The first book review in the series is ICAMSR Executive Director Barry E. DiGregorio's Mars: The Living Planet. This highly readable "science story" examines the evidence for and against life on Mars today–specifically, microbial life, as sought by the biology experiments of the 1976 Viking Mission to Mars.

Fred Hoyle's and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe's new book Astronomical Origins of Life - Steps Towards Panspermia. Two of the pioneers of the modern version of panspermia – the theory that comets disperse microbial life throughout the cosmos – trace the development of their ideas through a sequence of key papers. A logical progression of thought is shown to lead up to the currently accepted viewpoint that at least the biochemical building blocks of life must have derived from comets. The authors go further, however, to argue that not just the chemicals of life, but fully-fledged microbial cells have an origin that is external to the Earth. Such a theory of cosmic life, once established, would have profound scientific as well as sociological implications. The publication of this book is all the more timely now that we are on the threshold of verifying many of these ideas by direct space exploration of planets and comets.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, panspermia's most outspoken scientist advocate, describes in his new book that extinction level events are not always the result of impacting celestrial bodies. Instead he suggests that possibility that these events are caused by microbes hitchhiking rides in cometary dust.

On Mars: Exploration Of The Red Planet 1958-1978 (NASA SP-4212) is without doubt the most comprehensive history of the NASA Viking Mars missions. The book contains an absolutely amazing wealth of detailed information about the origin of the greatest planetary science mission in the history of science - project Viking. In this volume you will meet the engineers, technicians and scientists who played a major role in humanities first serach for life on Mars. This is mandatory reading for anyone who wishes to discuss the Viking mission intelligently. ICAMSR gives this historical masterpiece our highest possible recommendation.

The Martian Landscape (NASA SP-425) provides in depth information on the Viking Lander cameras and how they carried out their photographic missions that lasted an incredible 6 years on Martian surface. Included are scores of images from Viking Landers 1 and 2. All serious students of Mars should be familiar with this book.