will hold off on getting it until I'm planning a trip (I can get by with A Traveler's Guide To Mars for a while longer), but the preview pages show that Carr has made great use of the recent flood of Mars imagery from various orbiters and from the Mars rovers.

No comments: