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...

The third novel in a series can be a bit of a let down, but Robert Jackson Bennett makes this the best so far. In his beautifully imagined world which has advanced biological technology while otherwise being near-medieval we once more encounter the unlikely pair of investigator Dinios Kol and his boss, Ana Dolabra whose ability to pull together information from multiple sources to come to deductions isn’t quite human - and whose personality is abrasive to say the least. They are called in to deal with what appears to be a relatively simple murder with a clear perpetrator, but that conclusion risks political instability as the daughter of one leading family is killed by the son of another - the two lines being close to Montagues and Capulets in their hatred for each other, even though their businesses are intertwined. What gradually becomes revealed is a far more complex plot involving a horrendous biological mechanism that, at the same time, gives Bennett a chance to tell us much more ...

Sixty years ago, books about astronomy for general readers were almost unheard of. There were books aimed at enthusiastic amateurs who wanted to explore the night sky with telescopes of their own, but genuine popular science books on the subject are a relatively recent invention. One reason for astronomy’s surge in popularity is a new class of ‘unsolved mysteries’ – always a sure-fire hit with readers – with intriguing names like black holes, dark matter and dark energy.  A second development is the arrival of gorgeously detailed photographs of astronomical objects – which most people will associate with NASA’s Hubble telescope, but can actually be traced back to a book that came out in 1979 called Catalogue of the Universe , which contained the very first true-colour astronomical photograph the general public ever saw. One of that book’s authors was Paul Murdin – co-discoverer of the first black hole, and now a prolific writer whose latest offering is reviewed here. It deals with ...

I've always loved the 'introducing X, a graphic guide' series from Icon Books, with titles such as Introducing Infinity: a graphic guide . They're quirky, pocket-sized books with typically one or two page segments each featuring an eye-catching illustration. However, the publisher also has a set of graphic guides that are full-sized books, the latest being The Universe . I was also very impressed with Jillian Scudder's illustrated Astroquizzical  - she knows her stuff and puts the science across well. The same is true here - it's hard to fault the basics of the text. But I found the book a pain to read because of the way it's laid out and illustrated. Frankly, the layout (and cover) make it look more like a self-published book than one that's professionally produced. The text and image layout is haphazard, with random switching of fonts. Headings are few and far between - there is no apparent structure to the book. In a lot of cases, the illustrations go...