This near-future dystopian view of a tech giant taken to the extreme still has the power to bite thirteen years after it was first published, though some flaws are now more obvious. Central character Mae gets a job at the Circle, a sort of Google+Meta+Musk. To begin with all is wonderful, though even early on she gets a shock when she is disciplined for not RSVPing an invitation to something she wasn't interested in, sent simply because her socials said she had once visited a country. As things get more intense, Mae (who frankly can be a little slow on the uptake) becomes a key figure in the Circle, wearing a streaming camera all day and taking viewers around the campus showing what's happening. The message of the company is no secrets, no lies - with everything in the open the world will be better. This may seem a naive view, but it's interesting that in 2009 the then CEO of Google (referring to the Glass product) said ‘If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, ...

Scott Solomon is a biologist, professor, and science communicator. He teaches ecology, evolutionary biology, and scientific communication as a Teaching Professor at Rice University in Houston. Dr Solomon is also a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History , and the author of Becoming Martian: How Living in Space Will Change Our Bodies and Minds . Why science? To me, the appeal of science has always been about understanding the world around us. Science gives us a way to address big questions like 'Where did we come from?' But it also helps us to make useful predictions about the future– everything from what the weather will be like tomorrow to what will eventually become of our species? Why this book? As an evolutionary biologist, I am intrigued by the fact that we are at a point in which for the first time some people may soon be truly living on other planets. I wanted to explore what we know about how people will be affected by the ...

The first in this series, The Tainted Cup , was superb - and Robert Jackson Bennett has come up with an equal in its sequel. Though labelled fantasy, for me this is definitely science fiction (there is no magic involved), crossed with a complex murder mystery involving a heady mix of political intrigue. As with its predecessor, the narrator, Din is a young assistant investigator, relatively recently started in his first position in the legal arm of their empire. His enhancements as an engraver are slightly reminiscent of a mentat in Dune, giving him perfect recall and leading to surprising sword fighting abilities. His boss, Ana, is more complex - a combination of Mycroft Holmes from the modern-day set Sherlock TV show and Judge Dee from van Gulik's remarkable books. Except she wears a blindfold most of the time and swears a lot more.  We learn more about Ana's abilities and why she is so strange in a story that takes the central characters to a location on the edge of the empi...

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...

Having been captivated by Eva St. John's excellent fantasy  Flint in the Bones  and its sequel, I looked for anything else by St. John and came across her  Quantum Curators  series. I initially assumed these were five separate books, starting with  The Quantum Curators and the Fabergé Egg , but it would be more accurate to describe it as a single five-volume novel. For me, this turned out to be St. John on training wheels before she hit full capability with  Flint in the Bones . Unlike that book, this is science fiction - specifically a many worlds multiverse story, though (initially) there are only two worlds, known by the occupants of one as Alpha and Beta Earths. Ours is Beta, while the other has more advanced technology and has developed a 'quantum stepper' that allows curators to cross into Beta Earth and rescue artefacts that would otherwise be destroyed or lost. The main characters are Neith, an Alpha Earth curator from Egypt (it was a failure to des...

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...