Ship of Strangers (SF) - Bob Shaw ***

Bob Shaw was a solid performer amongst British SF writers in the second half of the twentieth century. He's perhaps best remembered for Other Days, Other Eyes, which has the very clever conceit of 'slow glass' - glass that it takes light years to pass through - but Ship of Strangers is a more straightforward story of interstellar exploration, featuring a survey ship that specialises in surveying uninhabited planets.

Shaw does a respectable job - it's readable and the challenges faced by the protagonists are imaginative. Most of all, it reminds me of what I really miss about older SF books - it's only 160 pages long and couldn't be used as a doorstop. In format it's effectively a set of linked long short stories (or short novellas), with the main character Dave Surgenor involved in a series of adventures from unexpected alien encounters to a bizarre new cosmological phenomenon.

The only things that date the book are the use of tapes for data storage (it's remarkable how often their obvious flaws weren't spotted), smoking onboard a spaceship, and a sole female character, who is rather clumsily portrayed. Because it never really makes it to page-turning heights, I've only given it three stars, but for the inventiveness of the ideas, and the challenges presented for problem solving it deserves four. Oh, and I can't help but feel that 'Dave' is a nod to 2001.

The book is out of print on paper (the cover shown is my hardback edition), though available secondhand, but is available as an ebook.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Comments

We Are Eating the Earth - Michael Grunwald *****

If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment. The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US governments, the EU, the UK and more was the assumption that (apart from carbon emitted in production) using these 'grown' fuels was carbon neutral, because the carbon came out of the air. The trouble is, this totally ignores that using land to grow fuel means either displacing land used to grow food, or displacing land that had trees, grass or other growing stuff on it. The outcome is that when we use 'E10' petrol (with 10% ethanol), or electricity produced by ...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

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...

Search This Blog