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 made to happen within the currently known laws of physics. Beyond that, however, the book is almost entirely non-fiction. There are no intelligent aliens in Clegg’s galaxy (though he doesn’t rule out the possibility they may eventually be found), but there are very simple life-forms in the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa. While we don’t know this for a fact today, it isn’t pure science fiction either. It’s more in the line of ‘informed speculation’ – something that many present-day scientists believe might soon turn out be true. When he touches on possible future developments like this, either in the context of scientific knowledge or technology, Clegg highlights them with short text boxes headed ‘speculation alert’.
Like any real sightseeing cruise, the book doesn’t try to describe everything it might encounter along the way – just a few key destinations that are especially interesting or engaging for tourists from Earth. This includes the planets of our own solar system as well as a selection of ‘exoplanets’ orbiting other stars, and a handful of truly spectacular sights including star-forming regions, supernovas and pulsars. But the most extensive coverage (around 60 pages spanning 2 chapters) goes to black holes – which, after all, are going to be near the top of anyone’s galactic sightseeing list.
To be honest, talking about ‘sights’ is probably underselling what the book actually offers. At one point Clegg makes a useful distinction between the fields of astronomy and astrophysics: ‘Broadly, astronomers collect facts, while astrophysicists try to explain those facts using physical theory.’ By this definition, the book probably leans more to astrophysics than astronomy. It does describe what the starship travellers would see – from much closer range than any present-day telescope – but this is just a starting-point for an explanation of the underlying science.
Not everyone would willingly pick up a book about astrophysics (a subject with a thoroughly undeserved reputation for dryness and obscurity), so Clegg’s trick of turning it into a sci-fi-sounding space voyage is a clever one. Even so, there are downsides to it as well. One of Clegg’s great strengths as a popular science writer is that he understands his readers very well, and has a pleasantly chatty way of talking directly to them – the real Brian Clegg addressing the real you. But he can’t do that here, because the narrative is ostensibly a 22nd-century tour guide talking to 22nd-century tourists. This means, for example, that explaining complex ideas by drawing analogies with the familiar 21st century world around us, as Clegg might do in any of his other books, isn’t an option in this case.
The other small problem I had with the book may only be an issue for people like me, who habitually overthink such things. But it has to do with those ‘speculation alert’ boxes. Given that so many things are likely to change in the next hundred-odd years, why are some things speculated on, while others (such as the future of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, to mention an obvious one that occurred to me) aren’t? At one extreme – invoking some kind of fictitious ‘prime directive’ that prevents us knowing anything about our own future, for example – there could have been no speculation boxes at all. That would certainly have been preferable to the other extreme, where the boxes took over the book to the extent that it was more about potential future developments than our current picture of the cosmos. But Clegg’s actual approach lies somewhere between these two extremes.
To me, this gave the book a distinctly split feel – as if it were trying very hard to be purely factual, but couldn’t help being pulled towards speculation every now and then. This isn’t really a criticism, though, as I agreed with the majority of Clegg’s speculations and found some of them positively amusing – such as when he sweeps aside all the currently fashionable theories of dark matter and quantum gravity. On the other hand, scientists working in those particular fields may be less amused – as would all those space agencies aiming to have human bases on Mars by the end of the 2030s, when they’re told this will have to wait until the 2060s. That’s still a little optimistic in my opinion – but then again, if human spaceflight were shown as progressing at the pace it really does, we’d never be able to go on our interstellar cruise in the 22nd century, would we?
Despite the occasional excursions into speculation, Clegg always clearly labels them as such, which puts his book head and shoulders above an earlier one I reviewed that was based on a similar concept (albeit limited to the Solar System) – The Ultimate Interplanetary Travel Guide by Jim Bell. Having just looked back at Bell’s book, I’m afraid my review of it was a little too harsh (I should have give it three stars, not two), but my central criticism that he makes no distinction between facts and speculation still stands. So that’s a major plus for Clegg’s book. If there’s one area in which Bell’s book wins hands down, though, it’s in visual content – it’s packed full of eyecatching colour images. Arguably Clegg has these, too – but they’re on an associated website rather than embedded in the book itself. If you’re reading it electronically this means you constantly have to click on hyperlinks, or if you go for the print version you have to use QR codes, which is even more distracting. But never mind – it’s just a small irritation in what’s an otherwise really gripping tour of the galaxy around us.
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Review by Andrew May - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Please note, this title is written by the editor of the Popular Science website. Our review is still an honest opinion – and we could hardly omit the book – but do want to make the connection clear.
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