There are a few SF titles that have cut through to be regarded modernish classics in the more general literature sense. One example would be Flowers for Algernon (which I read in English class at school). Another, surely, is the 1959  A Canticle for Leibowicz . There are parallels with Pavane , in presenting a 'modern day' setting with medieval living standards where the Catholic Church remains a major power, yet technology is gradually breaking through. But this is not an alternative history: it's a post-apocalyptic future where civilisation was destroyed by nuclear war, with tiny embers of knowledge kept alive by a monastery dedicated to a twentieth century electrical engineer turned priest called Leibowitz. Divided into three sections, each taking place six centuries apart, we first get a totally medieval view of the discovery of circuitry on a blueprint and more from pre-apocalyptic times. Then we see the gradual re-emergence of electrical technology in the abbey. And ...

As deputy editor of Our World in Data and senior researcher in the Programme for Global Development at the University of Oxford, Hannah Ritchie is ideally placed to get a balanced view of the state of the climate, what we're doing to and how we can try to fix it. And, perhaps surprisingly after reading the doom-laden The Fate of the World by Bill McGuire, it's a reasonably positive read. Ritchie does not set out to sugar coat things, and is no kind of climate change denier. But in answering 50 key questions about our climate and its future she is often able to provide a nuanced response. She assures us that it really isn't too late to take action and that all contributions are helpful (even if, admittedly, we need the big players to do more). So, for instance, in answering 'My country only emits 1% of the world's emissions; surely it's too small to make a difference', she points out that 36% of emissions come from countries whose emissions are 'too smal...

Alex Davies is a technology journalist, author of Driven: The Race to  Create the Autonomous Car, and a former editor at Wired, The Athletic,  and Business Insider. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley. His latest book is How to Keep a Plane in the Sky. Why engineering? I'm not an engineer myself — I'm a journalist who's spent years covering people who are. What draws me to it is that engineering is where abstract values like 'safety' and 'trust' actually get made concrete. Someone has to decide, in specific numbers, how much force a car seat can take before it's a failure, or how many g's a human body can survive. Those decisions are usually invisible to the rest of us, but they're some of the most consequential ones our society makes.  I got hooked on writing about it because it's a way to write about risk, trust, and human judgment while staying grounded in real, physical stakes — a wing that either holds or doesn't, a test that ei...

In the old days books were described as 'X meets Y', while more recently it's the fans who get the mention - in this case 'perfect for fans of Orphan Black, Killing Eve and Keeping it Real ' though we also get in the title tag ' Blade Runner meets Barbie '. There's an element of truth in most of these, but Maud Woolf has nonetheless pulled off an entertaining and different novel. Lulabelle Rock is a film star who over the years has accumulated 12 Portraits - these are not human (so not clones as they are described in the blurb), but are replicas, pretty well only distinguishable by not having palm prints or the usual stuff inside their body. The idea is that the Portraits can be used to do boring tasks that Lulabelle can't be bothered with, from social media to guest appearances. But for whatever reason she has create a thirteenth Portrait, the first person narrator of the book, who is given the task of decommissioning all the rest. (If a human did...

Something that struck me very early on when reading this book was the statement 'The evolution of the new media environment, particularly in the United States, has encouraged a shift for consuming news with the goal of becoming better informed to turning to news for enjoyment.' Only a day or two before I had been listening to a discussion between a couple of friends about how they hated the news these days because it was so miserable. Hardly a source of enjoyment. There is, without doubt an age factor here. These were middle-aged people who, like me, would never think of going to TikTok or Instagram for news. Personally, I've abandoned TV news for news websites (partly because you can get the information far quicker than a boring old bulletin). But given that I am neither American nor of the key age group for newsertainment (my word, not Jennifer Hoewe's) reading this book was rather like reading a sociology text about tribespeople from a totally different culture. Whil...

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...