Tom Salinsky is a writer, podcaster and corporate coach living in London with his wife and too many cats. With Deborah Frances-White, he is the author of The Improv Handbook (Methuen Drama, 2008). With Robert Khan he is the author of five plays and many audio dramas for Big Finish. With his podcast colleagues John Dorney and Jessica Regan, he is the author of Best Pick: A Journey Through Film History and the Academy Awards (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). As a solo author, he has published Star Trek: Discovering the Television Series (Pen & Sword, 2024), the second volume of which is due for release in 2025. His latest title is   Red Dwarf: Discovering the TV Series . Why science fiction? I’m sure there are countless theories about why awkward teens gravitate towards science fiction and fantasy, but everyone likes a bit of escapism. And if your ordinary life is dull or scary or isolating or confusing, then you may well be drawn to escapism which is set in a world as unlike your or

This is a single longish short story in Amazon's Far Reaches collection - and proved pleasantly engaging. I hadn't come across Veronica Roth before (apparently she wrote the Divergent series) but she has a light, readable style in this rather classic setting of 'working class folk on the spaceship'. This is the home of Elton John's Rocket Man , which was very common in 1950s SF films  and lasted through to Star Trek, when the writers were still essentially modelling their crews on nautical vessels, with their inevitably working class characters to do the dirty jobs. In Void , we meet Ace, one of the team who does onboard maintenance on a craft that shuttles between Earth and Proxima Centauri. She and her colleagues deal with everyday problems like malfunctioning toilets. You would probably think that by the time we can build near-light speed ships, we could also make a robot that could mend a toilet - and real life experience of space travel so far is that there is

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho

The cover image and title font leave little doubt that this book is targeted at fans of blockbuster sci-fi movies – which these days means a sizable fraction of the general population. That’s a great marketing ploy, because if potential readers paid too much attention to the words ‘real science’ tucked away in the subtitle, then the audience might shrink to a small fraction of the size. It’s a sad fact that space is only seen as cool when it’s fictional; as soon as it becomes factual then it’s strictly for science nerds only. The most obvious reason is that, outside science fiction, there’s barely any ‘human interest’ angle to space. On top of that, once you get above the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s almost impossible to give a proper explanation of how objects behave and interact without recourse to at least GCSE-level physics. So I have to give Andrews top marks for avoiding both these pitfalls. He picks the one astronomical topic that really does have a human angle – a potential collisi

As the author makes clear, this is one for the fans - amongst which I count myself. I can still remember in the late 80s, workmates enthusing about the BBC SF sitcom  Red Dwarf . As a result, I first encountered it in series 3, where it really found its feet, but later revisited the whole show from the delightfully titled first episode, The End . There are broadly two types of content in Tom Salinsky's slim book - a history of the making of the series and the episode guide. The history part - an overall section, followed by a piece on the making of each series - would appeal to anyone with an interest in TV, and particularly TV science fiction. By contrast, the episode guide is very much for people like me - it's geeky detail, such as circumstances when Rimmer appears more solid than he should be, anachronistic mentions and lack of in-series consistency.  Salinsky gives each show a rating - for an enthusiast he's quite harsh on episodes that others might regard as perfectly

There's something odd about this chunky book on probability - the title doesn't mention the P word at all. This is because David Spiegelhalter (Professor Sir David to give him his full title) has what some mathematicians would consider a controversial viewpoint. As he puts it 'all probabilities are judgements expressing personal uncertainty.' He strongly (and convincingly) argues that while the mathematical approach to probability is about concrete, factual values, outside of the 'natural' probabilities behind quantum effects, almost all real world probability is a subjective experience, better described by more subjective terms like uncertainty, chance and luck. A classic way to distinguish between those taking the frequentist approach to probability and the Bayesian approach is their attitude to what the probability is of a fair coin coming up heads or tails after the coin has been tossed but before we have looked at it. The frequentist would say it's def