I don’t know about you, but I always open a book with the intention to like it (there might have been a slight exception with The Da Vinci Code, but that’s the exception that proves only literary incompetence tied to astonishing success will break my general bibliphilic disposition). And I really wanted to like this one: I’ve read a couple of other, similarly themed but historical books, such as Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, and really enjoyed them, so I was hoping for something similar from Mark Thompson. What’s more, while I read widely about astronomy, planetary and stellar, when I was younger, I’ve not looked at it much recently, so I expected there to be a huge range of exciting new findings from all the space probes that have visited the solar system’s planets and satellites over the last 10-15 years. And there probably is – but I’m afraid, my eyes glazed over and my attention wondered.
This book is dull. Dull, dull, dull. At best, I’d call the prose workmanlike and clear. As a positive, I now understand the mechanics of using the gravity slingshot to accelerate a spaceship to the outer reaches of the solar system much better. But the rest of it is all so dreary.
Look, here’s a telling example. Venus, we’ve found out, rather than being the planet of love is as near hell as you can get this side of death: crushing surface pressure, hot enough to melt lead, sulphuric acid clouds: anyone on the surface would be crushed, cooked and corroded in seconds.
But if that wasn’t enough, there is now evidence that the entire planetary surface, every half billion years or so, dissolves into a molten magma lake. This is because Venus has no volcanoes, so there is no mechanism for the heat at the planetary core to escape, so it builds up and builds up and builds up until, in a truly apocalyptic scene, the whole surface of the planet melts, allowing the pent up heat of 500 million years to escape. Then, slowly, it cools and solidifies, and the whole cycle repeats.
So, something pretty juicy for a science writer to get his words into, you’d think? Think again. Here’s Mark Thompson’s description of Venerean apocalypse:
Like all the rocky objects in the Solar System, Venus displays thousands of craters, and the majority of them are still in excellent condition. This suggests that there has been minimal erosion of surface detail. More interestingly, it implies that the surface underwent some kind of global restructuring event around 600 million years ago…In a global event that lasted perhaps up to 100 million years, the entire crust weakened and yielded to the mantle, in effect recycling itself.
There, you see? Thompson takes the most cataclysmic event imaginable and turns it into a bloody Bob the Builder episode (for those who don’t have toddlers and thus are unaware, Bob is clean and green, and committed to the three ‘Rs’: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle).
But if dullness was the only objection, I’d give the book three stars: it’s at least reasonably clear; good, stolid sciencey stuff. But why, oh why, oh why do science writers, who would be appalled (justifiably) if someone accused them of mixing their neutrons with their neutrinos, not feel the same obligation to check their historical facts as they do about checking their scientific facts? Thompson, in the laziest way imaginable, rehashes the old, old Galileo Affair story as a conflict between obscurantist Churchmen, wedded to outdated and unobservable models of the universe, and brave, bold Galileo, speaking truth to power come hell or house imprisonment. I mean, this version of events went out fifty years ago: even Wikipedia has caught up with what actual historians think about what happened. For a proper review of the myths and realities of the Galileo Affair, see this article by historian Tim O’Neill (and lest I be accused of special pleading, note that O’Neill is an atheist and a sceptic).
The consistency with which science writers regurgitate these old lies makes me wonder, in my more paranoid moments, whether there really is a hidden agenda. But no. It’s far more likely to be the lazy assumptions of unexamined prejudice – something as prevalent among scientists and science writers as any other section of the population. So, for this egregious lapse, I’m knocking an extra star off: two out of five stars for A Space Traveller’s Guide to the Solar System. Try reading some of Patrick Moore’s books about the solar system instead – at least he can write.
