Patricia Fara has a way of making history of science different by looking at what may be a familiar topic from an unexpected angle. In this partial biography of Isaac Newton, dealing with his time in London, she takes this approach with mixed success. The best thing is that we see more of this time in Newton's life, which tends to be dealt with relatively quickly in standard scientific biographies, as his focus was primarily dealing with the Royal Mint and the Royal Society. That the word 'royal' appears twice here is no coincidence, as we see a picture of a new Newton emerging, getting away from his near-monastic scientific life at Cambridge to become a more social creature, with a distinct interest in keeping in with high society, including the royal family. Perhaps the most interesting thing for me was the way that Fara brings in a topic that I've rarely seen mentioned in Newton biographies - slavery. Newton might not have been actively involved, but the slave trade
Adrian Hon has taken the concept of the successful BBC radio series 'A History of the World in 100 Objects' and imagined a future version of this, looking at dates from 2020 to 2079. Hon makes it clear in his author's note that this is intended to be informative fiction rather than futurology, but the reality is that all futurology is fiction, and it's inevitable to read this book as much in the vein of futurology as pure science fiction. Certainly the New History shows the futility of futurology as anything other than fiction, since the 2020/2021 examples have no reference to the pandemic - which is particularly ironic as object number 10 is an automated courier, first used to take something to a market, which is demonstrated in Wuhan. To begin with, I really enjoyed the entries. (They can't really be referred to as objects because many of them are events, people or documents, rather than actual objects.) The first, for example, really brings out the power of the