Cosmic Rocks: On Helen Gordon’s The Meteorites

Kate Macdonald Under Review:The Meteorites: Encounters with Outer Space and Deep Time. Helen Gordon. Profile Books, February 2025. The Meteorites enthused me so much that I made my scientist father read it. Science journalist Helen Gordon’s non-fiction account begins with a meteoroid’s birth, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, then its approach to a blue planet inconveniently in the way of its orbital path (a meteoroid is the rock in flight, called a meteorite once it has landed). Then we plummet gracefully to human scale, walking in the rain to the field where the rock fragments landed, browsing the tables at the world’s biggest meteorite market, and sitting in on the Planetary Defence Conference organised by the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs (really), where we hear updates on ways we hope will save the earth if a really big one comes to call. Gordon’s writing is popular science at its best: complex astrophysics and cosmic geology explained to the…