Skip to main content

Seasonal review 2022

Image from Unsplash
There may not be any reviews here now until January 2023 as we like to take a break - but our reviews will be back again in January.

Topics come and go in the popular science world - looking back over 2022, brains/consciousness, climate change, AI and space/cosmology have been the most dominant in terms of review titles. As someone with a particular interest in physics and maths, I'd love to see a few more of those next year. And chemistry remains the least covered of the core science subjects. 

A few years ago I speculated on why this was the case. Back then (2017) this site had 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. Admittedly, there is always a danger of editorial bias, but I have certainly never avoided chemistry titles if publishers sent them my way. They simply don't arrive. Publishers I spoke to at the time suggested that chemistry was, perhaps not 'sexy' enough.

Meanwhile we have seen some topics that don't get much coverage do well. I want to highlight Henry Gee's A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, which recently (deservedly) won this year's Royal Society's book prize. I have to include a disclaimer that I count Henry as a friend - but then that's case with a good number of other UK-based science writers. It also points to the positive side of social media, which usually only gets bad press. I first 'met' Henry through a now long-defunct Nature initiative of setting up blogs on their website, which we both took part in (Henry also works for the publication). I think I've only met Henry twice in person, but our online interactions more than make up for this.

It's not, however, just chemistry that suffers in terms of exposure. This site covers popular science and science fiction books. I have written elsewhere how SF (and other genre fiction) is regarded as a poor cousin of literary fiction. Similarly, I'd suggest, popular science tends to be somewhat sidelined in the non-fiction world. My local independent bookshop has one shelf (not one bookcase) of popular science titles. Waterstones, the UK's biggest bookshop chain, seems to have subsumed popular science entirely into their vague 'smart thinking' section (at least in the store I go in most often). 

What's more, I noticed the other day that the respectable publisher OneWorld, which has a good science list, recently put out a 'Christmas Gift Guide' with a sole popular science contribution of Sean Carroll's interesting but hardly approachable Biggest Ideas in the Universe title. Don't listen to them! Popular science (and SF) books make great gifts.

I think part of the problem is that there is a view in the literary world that good books have to be hard going. Anything that smacks of being enjoyable - whether it's well written popular science or entertaining science fiction - takes second place to titles that are worthy. This particularly comes across when newspapers do a 'What I'm reading' thing. You know for certain that what the chosen celebrities will list are books that are considered challenging. Frankly, for me, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I don't read to suffer, I read for enjoyment and interest. But that rarely seems to be a criterion in the literary world.

Luckily, though they may not often make the bestseller lists, excellent popular science and SF books continue to be produced. There was a time when it was suggested such 'midlist' books were dying out because everything would either be blockbusters or self-published to an audience of three. Thankfully, that has not happened, in part due to the translation market, as many good English language popular science books do well in other languages (and to some extent vice versa).

So I wish you a happy Christmas if you celebrate it, and a great New Year - and look forward to reading many excellent books in 2023.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more