The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars

Complete and unabridged, with 58 full-page plates by Ivan Aivazovsky, Albert Bierstadt and Johan Christian Dahl. A New York man dies and wakes on Mars, where the dead of Earth go on living — and sends his notebooks home through a medium, describing the planet's cities, its canals and its arrangements for the newly arrived. L. P. Gratacap was a mineralogist at the American Museum of Natural History, and the geology of his Mars is worked out with a curator's patience. Spiritualism and hard science share the same book without embarrassment. Fifty-eight plates by painters including John Martin and Frederic Edwin Church carry the book's own current of moonlight, cloud and ruined stone.