Ideal orbs

Planet not up to scratch? Too much methane, too little water? Look no further than Martyn J. Fogg’s Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments (Society of Automotive Engineers, Warrendale, Pennsylvania, $49 ISBN 1 56091 609 5) for how saturated brine lakes on Venus would begin to unshroud the cloudy planet, what to do with a barren asteroid and the problems of warming up Io. Fogg reckons that understanding the complexity of planetary systems will help unravel some of the mysteries of Earth. He’ll probably prove a boon to lazy writers of science fiction.