OLIVER MORTON

A Sunday Times must read book of 2019As heard on Radio 4 Book of the Week''An out-of-this-world read ... brilliant and compelling. Morton is a high-octane British science journalist, and every chapter is littered with material that strikes, amazes or haunts ... this is a book filled not just with a lifetime''s knowledge of its subject but with a lifetime''s suppressed excitement.''James McConnachie, Sunday TimesEvery generation has looked up from the Earth and wondered at the beauty of the Moon. 50 years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse - with the whole world watching through their eyes.In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver Morton explores the history and future of humankind''s relationship with the Moon. A counterpoint in the sky, it has shaped our understanding of the Earth from Galileo to Apollo. Its gentle light has spoken of love and loneliness; its battered surface of death and the cosmic. For some, it is a future on which humankind has turned its back. For others, an adventure yet to begin.Advanced technologies, new ambitions and old dreams mean that men, women and robots now seem certain to return to the Moon. What will they learn there about the universe, the Earth-and themselves? And, this time, will they stay?

A climate crisis book which offers a new and controversial solution geoengineering and which delivers a rich deep history of climate change and the science and politics that underpin it

Eating the Sun is the story of the discovery of a miracle: the source of life itself. From the intricacies of its molecular processes to the beauty of the nature that it supports, Eating the Sun is a wondering tribute to the extraordinary process that has allowed plants to power the earth for billions of years. Photosynthesis is the most mundane of miracles. It surrounds us in our gardens and parks and countryside; even our cityscapes are shot through with trees. It makes nature green the signature of the pigments with which plants harvest the sun; wherever nature offers us greenery, the molecular machinery of photosynthesis is making oxygen, energy and organic matter from the raw material of sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. We rarely give the green machinery that brings about this transformation much thought, and few of us understand its beautifully honed mechanisms. But we are dimly aware that those photosynthetic mechanisms are the basis of our lives twice over: the ultimate source of all our food and the ultimate source of every breath we take. Eating the Sun will foster and enrich that awareness. And by connecting aspects of photosynthesis that are vital to our lives, to the crucial role its molecular mechanisms have played through more than two billion years of the earths history, Eating the Sun will change the way the reader sees the world.

A narrative history of the men and women who have explored Mars and mapped its surface from afar, and in so doing conditioned our understanding of our nearest planetary neighbour. The maps of Mars are exquisitely detailed representations of a land as large as all the continents of the earth combined. Yet they are being drawn before any human eye has seen the wonders they contain. In this fascinating mix of science, travel and the history of scientific imagination, Oliver Morton tells the story of the men and women who are mapping a dramatic, mysterious landscape, without having once set foot on its surface. Filled with awe-inspiring detail about volcanoes twice the height of Everest, basins deeper than the Pacific, Mapping Mars is a breathtaking account of a world opening up to the imagination.