Camille Flammarion's the Planet Mars

Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) began his career at 16 as a human computer under the great mathematician U. J. J. Le Verrier at the Paris Observatory. He soon tired of the drudgery; he was drawn to more romantic vistas, and at 19 wrote a book on an idea that he was to make his own the habitability of other worlds. There followed a career as France s greatest popularizer of astronomy, with over 60 titles to his credit. An admirer granted him a chateau at Juvisy-sur-l Orge, and he set up a first-rate observatory dedicated to the study of the planet Mars. Finally, in 1892, he published his masterpiece, La Planete Mars et ses conditions d habitabilite , a comprehensive summary of three centuries worth of literature on Mars, much of it based on his own personal research into rare memoirs and archives. As a history of that era, it has never been surpassed, and remains one of a handful of indispensable books on the red planet.§§Sir Patrick Moore (1923-2012) needs no introduction; his record of popularizing astronomy in Britain in the 20th century equaled Flammarion s in France in the 19th century. Moore pounded out hundreds of books as well as served as presenter of the BBC s TV program Sky at Night program for 55 years (a world record). Though Moore always insisted that the Moon was his chef-d oeuvre, Mars came a close second, and in 1980 he produced a typescript of Flammarion s classic. Unfortunately, even he found the project too daunting for his publishers and passed the torch of keeping the project alive to a friend, the amateur astronomer and author William Sheehan, in 1993. Widely regarded as a leading historian of the planet Mars, Sheehan has not only meticulously compared and corrected Moore s manuscript against Flammarion s original so as to produce an authoritative text, he has added an important introduction showing the book s significance in the history of Mars studies. Here results a book that remains an invaluable resource and is also a literary tour-de-force, in which the inimitable style of Flammarion has been rendered in the equally unique style of Moore.§§