Mars and its canals have long been fertile ground for historical analysis. The claim, first made in 1877, that straight dark lines could be seen on the planet, and the subsequent furore over whether or not these markings were evidence of extraterrestrial life, are by now well-known stories. In the last decade in particular there has been a resurgence of interest in this topic, combined with an array of impressive, thoughtful and complex reanalyses of these events. David Strauss's biography Percival Lowell (2001) has reconsidered the character and stature of astronomy's most vociferous advocate of the artificial-canal hypothesis. Robert Markley has linked the themes of ecology, literary representation and planetary astronomy in Dying Planet (2005). Robert Crossley has illuminated the rich relationship between fiction and science through humans’ long history of Imagining Mars (2011). Martin Willis has examined Lowell through Victorian and modernist ways of seeing in Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons (2011). And Jennifer Tucker has explored the public reception of photographs of Mars's canals in Nature Exposed (2005). Taken as a whole, these works – which build on Michael Crowe and Stephen Dick's pioneering histories of the plurality-of-worlds question – are a fine illustration of the considerable historiographic gains our field has made in the last quarter-century. They have taken an episode that astronomy's own disciplinary histories have often suppressed as a silly mistake and rightly returned it to the heart of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history of science.

So why return to Mars? A consistent theme that underlies the above works has been the ability of the planet and its canals to act as a cultural mirror apt for the integration and synthesis of scientific, social and political narratives. K. Maria D. Lane's Geographies of Mars brings to this fruitful mix of literary and historical scholarship a fresh geographical perspective, and represents the most impressive interdisciplinary study of Mars yet. The book breaks a great deal of new ground and is exemplary of how the ‘geographical turn’ can reinvigorate well-studied episodes within history of science.

The book's structure builds out from geography's most concrete relationship with Mars – the map – to encompass the cultural geography of place and the political geography of race and empire. Lane begins by cogently arguing for the powerful role played by cartographic representation in establishing views of Mars as irrigated and inhabited. The ascendancy after 1877 of a specific kind of map – detailed, clear, abstract and ultimately geometrical – projected a scientific authority that only waned after the slow rise of planetary photography. The power of this visual authority was linked, Lane then suggests, to an equally influential shift in the locations in which Mars science was conducted. As observatories began to move away from metropolitan centres in search of better seeing conditions, the credibility of Martian observations became intimately connected with mountain sites and the privileged high-altitude vision that they enabled. Exploiting this relationship relied upon then-popular geographical tropes of heroic exploration, and the relative success of both the advocates and the opponents of the canal hypothesis was in part determined by astronomers’ ability to cultivate such representations. In a shift in focus towards the broader cultural meanings of Mars science, Lane then analyses the contrasting public intellectual projects of Lowell and Alfred Russel Wallace, skilfully making the case for re-evaluating their message about inhabited Mars within the context of political and philosophical debates surrounding empire, race, technology and human progress. The final chapter then takes us ‘Toward a cultural geography of Mars’, and considers the small step from irrigated Martian landscapes to broad speculations about the physical and social characteristics of the Martian ‘Others’. It has been a weakness of Martian studies generally that the rich output of imaginative fiction about the planet has been an all-too-tempting distraction, deflecting scholars away from analysis of the canals as a scientific concern. Lane avoids this pitfall by considering instead the ‘imaginative geographies’ of both Mars and Earth, seen here as reflections of the interwoven nature of science, politics and public culture in the early twentieth century. From this Lane draws out some (admittedly pretty broad-brush) distinctions between British and American responses to the idea of the superior Martian, and relates these to national attitudes towards imperialism. Here, quite clearly, geographical tropes ‘allowed Mars to become a site of projection for terrestrial concerns’ (p. 215). This climax encapsulates one of the book's great strengths, namely its success at making seemingly bizarre claims about Mars begin to make sense when analysed through the geography of scientific practice, representation and reception.

The book's only real flaw is its reliance on an anachronistic and simplistic conception of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century astronomy's power structure and publications hierarchy. For example, calling Percival Lowell, the director of a state-of-the-art observatory with a large staff, an ‘amateur’ obscures more than it reveals. The claim that any sort of relevant distinction can be made between ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ astronomers in this era needs to be handled with great caution, or else we risk treating one of the principal products of the Mars canal debate as one of its causes. Likewise, Lane's reliance on a supposed separation between ‘astronomical journals’ and ‘the popular press’ repeats the common error of assuming a binary conflict between inhabited-Mars theories promulgated by the latter and sceptical criticism forwarded by the ‘professionals’ who only ‘reluctantly’ deigned to communicate outside the former (p. 12). In fact, the genres and modes of discourse employed by the actors within this debate are as complex as they are varied, though of course it is traditional histories of astronomy, rather than Lane, which deserve most of the criticism for the persistence of this binary perspective. Another small but frustrating flaw of the book is the poor standard of referencing. The endnotes are often vague and the bibliography conflates, for example, the works of Edward Pickering and his brother William (two men who had very different opinions about Mars), whilst some articles are listed with the wrong title and certain others are listed without volume or page information. Such criticisms are, however, greatly outweighed by how much the book does extremely well. Lane's geographical perspective impressively enhances our understanding of the Mars canal saga.