Until recently there was a huge geeky talking point based on establishing a colony on Mars. Several billionaires took an interest, notably SpaceX's boss, while there was even the suggestion that a Mars colony could be run as a TV show, like an extraterrestrial Big Brother. The wilder speculation has now died down, but the idea of living on Mars still has a strong niche following.  In Becoming Martian , Scott Solomon gives us an in-depth and engaging look at the difficulties faced in moving to our nearest semi-inhabitable planet, which are considerable. As Solomon points out, the idea of terraforming Mars, giving it a breathable atmosphere and enough greenhouse gasses to warm it up a bit, is simply impractical - even if such a massive effort could be achieved, the combination of relatively low gravity, limited nitrogen and no magnetic field would mean the new atmosphere would be quickly lost again. This means that would-be Martians will have to protect themselves permanently from ra...

I had really mixed feelings about this sci-fi techno thriller by Douglas Richards (or, to give him his full name according to the cover NY TIMES BESTSELLER Douglas E. Richards). The SF premise is very clever and caught my attention in an instant - far better than the slew of fluffy time travel books that are currently filling the shelves. What if you could travel back in time - but only for a fraction of a second? When I started to read and found myself in a sub-Dan Brown action thriller with no real mention of time travel, I was confused. The action is dramatic, certainly, and the central character, biologist (and fiancé of a genius physicist) Jenna Morrison is put into a situation where her entire world is turned upside down, but she can't go to the authorities. But not a lot of time travel (though we guess this is what the physicist's new discovery involves). Eventually, though, after some distinctly implausible action when Jenna joins up with super soldier turned PI Aaron B...

If I'm honest, I was disappointed by David Miles' definition of a cold. He tells us 'Within these covers, a cold is an illness caused by a virus that infects the upper respiratory tract and, in most cases, clears up within a matter of days or possibly weeks without requiring medical intervention. This definition is the reason I included the influenza viruses and the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 as cold viruses.' To me, this doesn't seem fair. As far as I'm concerned, the term 'common cold' refers to exactly what I'm suffering from as I write this: a subset of such viruses that definitely does not include either of those killers. I've read far too much about COVID and generally avoid books covering it like the plague (sorry). Miles argues that 'some infections with every type of cold virus lead to some sort of serious illness.' But the reason I was more interested in this book, was I wanted to read about the relatively harmless bu...

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...

Tom Griffiths introduces himself: I’m a cognitive scientist — a professor of psychology and computer science at Princeton University — so I think about minds and mathematics every day. But we are in an interesting moment where people who aren’t professional cognitive scientists are grappling with the same questions: Can machines think? Is it possible to describe minds using mathematics? What are the limits of different approaches to building a mind? Will we be able to create super-human artificial intelligence? These are questions that have come into focus in the last few years with the creation of chatbots that can hold conversations and solve challenging problems, but answering the questions we have about modern AI requires going further back into the past. In writing the book, I hoped to give readers the context for this moment and some of the language for talking about it, as well as highlighting the stories of discovery that brought us to this point and that suggest possible paths...

It's an easy assumption (which I made) that this book is fantasy as it involves a ghost hunter, but I'm calling it SF, as at the time of publication at the end of the nineteenth century, the Society for Psychical Research was treating such phenomena as a subject of scientific investigation, and there has been plenty of SF where the 'science' has been anything but correct. This is part of MIT Press's Radium Age series, which brings back titles from the period when science fiction was just starting to emerge. Often writing from this period was stodgy and no longer easy to read: arguably with little other entertainment available in the home, there was far less need for good writing than is the case now. But short stories of the period can often work better - think how well, for instance, the Sherlock Holmes stories hold up. Although the Herons (in reality mother and son team, the bizarrely named Kate O'Brien Ryall Pritchard and Hesketh Hesketh-Pritchard) aren'...