ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS

A set of loosely connected personal essays written during one of NASA’s simulated missions to Mars.

In her first book, laser physicist–turned-writer Greene sets out to use the wisdom of “human explorers on Mars [to] inspire new ways to sustain our lives and ecosystems back on Earth.” It’s a laudable goal, but the resulting collection mostly falls flat. Writing from her own experience as second-in-command of the 4-month-long 2013 Hawai’i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) mission, the author chronicles her life’s changes refracted through the prism of living in tight quarters with other crew members, who all “brought their own projects to the mission.” Over the course of the narrative, we learn about Greene’s failing marriage and the importance of retaining a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco; the death of her brother; her parents’ house in Kansas, where they have lived for decades; and the fact that because of the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Greene had to sign forms consenting to be a research subject. In going from “writing like [a] science journalist...to someone who was writing herself into a story,” however, the author drops the more interesting threads involving space exploration. Greene helpfully coins the term “technoschmerz” to describe the anguish caused by the disconnection between what we expect from technology—e.g., moonshots and Mars missions—and the confusion, emotional rifts, and anxiety it produces as it separates us from one another. Recalling Frank Borman, commander of the 1968 Apollo 8 mission that produced the iconic Earthrise photograph, Greene claims that only poets could capture the grandeur of Earth viewed from space. Technoschmerz en route to Mars also may be the domain of poets, but that poem has yet to be written.

Living on “Mars” may have changed Greene, but her journey of self-exploration is unlikely to change many readers.