With Mars regaining a prime position in the news, I read this book at a very appropriate time. The author has written about human’s obsession with the planet as far back as the western world has tried to map and study it. Parallelly we are also given an insight into what her life was like with a father who was also equally interested in the topic and her forays into the field.


The tale twists and turns between the two main topics but continues to hold Mars as the central focus. On reading the afterword, I realised afresh how seriously the author takes her connection with the subject and all the other things that it implies.
It is not a book to read at one go, with a lot of content to absorb as well as scientific conversations. The extent of the science is not enough to alienate someone who doesn’t know the subject, but it did feel heavy during the mentions. The talk about her life and its growth and her understanding of Mars and the research associated with it help slow the pace down. The essence of humanities needs to understand this other planet is also discussed. It also talks of the idea of women in science, which is brought up at appropriate moments.


I liked the book, but it took me a long time to work my way through it. By the time I got to the end, I was not sure I remembered all of the beginning. This is mainly because I read only a few non-fiction books during the year. I am sure someone better versed than me in something Mars related would find this easy going.

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

In The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World, planetary scientist Sarah Stewart Johnson explores our history with the red planet. Our journey started when the realisation dawned that the reddish speck of light in the sky was another world. The development of telescopes allowed us to get a better view of Mars – but not a good one. Pretty much everything early astronomers saw – or thought they saw – turned out not to be true. In the late 1800s, for example, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli famously saw straight lines across the Martian surface. At this point in Earth’s history, our engineering skills had developed to the point where we were building large canals, including the Panama Canal. Schiaparelli’s ‘canali’ (channels) were therefore assumed to be the irrigation canals of an intelligent Martian civilisation. But although other astronomers jumped on the bandwagon, Schiaparelli’s linear features never really existed.

Our view of Mars shows seasonal changes, and for a long time we believed that what we were seeing was the growth of new vegetation in spring, which died back in the winter, as it does on Earth.

Stewart Johnson is an assistant professor of planetary science at Georgetown University. She has worked with three Mars rovers – Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity – and the bulk of the book covers the discoveries we have made about Mars during the Space Age. In the 1960s, Celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan was firmly convinced that there was visible life on Mars and that it looked like a cross between a turtle and a jellyfish.

The first pictures from Mars were, therefore, a crushing disappointment. Mariner 4 was the first successful Mars mission, sending back the first pictures of the planet in 1965. The resolution was woeful, but it was good enough to see craters on the planet surface. Unlike on Earth, they hadn’t disappeared due to the churn of plate tectonics or weathered away under the influence of water. The atmosphere was thin, there was no protective magnetic field, and it was cold. Mars was a barren rock.

Mariner 9, launched in 1971, painted a slightly more promising story. It revealed that the seasonal changes seen from Earth were nothing more than dust moving around. However, it showed us that the surface of Mars is not flat, but home to giant volcanoes and cavernous canyons. It saw evidence of riverbeds, meaning that Mars was a very different place in its early history. The dream of finding living organisms faded, replaced with the hope that we can see evidence of ancient life. Which, of course, is where we are today.

Part of Stewart Johnson’s story is how our concept of life has evolved, and how the search for life on Mars has led us to new discoveries on Earth. We have uncovered forms of life that get their energy from the chemicals in their environment, rather than relying on solar power. We’ve found extremophiles – lifeforms that thrive in conditions previously thought to be uninhabitable. It has got to the point where it’s newsworthy to report when scientists find somewhere that doesn’t have any life.

So the ways in which we’re looking for life on Mars have changed. And there’s still the distinct possibility that there is evidence of life on Mars that is so beyond our understanding that we wouldn’t recognise it if we saw it.

The book ends just before the launch of the Perseverance rover this summer (along with two more Mars missions, which is why summer 2020 was dubbed the Mars Summer.) We won’t know which of those missions will succeed until they arrive in February 2021. But the ones that survive will tell us new things about the planet that has fascinated humanity for so long.

Sirens of Mars is a detailed chronicle of our attempts to learn more about Mars. But it’s not a dry retelling. In fact, it sometimes struck me that our Mars story plays out like a soap opera. We build up Martian hopes and dreams only to see them dashed – sometimes literally, into a million pieces on the planet’s surface.

Whether or not we find evidence of life on Mars, we now have the tools to look for it further away – on the moons of the outer planets, and even on exoplanets beyond our solar system.

“They are points of light and shadow at the very edge of our sight, far beyond our grasp. Then again, that is exactly how Mars seemed only a century ago.”

A fascinating read about Mars, very informative and totally accessible to people who don't know much about the subject. I have to admit that it didn't transport me as much as The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager, which was published recently too and shares the same subject of planetary science while being more lyrical. Nevertheless, I enjoyed The Sirens of Mars and felt enriched by all I've learnt.

When one thinks of life on Mars, those little green aliens tend to come up in the imagination. Loads of Science Fiction authors have written about it, be it Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles or Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. More recently, movies have touched the Red Planet - many laughed with the puns in The Martian and wondered about its science, others loved the Old Mars touch of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Princess of Mars even better.

With the upcoming NASA Mission "Mars 2020" featuring rover Perseverance, curiosity for Mars is given another notch, and this semi-fiction book is a very good preparation for it. It dives deep into the history of researching Mars starting with coarse views through bad lenses, via the fallacies of Martian channels, and focuses on the NASA missions since the 1960s. Every flyby gets a treatment, every rover is followed thoroughly.

The author manages it to present a red threat of scientific needs and curiosity starting from those early days, many setbacks and disappointments, up to the question why we are still sending new Missions there. Also, check out this interview with her for some more background information.

The only thing that I'm really missing is pictures. One can always go to external sources, of course, e.g. the wonderful space.com article, but I'd have preferred seeing them in the book.

It is a personal story, a story of the author's family, and one of herself, because she's been a scientist in three of those missions. Her story interleaves the non-fiction parts in an autobiographical point of view.

While she is no celebrity, her story is mostly interesting. Only very late in the book, when she starts talking about the birth of her child, I lost interest. That was also the time when she went far more into philosophical topics and ramblings about Euclidean mathematics.

The narration covers some 170 pages and is followed by a huge footnote section which I didn't digest but is expected from a scientist. The prose is absolutely accessible for normal readers, and it even builds up tension in the ever quest for microscopic life on Mars. No little green aliens are to be found here, but a wonderful scientific and autobiographical story of life on Mars, which I recommend for anyone interested in Martian affairs.

An insightful book full of the wonders of Mars.
Mars has always been a planet that has captured the imagination. From the idea of little green men waving down upon us, to the very real hope of finding real life.

This book follows the journey of science and the steps they have taken in order to see if there is life, or could be life on the red planet. From theories to the mars rovers and discovering what the planet actually looks like, even though it's so far from us.

The book is informative and witty. It's easy to read and understand, and it draws you in as if you were in the same room as the scientists, as they wait for the data to come back from Mars.

The authors mixes in some personal details along side the history of Mars, and I really like how this was done. It read effortlessly and for me, made it much easier to connect with.

A wonderful read full of exciting history and scientific breakthroughs.

Throughout July, GeekMom is preparing for the planned launch of the Perseverance rover on July 20th with Mars Month, a month filled with Mars-themed content. Be sure to follow the Mars Month tag to find all of this month’s content so far in one place. Today I am reviewing The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewart Johnson.

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The Sirens of Mars is a part memoir, part historical narrative of the exploration of one of our nearest planetary neighbors. Written by Sarah Stewart Johnson, an assistant professor of planetary science at Georgetown University, the book covers the history of our obsession with the red planet and also the people who helped us to take greater and greater leaps toward understanding it.

As The Sirens of Mars progresses through its eleven chapters, it slowly traces the history of Mars exploration, but this is no dull and dry chronology. The story jumps around in time tying the author’s experiences to those of her predecessors, whether they be the tenured professors working just a few decades prior to her, or the ancient philosophers working away at the great Library of Alexandria. We spend time with Percival Lowell who fought for years to prove that the lines he saw through his telescope really were canals, and with Wolf Vishniac who met his death deep in the Antarctic while busy working to try and prove that life can indeed survive in those harsh conditions.

While the conclusions many of these early Martian pioneers were wrong – the “canals” first identified by Giovanni Schiaparelli and investigated by Lowell may well have been ghostly images of their own retinal veins projected over the planet they were so studiously investigating – what they left behind was their passion, an almost overwhelming desire to make the ultimate discovery, ignited by a belief that perhaps they can change history. It’s something Johnson herself experienced, a moment she shares in the pages of this book, describing the moment as when she “suddenly saw something I might haunt the stratosphere for, something for which I’d fall into the sea… a chance to discover the smallest breath in the deepest night and, in so doing, vanquish the void that lurked between human existence and all else in the cosmos.”

Despite all the great achievements cataloged in these pages, it is Johnson’s personal story that really ties The Sirens of Mars together. We get to follow along with her career from her early college days through to today; her thrill at making a scientific discovery (multiplied exponentially when she learned it had been successfully repeated by an independent team), her excitement at being in the room when the first images of the Endurance Crater taken by Opportunity. Johnson expertly narrates these events, allowing us to see them through the eyes of a young scientist who has really been in the room where it happened and thus allowing us to feel those thrills along with her. I defy anyone to read this book and not step away immediately wanting to ditch their current job and call NASA looking for a new career.

My one criticism of the book is that it contains no images. Countless pages are devoted to describing maps, illustrations, and photographs and these often key to understanding exactly how theories were devised, discoveries made, and passions ignited. I wish I could have seen those images there on the page for myself without having to constantly resort to Google.

The Sirens of Mars is easily one of the greatest works of non-fiction I have ever read, comfortably equalling my beloved Dinosaur Hunters by Deborah Cadbury. The book ends looking forward to the future, explaining the planned landing site for the latest Mars rover – Perseverance – and why exactly that site was chosen. This is a book that knows it is being forced to conclude before the story it wants to tell is finished and Johnson chooses to close it by looking forward with hope and more of the same excitement that colored the previous 180+ pages. Who knows what Perseverance will discover, I just hope Sarah Stewart Johnson will be the one to tell me all about it.

If you’re looking for one book to bring you up to speed on Mars at the beginning of 2020, The Sirens of Mars is the one you need.

GeekMom received a copy of this book for review purposes.