What Does a Martian Look Like?
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Product Description
Terry Pratchett
"These men know their aliens."
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
"A fascinating and useful handbook to both the science and science fiction of extraterrestrial life. Cohen and Stewart are amusing, opinionated, and expert guides. I found it a terrific and informative piece of work–nothing else like it!"
–Greg Bear
–Greg Bear
"I loved it."
–Larry Niven
"Ever wonder about what aliens could be like? The world authority is Jack Cohen, a professional biologist who has thought long and hard about the vast realm of possibilities. This is an engaging, swiftly moving study of alien biology, a subject with bounds and constraints these authors plumb with verve and intelligence."
–Gregory Benford
"A celebration of life off Earth. A hearteningly optimistic book, giving a much–needed antidote to the pessimism of astrobiologists who maintain that we are alone in the universe–a stance based on a very narrow view of what could constitute life. A triumph of speculative nonfiction."
–Dougal Dixon, author of
After Man: A Zoology of the Future
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
CAIN AND ABEL have walked and drifted in many strange places - 'walked' was not appropriate for many of them. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
CAIN AND ABEL have walked and drifted in many strange places - 'walked' was not appropriate for many of them. Read the first page
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Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Be warned, this is actually the same book as Evolving the Alien: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, which is what it was called in hardback. It is a great book and nowhere near as dumb as the new title suggests - nor will it tell you what a Martian looks like, but it does contain a lot of deep but fairly easily accessible science about how alien life might develop in a variety of weird ways.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Those of us who have had the pleasure of meeting Jack, and of listening to his lectures on alien life, will relish this book. Together with Ian Stewart [the two becoming a composite entity known as JACK&IAN], he provides us with the extra detail that he never really has time to develop within the limited time of a one hour lecture, and which the listener longs for.
Although this book is about possible alien life, it has to start from life on Earth - the only example we possess. JACK&IAN take[s] us on a tour of the bewildering, amazing and downright weird ways living things have found of getting on with the business of Life on Earth. If your knowledge of terrestrial flora and fauna is limited to the cosy, well-ordered diagrams of school text books, then you will find here real food for thought.
Unlike some other books on the possibility of alien life, this one roots itself firmly in real science, by people who know their subjects, and it attempts successfully to demonstrate that, even if alien life occurs on a planet similar to our own, it will be far more odd [to us] and interesting than the feeble fare dished up by Star Trek and similar. The book exudes the enthusiasm that its author/s have for the subject, but there is also a strong message for us to keep open minds, and not to impose our own rigid prejudices and misapprehensions,perhaps not just on this the subject. I believe it was Nils Bohr, who, when starting a lecture, would say "Treat everything I say to you as a question" - sorry if I've got that wrong,Jack.
JACK&IAN ably follow[s] this dictum. However, this is a thought-provoking book for the informed reader, not one for casual dipping. It will be occasionally useful to have a dictionary on hand to look up genetic terms - but that's no bad thing.
As for what Martians look like? Well, whatever they want to seems to be the idea, and not like the Martian "sponge" I once gave Jack as a souvenir.
As usual for these two gentlemen, their mutual contributions merge seamlessly, and this book is an excellent addition to their canon. If it is the first of their works you have read, let it lead you to their other works.
Format:Paperback
This is an exposition of their ideas on extraterrestrial life, by a reproductive biologist (Cohen) and a mathematician (Stewart). They have contributed to the "Invisible Book"s of ecology and astronomy that underpin each of a number of sci-fi works, most notably those by Terry Pratchett.
They introduce a new term, xenoscience, to indicate an integrated science of alien life, which they oppose to astrobiology, which they say is only the addition of earth-based biology to earth-based astronomy.
Normally, the publisher's blurb is a forgettable puff, but in this instance it conveys the authors' position quite nicely:
"Creatures ... that are born pregnant; with twenty different sexes; that eat their own children; that can survive without water for a quarter of a billion years. Absurd? Not at all. These are creatures alive on planet Earth. And they show us just how different alien life could be from anything we know."
This is contrary to a number of works published at the same time, such as Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Ward & Brownlee, and Perfect Planet, Clever Species : How Unique Are We? / William C. Burger by Walter Burger, whose position is that Mankind is very special and probably unique.
The present authors clearly have a good view of the enormous possibilities for life elsewhere, and mention some of the more extraordinary biologies of Earth life. They also spend some time pointing out defects in the Rare Earth book.
They spend little time on specific alternative life chemistries (as seems to be normal these days). The only book I have so far found which describes possible alien chemistries in detail is Val Firsoff's Life beyond the Earth. A study in exobiology, now nearly 50 years old.
The two books previously mentioned spend most of their pages describing the history of the planet Earth, in order to convince the reader that Earth life is unrepeatable (which, if taken literally and precisely, then of course it is; and alien life, if it exists, will be unrepeatable in the same way). This book doesn't do that, so in trying to fill some 350 pages it suffers from a shortage of good material. For the next edition, I hope that the editor will be more energetic with chapters 8 (Dragons, Teddy Bears, and Toddlers) and 13 (Have Aliens Visited Us?). The second half of chapter 11 (the Sensual Tribble) deals unnecessarily, and at length, with an episode in Star Trek and could be excised or moved to a different book.
Apart from the latter, the sci-fi connection is a positive feature: there are 28 boxed synopses of SF works that are referred to in the main text, as well as a running story of an alien tourist agency that offers trips to the planet Earth with its primitive humanoids. I liked all these.
There is one glaring error. In chapter 4 they say that gravitational clumping disobeys the second law of thermodynamics, apparently out of a misunderstanding of the physical concept of disorder, which is different to the biological one. It is both unnecessary and irrelevant.
The book is well-written, and has a good index. It expresses quite well a repudiation of the Humans Are Special view.
They introduce a new term, xenoscience, to indicate an integrated science of alien life, which they oppose to astrobiology, which they say is only the addition of earth-based biology to earth-based astronomy.
Normally, the publisher's blurb is a forgettable puff, but in this instance it conveys the authors' position quite nicely:
"Creatures ... that are born pregnant; with twenty different sexes; that eat their own children; that can survive without water for a quarter of a billion years. Absurd? Not at all. These are creatures alive on planet Earth. And they show us just how different alien life could be from anything we know."
This is contrary to a number of works published at the same time, such as Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe by Ward & Brownlee, and Perfect Planet, Clever Species : How Unique Are We? / William C. Burger by Walter Burger, whose position is that Mankind is very special and probably unique.
The present authors clearly have a good view of the enormous possibilities for life elsewhere, and mention some of the more extraordinary biologies of Earth life. They also spend some time pointing out defects in the Rare Earth book.
They spend little time on specific alternative life chemistries (as seems to be normal these days). The only book I have so far found which describes possible alien chemistries in detail is Val Firsoff's Life beyond the Earth. A study in exobiology, now nearly 50 years old.
The two books previously mentioned spend most of their pages describing the history of the planet Earth, in order to convince the reader that Earth life is unrepeatable (which, if taken literally and precisely, then of course it is; and alien life, if it exists, will be unrepeatable in the same way). This book doesn't do that, so in trying to fill some 350 pages it suffers from a shortage of good material. For the next edition, I hope that the editor will be more energetic with chapters 8 (Dragons, Teddy Bears, and Toddlers) and 13 (Have Aliens Visited Us?). The second half of chapter 11 (the Sensual Tribble) deals unnecessarily, and at length, with an episode in Star Trek and could be excised or moved to a different book.
Apart from the latter, the sci-fi connection is a positive feature: there are 28 boxed synopses of SF works that are referred to in the main text, as well as a running story of an alien tourist agency that offers trips to the planet Earth with its primitive humanoids. I liked all these.
There is one glaring error. In chapter 4 they say that gravitational clumping disobeys the second law of thermodynamics, apparently out of a misunderstanding of the physical concept of disorder, which is different to the biological one. It is both unnecessary and irrelevant.
The book is well-written, and has a good index. It expresses quite well a repudiation of the Humans Are Special view.
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