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The Phantom Scientist (SF) - Robin Cousin ****

Over the years I've come across a range of graphic novels and graphic popular science (that's 'graphic' in the sense of illustrated, not explicit) and rarely found one that wasn't a bit of a disappointment compared with a traditional book. I think this is because, despite the old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words, the reduction of text to speech bubbles and tiny captions means that it's difficult to get any subtlety into the fiction, or depth of understand of the science into non-fiction.

The Phantom Scientist is a graphic novel, but one that according to the description 'draws together linguistics, biology, astrophysics, and robotics in a mind-bending puzzle that will thrill and inform readers' - so it takes on the very difficult role of both being an SF mystery thriller and something that puts across mathematical and scientific concepts. Because what happens is certainly not possible at the moment, it does stray into science fiction. The combination of putting across real science and maths plus fiction is hard enough with words, and doubly so in a graphic novel form.

There is, however, good news. This is the best attempt I've ever seen at putting scientific and mathematical ideas into a graphic novel format - and Robin Cousin manages to give the book a distinctly intriguing sense of mystery. It's because of this, despite its quite significant flaws, that I've given it four stars. The book features a strange institute, the fourth of its kind, where various random scientists are brought in so that their interactions cause increasingly chaotic occurrences, supposedly to inspire creativity. We get bits of system theory, the travelling salesman problem, fractals and more, all coming together quite effectively.

This is very much the Lego Movie style of comic strip - there is no attempt at life-like imagery, but enough to get a broad pictorial feeling of what's happening across. Having said that, for at least half the book I thought two different characters were the same person, and I could never identify who half of them were, which was quite confusing.

For no obvious reason, some of the images are very low contrast (see the examples to the right) - unless you read it under a bright light, where there's text, for example, it's almost impossible to read in these sections, which is a real pain.

Apart from the impossibility of a system predicting human behaviour as occurs here (the reason it's impossible is even stated by one of the characters), there are also a couple of plot holes: something that supposedly was going to occur in 36 hours' time happening after about 2 hours, and also a group of astrophysicists who seem to have no relevance to the overall picture (and whose only role seems to be to provide a torch). There's also a decidedly confused ending.

Despite these flaws, though, there is a quite impressive introduction to the P=NP question and its implications, plus various other bits of science and maths that emerge from the interaction of disciplines. If not entirely successful, it's a very good try at a near-impossible goal (which given the whole P=NP business, is arguably not a bad thing for it to be).

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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