Then Mike became ill and died, and Seager, now a widowed mother of two, came unlucky. The merciful wave of her sorrow makes for difficult reading. ‘Hour by hour,’ she writes, ‘I felt broken as cold-proof.’ Over time, a group of six other widows, who meet every other Friday, “move from house to house like emotional stickers,” helped Seager gradually return to the world.
The second half of her story shines with insight into what it means to lose a partner in midlife, and just when the widows helped Seager feel less alone, her story will surely help all readers with a similarity loss. ‘If you lose one,’ she writes, ‘you will not lose them all at once, and their death will not stop with their death. You lose them a thousand times in a thousand ways. You say goodbye to a thousand. You have thousands of funerals. “
Johnson’s “The Sirens of Mars” oscillates between a history of Mars science and a description of the author’s own journey as a planetary scientist seeking sparks of life in immensity. She presents efficient miniatures of astronomers such as Percival Lowell, who popularized the idea of visible ‘channels’ on Mars as evidence of an early civilization; Carl Sagan, who suggested that large, turtle organisms “are not only possible on Mars; they may favor ”; and Maria Zuber, the only woman among the 87 researchers in the Mars Global Surveyor science team of 1996. Along the way, you will appreciate the astonishing ingenuity needed to steer robbers the size of Mini Coopers hundreds of millions of miles through a frozen vacuum. , landing them on another planet and driving them remotely.
Most compelling are Johnson’s memories of formation moments, as a young girl passing through fossils with her father, as a broad-eyed student entering the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the first time (“It felt sacred to be in those rooms”) ) and as a horrible young scientist in Copenhagen who holds bacterial cells in her hands that are 20,000 times older than she is. Johnson remembers being surprised when she attended a lecture by Zuber in High School. “My back was focused when it became clear what I was responding to,” she writes. “It was the first time I ever heard a woman talk about planetary science.”
As Johnson’s prose swarms with lyrical amazement, as varied and multi-skinned as the apricot deserts, butterscotch skies and blue rays of Mars, Seager’s rawer and stronger, full of blue and black, is written in the ink of sorrow, suffering, healing and – finally – clarity. In Seager’s hands, you’re as apt to learn about “a special body bag designed to slide down stairs” as it is about storm-wrecked evil exoplanets, where it melts iron.
Both books beautifully dramatize the emotional precariousness of having a career at the fate of space hardware. Both deal with the challenges of female physical scientists in a male-dominated field, and both transmit the struggle of operating in the healing scales of the universe to work, and then commute home to operate in the humbler scales of the domestic atmosphere. “I was persistently torn in two, always some form of distracted,” Seager writes. Johnson, after spending her working day after a Mars rover millions of miles away, hurriedly picked up her children at kindergarten. “It feels almost impossible to leave,” she says, “the one love separates me from the other.”
Spoiler alert: Both books end with the exploratory discovery of extraterrestrial life. On Johnson’s last pages you find yourself spiraling through Herodotus and Euclid; in Seager’s you see her learn how to love again. But these are not disappointments – on the contrary, their testimonies are reminders that we are all just part of a continuum of inquiry that extends through the Enlightenment to Ibn al-Haytham, Aryabhata, and Aristotle, human links in centuries-long chains of questions.
