Bob Shaw was a solid performer amongst British SF writers in the second half of the twentieth century. He's perhaps best remembered for Other Days, Other Eyes, which has the very clever conceit of 'slow glass' - glass that it takes light years to pass through - but Ship of Strangers is a more straightforward story of interstellar exploration, featuring a survey ship that specialises in surveying uninhabited planets.

Shaw does a respectable job - it's readable and the challenges faced by the protagonists are imaginative. Most of all, it reminds me of what I really miss about older SF books - it's only 160 pages long and couldn't be used as a doorstop. In format it's effectively a set of linked long short stories (or short novellas), with the main character Dave Surgenor involved in a series of adventures from unexpected alien encounters to a bizarre new cosmological phenomenon.

The only things that date the book are the use of tapes for data storage (it'…

The Popular Science site specialises in reviews of popular science and science fiction books, but with the gift-buying season upon us, we wanted a chance to let you know about a book by our editor, Brian Clegg, that makes an idea present for the kind of person who reads the books reviewed here. 
The ultimate trial of knowledge and cunning, Conundrum features 200 cryptic puzzles and ciphers. The solutions link throughout the book – so you need to solve them all to get to the final round.

With a focus on ciphers and codebreaking, Conundrum contains twenty sections, each built around a specific subject from music to literature, physics to politics. To take on Conundrum you need good general knowledge and the ability to think laterally. But if you need help, there are plenty of hints to point you in the right direction. 

Whether you attempt to crack it alone or work in a team, Conundrum will challenge you to the extreme.


Can you take on Conundrum and win? There’s only one way to find out…

Pap…

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This is an entry in a series from the MIT Press that selects a small part of a topic (in this case, a subset of artificial intelligence) and gives it an 'essential knowledge' introduction. The problem is, there seems to be no consistency over the target audience of the series.

I previously reviewed Virtual Reality in the same series and it kept things relatively simple and approachable to the general reader, even if it did overdo the hype. This book by John Kelleher starts gently, but by about half way through it has become a full-blown simplified textbook with far too much in-depth technical content. That's exactly what you don't want in a popular science title.

What we get is plenty of detail of what deep learning-based systems are and how they work at the technical level, but there is practically nothing on how they fit with applications (unless you count playing games), which are described but not really explained, nor is there anything much on the problems that a…

It's easy to see the way that science fiction can fit with a 'science of' treatment - less so a fantasy such as Game of Thrones, which is the topic of the latest in this long-lasting genre. However, it's certainly not impossible. The Science of Middle Earth, for example, does a great job of exploring the scientific content of Tolkien's output, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that Rebecca Thompson should be able to do the same for George R. R. Martin's blockbuster series of books and the accompanying TV show.
I ought to say straight away that the title here is a little misleading, as by no means all of the content is physics. It covers paleantology, biology, zombieology (is that a word?) and more - but physics probably has the biggest word count, perhaps fitting as Thompson is a physicist. She tells us that the idea of the book is to use the popular fantasy series to introduce science to a wider audience, but I'm not sure that the way the material is pr…

I'm giving this book three stars for the topic and content - if I went on readability alone, I'd only give it two. I wanted to mention this upfront. It might seem a little unfair of me to expect an academic book to be readable but a) there's no reason why they shouldn't be and b) there's no point writing a book like this unless it is approachable by those outside academia, otherwise you're just preaching to the converted. Also the blurb does not suggest it is being aimed at an academic audience.

The book has a strange format. We get two chapters from Naomi Oreskes (based on lectures), then several chapters by other people commenting on what Oreskes wrote, then Oreskes returns to respond to the comments. In those opening chapters, there was a lot to like. It was good to gain a more detailed view of philosophy and sociology of science, as mine had been what is probably the typical view of a scientist who has read a little on the topic but not enough. I tended to t…