The Super-Organism – Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson ****

There’s something about super-organisms – the collective creature made up of insects like bees or ants – that seem to bring out the glossy in a book publisher. The Buzz about Beeswas all on glossy paper with piles of colour illustrations – so is The Super-Organism, though here the format is coffee table and the beautiful photographs crop up more frequently. Don’t be fooled by the format, though, this is no coffee table picture book.

We absolutely loved The Buzz about Bees, so it was interesting to see what the approach would be here. First it’s broader. Not only covering the bee super-organism, we also get ants and leaf cutters. It’s also in more technical depth than the bee book. Sometimes this is useful, giving more insights into these complex living mechanisms, at others the result is more complex than it needs to be. In The Super-Organism there’s more depth, more about the origins of the super-organism, more details of experiments to determine just what’s going on.

Of the two books we do marginally prefer The Buzz about Bees – it comes across as more friendly and more excited about the bees, and the text is more easily understood. The Super-Organism is just too big, both physically (my arms were aching when I finished reading it) and also has too much information, sometimes at an unnecessarily technical level. However it is well written by this very literate pair of scientists and certainly repays the effort of reading it. Perhaps biased by having read the bee book, the bees were my favourite part of this, mostly because they were old friends, but also because of their synergy with human society.

So not a book for you if you’ve weak arms or a fear of being bombarded with Latin tags and words like eusociality – but a massive gem if you really want to get into the workings of these bizarre multi-creature organisms.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...

Search This Blog