Abstract

As Roger Hennessey reminds us, “One of the most famous openings in English literature informs readers that ‘in the last years of the nineteenth century … human affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's yet as mortal as his own’” . So began H. G. Wells's famous War of the Worlds , in which Martians invade the Earth.The general public seems scarcely aware that discussions of extraterrestrial intelligent beings began to appear centuries before 1897, not just in fiction but also in serious writings by leading scientists, philosophers, and religious authors. Well before 1970 such scholars as Pierre Duhem, Arthur Lovejoy, and Marjorie Hope Nicolson had shown that mainline intellectuals for centuries have been writing about extraterrestrials. Between 1982 and 1996, three scholars published detailed and fully referenced books documenting in detail the history of ideas of extraterrestrial life from antiquity to the late twentieth century . In the last few years at least a half‐dozen authors have sought to repackage this exciting message for the literate public. The most successful of these popularizations is Worlds without End: The Historic Search for Extraterrestrial Life, the most recent book by Roger Hennessey, a retired British schoolteacher and administrator with strong interests in the history of science and technology.The strengths of Hennessey's volume are numerous. He has read and understood both the most authoritative scholarly work in this area and also a significant portion of the vast primary literature. He has surveyed in an engaging, judicious, and balanced manner materials from antiquity to the present and embellished his narrative with seventy‐two well‐chosen illustrations. He has avoided sensationalism even when writing about sensational controversies and eschewed partisanship even while describing individuals who in many cases were nothing if not passionate in their convictions. He has shown sensitivity to the complexities and to the range of issues that arose in the history of this long and continuing debate, which, although focused on distant locales and on possibly nonexistent beings, is capable of revealing much about the nature of terrestrials. He has traced through more than twenty centuries a debate that involved not just scientific but also key religious and philosophical issues, presenting the debate in its full cultural richness. The level of informational accuracy in his book is high . Although his references are significantly fewer in number and less specific than many scholars might prefer, they are at least adequate to assure specialists that he is not presenting as his own the hard‐won research results of others. The overall format of the book is appealing, its bibliography adequate, its index better than one expects in popularizations.Historians of science wishing to enhance a survey course in the history of science with an attractive text that will reveal to students a history filled with striking controversies and colorful figures as well as little‐known facets of the thought of many scientists of distinction may wish to consider using this book