I really enjoyed the second in this series from Sam Peters, From Distant Stars , and was not disappointed by this book, which brings the trilogy to a close. As before, there's a satisfyingly well-portrayed colony world, set up by a mysterious race who turned up at Earth, transplanted humans (and killed many more), then disappeared, leaving their unmanned ships traversing the colony routes as lifelines. On the storm-tossed world Magenta, central character Keon Rause, effectively a police officer, is trying to uncover a conspiracy that could wreck the colony while dealing with both his wife's apparent death (which by now he knows is faked) and an AI mockup of his wife that he created as a failed attempt to replace her. As before, one of the most interesting aspects is the built-in Servant, an all-purpose communication and information device which means there are quite often threaded conversations happening both verbally and mentally at the same time. Similarly the Tesser...

I'll be honest up front - I found parts of Making Eden hard work to read. But the effort was more than rewarded. David Beerling makes a good case that botany is unfairly seen as the Cinderella of biology - it simply doesn't get the same attention as the animal side. I realised how true this was when I saw a diagram of a 'timeline of evolution of life on Earth' the other day. Out of about 30 entries, arguably three of them applied to plants. And yet, as Beerling makes clear, without plant life, the land would still be barren and the seas far less varied. No plants - no animals. As someone with a very limited background in biology, I learned a lot here. The sophistication of some plant mechanisms are remarkable. Beerling dedicates a chapter, for example, to what he describes as 'gas valves', the stomata that open and close on the underside of leaves, allowing carbon dioxide in. The apparent downside is that they let moisture out - but as Beerling describes ...

Venturing into my old SF books I discovered this classic 70s short story collection from what's described on the back as 'a new breed of science fiction writer' - though, of course, George R. R. Martin would really make his name in the field of fantasy. There are some excellent stories here. Some are pure mood pieces, notably the opener 'With Morning Comes Mistfall' which is rather like a Somerset Maugham short story, set on a distant planet. Others have the classic twist in the tail, such as the short short 'fta' that gives a kick to the gut for that SF classic concept, hyperspace. Although the collection has very much a feel of the period - nuclear war hovers in the distant past in 'Dark, Dark Were the Tunnels', for example, and two separate stories reference Simon and Garfunkel songs - there's nothing here that doesn't hold up very well, other than a lack of female main characters. Only the closing title story, which won a Hugo Awar...

This is a weird one, in some ways reminiscent of one of those 'fun' books that tries to put a story across by mocking up fake documents - except the documents here are real - specifically, extracts from the FBI's files on leading scientists. Sometimes these are fairly mundane - security checks, for example, when a scientist has been put forward for some senior government post, such as the astronomer Vera Rubin, about which nothing whatsoever of interest is found. At other times, something unexpected turns up. In the case, for example, of Neil Armstrong, the background check pulled up a reference to a bizarre incident when two tourists arrived near Armstrong's home, asking questions that were considered too personal. In other cases, such as the flamboyant Richard Feynman, there were suspicions of communist or other disruptive tendencies, though Feynman comes out triumphant. Feynman is also an interesting example of something those who report scientists as suspicio...

Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has since published 15 novels and numerous short stories. She writes in both the SF and fantasy genres and has won critical acclaim in both. She has won the Hugo Award more than once. She lives in Massachusetts. Her latest title is Ancestral Night. Why science fiction? I've been a science fiction fan my entire life, and I feel like SF is the ideal framework for stories about humanity and how we can be better at it. Not just cautionary tales - though there's certainly also value in cautionary tales - but stories with some hope built in that we might, in fact, mature as a species and take some responsibility for things like reflexive bigotry and hate crimes (as I'm writing this, the heartbreaking news about the terrorist attack on Muslim worshipers in Christchurch is everywhere) and global climate destabilization. These are not intractable problems, but we need, as a species, the will to see tha...

Nessa Carey has proved consistently effective in putting across the next generation (as it were) aspects of genetics that take as far beyond the selfish gene. We've had The Epigenetics Revolution and Junk DNA on the aspects of genetics where genes are switched on and off, and looking at the parts of DNA that don't code for genes. Now, with Hacking the Code of Life, we come from the natural side to human intervention - the ability to edit the genome and the implications of this ability. In the past we've seen rather hysterical responses to gene editing, whether it's campaigns against genetically modified organisms that have prevented life-saving developments and wider availability of food, or dramatic predictions of disaster. Carey gives us a more balanced picture. She doesn't play down the risks - but all technology comes with risk. Use of fire might have been one of the greatest steps forward in human development, but it can also kill  people. We had to l...

When Einstein's Wife arrived in the post, as I often do while sitting at my desk, I thought I'd look through the first few pages to get a feel for it. Two and a half hours later I was still reading it. I ought to stress that this does not reflect a superbly well-written book. If I'm honest, the writing style is pretty solidly in the 'solid academic' mode. However, the content fascinated me. There were two reasons for this. One is that it reflects the circumstances in which Einstein did his early work, including those remarkable papers of 1905. I found out significantly more about his performance at university, for example, as a result of reading this. The other is that it uncovers the way that history - and specifically history of science - can be distorted to get a particular message across. So we get a kind of detective story, uncovering the blatant manipulation of what was (and wasn't) known. That being the case, I have to admit that this book will pr...

Matt Parker had me thoroughly enjoying this collection of situations where maths and numbers go wrong in everyday life. I think the book's title is a little weak - 'Humble Pi' doesn't really convey what it's about, but that subtitle 'a comedy of maths errors' is far more informative. With his delightful conversational style, honed in his stand-up maths shows, it feels as if Parker is a friend down the pub, relating the story of some technical disaster driven by maths and computing, or regaling us with a numerical cock-up. These range from the spectacular - wobbling and collapsing bridges, for example - to the small but beautifully formed, such as Excel's rounding errors. Sometimes it's Parker's little asides that are particularly attractive. I loved his rant on why phone numbers aren't numbers at all (would it be meaningful for someone to ask you what half your phone number is?). We discover the trials and tribulations of getting cal...

Only a couple of weeks ago, reviewing a 1960s SF book, I bemoaned the fact that science fiction novels of ideas are less common now. Although it is correctly labelled a space opera, Ancestral Night delivers ideas with aplomb. Let's deal with the space opera aspect first. Elizabeth Bear provides some excellent adventure scenes in space, and we've the usual mix of huge spaceships and interesting aliens. Main character Haimey Dz is an engineer on a ship that salvages wrecks - but, as we gradually discover - she also has a forgotten past. A major feature of the storyline (one that seems to link to the medieval idea of the lost wisdom of the past) is ancient technology from a long-dead race with capabilities, notably manipulating spacetime mentally (Bear has yet to point out that the travel technologies used here could manipulate time as well as space), which fit well with Arthur C. Clarke's magic definition. I particularly liked the (surely intentional) nods to the mu...

I have to admit I find magic acts rather tedious entertainment - but I do enjoy trying to work out how the trick was done and then (ideally) finding out how it really was undertaken - so I was fascinated by the idea of a book that claims to cover 'the science of magic'. (By magic, I should stress, I don't mean the fantasy sorcery version, but the very down-to-earth engineered version used in magic shows.) This handsome book proved to be a distinct curate's egg: there were sections I pretty much skip read as they were somewhat dull, but other parts that really captured my attention. The reason that some sections don't work so well was the classic academic writer's problem of not realising the importance of narrative and storytelling (which you'd think a practising magician like Gustav Kuhn would realise). The book comes alive when we are told about specific tricks or people or situations, but sometimes it becomes a collection of facts, a lecture on, sa...

At first glance this might just be another 'What AI is good at and not so good at' title. And in a way, it is. But, wow, what a brilliant book! Marcus du Sautoy takes us on a tour of what artificial intelligence has achieved (and possibly can in the future achieve) in a range of fields from his own of mathematics, through game playing, music, art and more. After a little discussion of what creativity is, we start off with the now very familiar story of DeepMind's AlphaGo and its astonishing ability to take on the hugely challenging game of Go. Even though I've read about this many times before, du Sautoy, as a Go player and mathematician, gives a real feel for why this was such a triumph - and so shocking. Not surprisingly he is also wonderful on what mathematicians actually do, how computers have helped them to date and how they have the potential to do far more in the future. After all, mathematics is by far the closest science to game playing, as it has strict...

A collection of three novellas and a short story from one of the recognised masters of the 'golden age' of science fiction. These 1950s stories demonstrate well both why this period was given this title back then - the quality was far higher than, say, the 1920s and 30s - and also why that gold has tarnished in quite a big way since. By Asimov standards, the characters here are slightly more three dimensional than usual, but still from the stock cupboard, while women only feature as part of the scenery. Still, there's some good material. The Martian Way is a bit of a precursor for Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - space colony under pressure from the dominant Earth realises that it has to find a way to be truly independent. In this case, the problem is water and the solution is recognising the wider resources available to those with mastery of space. Youth has some of the feel of a Bradbury story with young protagonists (inevitably both male) - though ...