Skip to main content

The Ultimate Interplanetary Travel Guide - Jim Bell **

Not too long ago, NASA brought out a series of spoof ‘space tourism’ posters for various destinations in the Solar System. For people like me, who have watched NASA depressingly fail to send humans to the other planets for decade after decade, it was just another painful twist of the knife. On the other hand, the posters probably have more appeal for younger and less cynical minds, by presenting familiar astronomical objects in a new and engaging way. There may even be scope for a whole book along these lines – and that’s what Jim Bell has attempted here.

 The main thing I learned from it is that my brain is programmed to read either fiction or non-fiction, and can’t handle a 50:50 mix of the two – which is what this book is. It drove me mad –  not least because I could see that the same material, presented as straight non-fiction, could have made a really excellent book. Using the NASA posters as a starting point, he could have enumerated the potential ‘tourist sights’ at each location, describing them as they would look to a human observer up close, and what special equipment or precautions would be necessary. That much is purely factual. The next question is what would need to happen to make such a tourist trip practical – if such-and-such a technology is developed, if such-and-such a social/economic/cultural trend is reversed, etc. By making all those ifs explicit, readers could judge for themselves whether the author is talking sense or not.

 But Bell doesn’t do that. He writes the book as if it’s an actual tourist guide from 200 years in the future, with no distinction between what is real and what is speculation. There are data tables showing hard facts like diameters and surface temperatures, alongside travel times from Earth (e.g. 6 hours to the Moon and a month to Jupiter) that are meaningless without some indication of the technology being assumed. Tourist attractions range from ‘real’ ones (natural features and historic landing sites), through sensible speculations (e.g. ice mines on the Moon and deep-sea research stations on Europa) to completely arbitrary ones (Star Wars style speeder races on Mercury and jazz festivals on Deimos).

 I’m not being overly kind about the book, because this is a popular science website aimed at adult readers and that’s who I’m reviewing it for. In all fairness, however, that’s probably not the author’s target audience. I can see that sci-fi fans with little interest in the ‘boring’ details of real-world science may well love the book. It’s certainly a very attractive package, with full-colour illustrations on every page and no dauntingly long blocks of text to read. It looks, in fact, just like one of those lavish coffee table books you see in The Works just before Christmas each year. I’ll even hazard a prediction of my own at this point. Possibly this Christmas, or failing that Christmas 2019, you’re going to see this book on sale in The Works at a very affordable price. If you happen to be looking for a present for a sci-fi mad youngster, it will be just the thing.


Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

 
Review by Andrew May

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein,  but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...
Post a Comment
Read more