New books about astronomy, aimed at general readers, are coming out all the time. The most obvious reason for this is that it’s a subject that never stands still, and even a book written five years ago can look dated to anyone who keeps up with the latest theories and discoveries. While authors are scarcely likely to complain about the ongoing demand for new books, they may struggle to find a sufficiently fresh angle to make their latest contribution stand out from its predecessors. Yet that’s what Brian Clegg has done brilliantly well in Interstellar Tours , which presents what might have been a pretty standard account of the make-up of our galaxy from a strikingly different perspective. Clegg asks us to imagine we are 22nd-century tourists taking a short cruise around the galaxy on a starship that’s capable of jumping, more or less instantaneously, to any point within a 100,000-light-year sphere centred on the Earth. This much is science fiction, because there’s no way it could be ma...

The tendency is for science fiction written this century to work on the small, personal scale, focusing more on characters than plot, but there is a long tradition of older SF novelists from E. E. (Doc) Smith, through Isaac Asimov to Larry Niven who took their stories big and bold - and that is the direction taken by mathematician and author Ian Stewart in his chunky (560 page) novel Loophole .  A strange phenomenon is discovered where a moon appears and disappears - it turns out it is orbiting through a wormhole, spending part of each orbit in two different universes. The discovery of this weird phenomenon leads to three sets of main characters being able to interact - something they need to do, as a mysterious fourth force is rapidly destroying stars. The first set we meet are distinctly alien (even though they behave like parish councillors), a second are apparently normal humans who aren't quite what they seem, and the third are humans of our future - between them spanning at l...

Alom Shaha was born in Bangladesh but grew up in London. A science teacher, writer and filmmaker, he has spent most of his professional life sharing his passion for science and education with the public. Alom has produced, directed and appeared in a number of TV programmes for broadcasters such as the BBC, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, and the Nuffield Foundation. Alom has represented his community as an elected politician and has volunteered at a range of charitable organisations. He teaches at a comprehensive school in London and writes for a number of online and print publications. His new book is Why Don't Things Fall Up? Why science? Honestly, because I had a couple of great teachers at school who made it make sense and come alive for me and, perhaps more importantly, made me believe it was something I could do. Why this book?  It’s the book I’ve been wanting and meaning to write ever since I had my first book pu...

There's a certain class of book that is beloved of academic authors, but that is often almost unreadable. It consists of a series of essays on a particular theme, each by someone different. Often they repeat each other, lack any cohesion and are deadly dull. I can only think that academics like doing them because it's a quick way to get a brownie point for having something published. This is such a book, but the good news is it's one of the most interesting ones I've read. The idea is to pull together two major world concerns: climate change and the state of democracy. Although there are a range of views, they all come from the same broad starting point that democracy is faring worse than it has for quite a while, that dealing effectively with climate change is best handled by democracy (despite some grudging acceptance that China is finally starting to get somewhere), and considering some of the impacts of climate change itself. The reason I'd say it's one of t...

Of all the sub-genres, arguably the two most comfortable bedfellows are gumshoe noir and dystopian science fiction. It’s part of the appeal of the movie Blade Runner , and it can be even more effective when done brilliantly in a novel like Titanium Noir. Nick Harkaway gets the whole vibe to perfection - his detective Cal Sounder has all the traits of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett protagonist, in a technological future without ever slipping into pastiche or parody. The nearish future setting has two tiers of humanity with the ultra-rich and super-privileged few able to renew their youth, in the process becoming 'titans' - not only does the procedure fix all ills and make them young again, each time it is taken, it makes them bigger, stronger and heavier. (Harkaway mostly gets away with this despite the usual giant problem of mass going up with the cube of the person’s size while bone strength only goes up with the square - he does this by giving the titans increasingly ...

This is a strange mixed bag of a book that starts with three parts that take sensible steps from leaving Earth, through 'touring the Sun's backyard' to 'into outer space', but then makes an odd leap in the final section 'to infinity and beyond' to explore the extremely hypothetical field of time travel - great fun as a topic, but hardly much to do with the rest of the book. Overall, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Lindsey Nyx Walker (something of a name overload) give us the print equivalent of a TV science show (perhaps not entirely surprisingly given Tyson has done a number of these and Walker is a TV producer and podcast writer). It's mostly presented at the superficial level of such shows (with a certain amount of Brian-Cox-on-a-mountain-style flowery prose), which kind of misses the point of a popular science book that you can go beyond the superficial. Occasionally we do get some more detail, but it's often not presented in a particularly approachable ...

This is a genuinely original science fiction novel with an intriguing underlying concept and multiple twists and turns at its heart. It's a shame that the cover proclaims it a 'story of first contact', because one of the twists is the reveal that this is the case, which isn't obvious to begin with in the book itself, but you can't see the cover without knowing it. The first part involves a dip into the life of international music star Owen, whose combination of magnetic stage presence and cult-like following reminded me of Valentine Michael Smith in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land . We then switch to the recruiting of a series of twenty-somethings to a mysterious global organisation and their distinctly odd training, ranging from assessing threats to the world to playing football. That abrupt switch requires a small suspension of irritation, but everything does come together in a satisfying fashion - and the 'first contact' challenge is quite unlik...

Nuclear fusion should, in principle, be the perfect addition to renewables as we move away from greenhouse gas generating energy sources. Yet, more than 60 years after it was first suggested, we still don't have a single working nuclear fusion power station. (If, as the subtitle suggests, this has been a race, it has been a walking backwards three-legged race.) Sharon Ann Holgate provides a compact introduction to what nuclear fusion is, the various steps along the road that have been made so far, and why it has taken so long. Starting with fusion as the power source of the stars, we discover the difficulty of keeping the tricky, twisty ultra hot material in the fusion reactor under control when using magnetic confinement, look at the two main technical approaches (and variants), the sheer scale of the engineering challenge, what is underway with ITER and more, along with the potential for the future. Although this is an area beset with disappointments, one where we always seems to...

This massive book (more on that in a moment) split my opinion more than any other I've ever read. When I read the opening chapter, where Inspector Mielikki Neith begins her investigation of what happened when a suspect died in the mentally invasive interrogation technique of her time I was hooked. Nick Harkaway's concept of a future Britain where practically all information is available to everyone and true democracy exists, with all decisions made by the people, is beautifully realised, and he wonderfully portrays as a utopia balanced on a knife edge of plunging into dystopia. Then I got to the next chapter, which dismayed me, as it appeared Harkaway had fallen for the irritating clichéd structure so common in modern novels of switching from chapter to chapter between different main characters and points of view, which eventually pull together. I found it tedious and just wanted to get back to Neith's story.  Soon after, I discover that things aren't what they seem, an...