Mapping Mars: science, imagination and the birth of a world by Oliver Morton

Beguiled by the mysterious face of a new world

One version of the history of our ideas about Mars says that science has destroyed our illusions. A beautifully mysterious planet which might harbour oceans and continents – or life – stands revealed as a sterile hulk, scoured by dust storms. The Solar System's only other potentially habitable world is a vast desert.

Part of the charm of Oliver Morton's cleverly-wrought account of what we know, or think we know, about our near neighbour is that it makes modern Mars seem more interesting, not less. When the ratio of fact to speculation was set by the power of Galilean telescopes, all things seemed possible, none very probable. Now, there is enough hard data to turn Mars into a physical landscape. And that place turns out to be just as rich fuel for the imagination as the earlier half-glimpsed images.

Morton begins with maps and map-makers. The Martian surface, as large as the dry-land area of Earth, is marked by volcanoes the size of small countries, countless impact craters, vast canyons, shorelines of vanished seas. They have been mapped in just the opposite way from the earlier days of Earth exploration: from pictures taken looking down at the surface. As these have been refined with new space missions, better instruments, smarter ways to crunch numbers, a whole planet has graduated from fancy to physiognomy.

Getting under the skin is harder for Earth-bound observers, but there are informed guesses about the underlying geology. We know far more than any previous generation about Mars' climate and atmosphere. A travel agent could write a pretty convincing prospectus for the grand tour, though tickets will be post-dated for an unspecified time.

All this is laid out in convincing detail, along with portraits of the men and women beguiled by the idea of a genuinely new world. As well as the straight scientists, we meet the visionaries and storytellers who have projected Earthly preoccupations on to the Red Planet. Like his subjects, Morton's writing blends romance and rationalism. There is plenty of solid exposition, but also more poetic moments than in most science writing. His sense of wonder extends from the planet itself to all the ways in which curious folk, still confined to a distant world, have been able to piece together what it might be like.

It also takes in the possibilities for giving Mars a new face. Terraforming – the transformation of the planet so that it could support our kind of life without the need for domes and pressure suits – would be an epic enterprise. It is the stuff of science fiction, but need it always be? Morton does not know, because no one does. But he is fascinated by the technical debates, as well as the philosophical ones, that have sprung up around the idea.

His treatment strikes a nice balance between the wry journalistic observer and erudite cultural historian. But he finishes with the conviction that the presence of intelligence on Earth means that the futures of the two planets are bound together. Read it, and you'll be convinced too.

The reviewer teaches science communication at University College London