Saturday, August 25, 2012

Mars and the Mind of Man

For a long time, it's been on my very lengthy to-do list: write a review of the 1971 book Mars and the Mind of Man. It's a record of a seminar held at the time of the Mariner 9 probe to Mars, in which key figures in space science and science fiction give their views of the impact of our new knowledge of the red planet.

I acquired an ex-library copy of this book a year or two ago, in the hope that it would reveal something more of Bradbury's attitudes to the "space age". (It does, so it was a worthwhile purchase!) Now I have an excuse to skip the review, because Maria Popova has done the task so well on BrainPickings.com.

Popova's article includes a number of images from the book, and a considered digest of the points of view expressed by the principal contributors Arthur C.Clarke, Carl Sagan and Ray Bradbury.


On Bradbury's birthday, 22 August, two artists presented new portraits of of Ray to the Waukegan public library. Pictured below are David Motley and Patrick Tufo with the paintings. The full story is here.


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