Packing for Mars by Mary Roach

Maybe I should make one of Mars?

You may recall my less-than-stellar review of Spook, and that at the end I was a little nervous about reading Packing for Mars, since it’s also by Mary Roach. But I am very pleased to say that Packing for Mars is way, way better. I even stayed up late to finish it last night! It could just be that the topic was one more interesting to me, or that I had adjusted to her style more, but I really do think this was simply better written.

Packing for Mars is about the strange and silly details that go into consideration when gravity is out of the equation. So there was a lot about bodily functions. Which is not surprising at all, since I’m pretty sure everyone’s always wondered how they shit in space (and now I know).

I do have a few gripes about the book; Mary Roach repeated a few things. At least one was a reintroduction of a topic, which included a cheery “as we learned and probably forgot in Chapter 4…” And a few others were nods to the fact that we’d already learned it, but it’s complicated, so we should probably learn it again. But then there was the water tank at NASA which has bits of the space ships assembled in it for practice, which was mentioned at least three separate times, and introduced like it was an entirely new idea each time. I don’t think I can hold it against the author, who probably wrote the chapters with enough time between them to forget that she’d already talked about that, but by the third explanation it was pretty annoying.

And…no that…well. A gripe I have in general about non-fiction writing is that it often jumps around from topic to topic, and then back, and then on a tangent, and then into a metaphor, which ties back to the first point, which you may or may not have forgotten by now. This was one of the issues in Spook (although I may not have addressed it in my review). And it was still present in this book, but to a much lesser extent. So I guess that’s more of a compliment than a gripe? That Mary Roach did a better job staying on-subject than previously experienced.

But like I said, this book was a really good read, full of interesting stuff (especially if you want to know about personal hygiene in outer space). It’s a wee bit dated (from 2010-ish), but only in the sense that you should add at least an extra decade onto every anticipated-date of a future project. No moonbase in 2015, for example. And I don’t think we’re still on track for Mars in 2035.

But we did fly by Pluto, and that’s fantastic, if completely unrelated.