Casey Mercer here, reporting from a desk that is part beaker, part bookmark. The Times has published a review of The Martians by David Baron, a book that promises to explain why Martians exist and how they organize their interplanetary HOA meetings.

Baron’s book is pitched as a hybrid of science reporting and speculative anthropology, a genre that should come with a hazard label and a spare set of gloved hands. If you crave grand theories, this volume delivers; if you crave precise conclusions, you might want a second coffee.

I approached the review with lab-notebook seriousness; I flagged sections with sticky notes shaped like tiny rocket ships.

The review oscillates between ‘data says’ and ‘the data refuse to be pinned down’—a familiar dance to anyone who has ever tried to summarize a Mars mission in a single sentence. Baron’s prose tries to be crisp, but the footnotes keep rearranging themselves like runaway satellites.

The Martians are depicted as bureaucrats wearing spacesuits and neckties, which may be the only outfit that survives a reentry. The image is funny, yes, but it also hints at a deeper question about governance in a frontier civilization.

Baron’s prose is crisp; the reviewer praises his ability to translate lab jargon into something readable, but with caveats that feel like disclaimers on a lab safety poster. The result is a book that reads like a field report and a manifesto at the same time.

Yet a ‘breakthrough’ in this book is oddly defined as ‘the moment when something actually breaks through’—like a page-break that decides to cooperate with your bookmarking app. It is a meta-joke about breakthroughs that refuses to be a breakthrough.

To keep readers from nodding off, the reviewer pursues metaphors like a detective chasing a stray electron. In a moment of genre-hack bravado, he claims he would need a ‘best portable space telescope’ to see through the footnotes.

Another scene reads like a user manual for a spacefaring library, where footnotes orbit the main text and every claim demands a citation. He imagines assembling a ‘Mars rover model kit’ to reconstruct the argument piece by piece.

Casey Mercer writes that the book’s ambition is noble but arguably misplaced, like trying to inspect a comet with a magnifying glass. The critique is affectionate but unsentimental, which is the only way to review a book about a planet-sized question.

The Times review notes the book’s structure—chunks of history, science, and social commentary—that sometimes collide like meteorites in a salad bowl. The pieces are lively, even when they refuse to stay in the same orbit.

Where the data speak, the author speaks; where the data fail, the author offers a polite shrug and a tidy caveat about sample size and orbital logistics. The effect is charmingly cautious, like a scientist who has learned to whisper to the heavens.

There’s a running gag about p-values that should probably phone a friend, a line that could only survive if p-values had mobile plans. The joke lands because it’s grounded in real lab anxieties about significance and peer approval.

The reviewer treats Baron’s prose as ‘clear’ and his caveats as ‘careful’, which in practice means the sentences come with a safety net wider than the desert on Mars. In other words, the book is rigorous in tone, if not in the meter of its conclusions.

Meanwhile the Martians themselves are not so much a civilization as a conference of unresolved questions, hosted by the author as a benevolent moderator. The result is a tour of curiosity that sometimes forgets to pack a summary.

Space exploration, the book suggests, is less about landing on planets and more about landing on footnotes. If you enjoy footnotes that feel like confetti, this is your tour.

The piece ends with a reflection on publication culture—peer review, simultaneity of news cycles, and the ritual of a book review turning into a minerals-into-words allegory. It is funny, but it also feels true enough to sting.

Mercer notes that consumption of science writing has become a spectator sport, where readers cheer on hypotheses as if they were sports teams. The metaphor is apt, and the bench coach in me wants to call a timeout to hydrate the facts.

Perhaps the most marvellous part is the quiet joke: a book about Mars that makes us rethink how we describe certainty without reducing science to a slogan. It is science writing that refuses to surrender to hype, and that is both brave and annoying in equal measure.

We close the notebook, still waiting for a breakthrough that lives up to the hype, but also grateful for the humor that keeps scientists from burning their lab coats. If you want a review that reads like a routine checkup, this earns a passing grade.

Readers are invited to imagine the Martians filing taxes and finally choosing not to colonize us after all. They prefer fruit baskets and arbitration, apparently.

And if you thought the review was about space, you were right - and if you thought it was about power, you were right also, because the cosmos loves a good data quip. The verdict is that science can be funny, and that funniness is a form of rigor, sometimes.