Thread by @People_Of_Space

So in the early part of my career, I wrote a few books about space and science. In the nineties, I started work on the Mars book, but like all great works of art (ahem), I abandoned it. @howellspace took pity on me and the rest is history or her story, in truth.

I was also a fairly unconvincing Harry Potter impersonator

(This was three years before Harry was even published btw)

After that, I turned to crime (writing) - but realised that, at heart, the best way to tell science stories is as detective stories with the investigators as the lead characters. If you tell the story through their eyes, people with no technical background can understand

So why did @howellspace and I write our book about Mars? We were asked that recently and the answer is here – filling-space.com/2020/10/02/wha… -- but also because of Perseverance’s upcoming landing

I am sometimes asked which books influenced me growing up – and apart from one, none of them were actually about Mars (though a few were about space, the rest about history)

In the seventies, books on space in the U.K. were written by either Patrick Moore, Reg Turnill or engineers who managed to suck dry any excitement with jargon, cheerless pedantry and technical gobbledigook

Reg was the legendary BBC air correspondent in the sixties and seventies – I think everyone who was interested in space had one of his “Observer’s” pocket books at one time or another @poppy_northcutt

For most kids who grew up in the seventies, Reg was a regular on a children's TV news show called "John Craven's Newsround". I don't think any of us knew just how well regarded he was by people in the news business on both sides of the Atlantic -- theguardian.com/media/2013/feb…

Patrick’s books were always entertaining – and if you read what he wrote in 1969, he would write a similar version to it later on the same typewriter (that’s not a criticism – give the people what they want, they will buy it)

And full disclosure. Patrick was my first editor and it all went horribly wrong thanks to the leaving of a very rude answerphone message. Me on his, btw, not the other way around.

One thing I can say about Patrick – for all his wonderfully contradictory eccentricities – he loved astronomy more than himself which is not something you could say then (or now) about some other “popularisers” who seem to love themselves more. And he loved cats, too

And he was happy to send himself up – My favourite was the famous occasion he asked an alternative thinker about his idea that there were hemispherical-shaped aliens on Saturn. “So they are not complete balls?” he asked with a straight face

But other space books? They were usually mind-bogglingly dull. My absolute favourite was one which described Gemini 8 as “a challenge in spacecraft control” - Hnh? Take a look at this -

At one point, the Gemini 8 capsule was rotating end over end once every second thanks to a balky thruster – and a friend of mine talked to Dave Scott about it who said, yes, they were worried they would pass out.

So, yes, drama and excitement – that’s what spaceflight always had if you could get accounts by people who could actually string a sentence together and tell a story without sounding as though they had put their false teeth in the wrong way round

In what was called “unmanned spaceflight”, there was another canard – these machines weren’t as interesting as the stuff humans did. And what a crock of shit that turned out to be.

The people behind the robotic missions were equally extraordinary: and over the next few days I will relate some stories of the people I met and their amazing – at times, unbelievable - stories

The best book I have ever read about Mars was – unsurprisingly – about Viking by Mark Washburn who, as I will relate, I later met. It was one of those books that felt like a light had gone inside my head. More on this on another day

So this morning (UK time) will share a few books that I have enjoyed - invidious as it is to name people, but please share yours. Extra points if they are from the seventies; even extra points if they are comprehensible to the average person in the street