When someone came up with the title for this book they were probably thinking deep cultural echoes - I suspect I'm not the only Robert Rankin fan in whom it raised a smile instead, thinking of The Suburban Book of the Dead . That aside, this is a glossy and engaging book showing how physical makeup (phenotype), behaviour and more tell us about the past, with the messenger being (inevitably, this being Richard Dawkins) the genes. Worthy of comment straight away are the illustrations - this is one of the best illustrated science books I've ever come across. Generally illustrations are either an afterthought, or the book is heavily illustrated and the text is really just an accompaniment to the pictures. Here the full colour images tie in directly to the text. They are not asides, but are 'read' with the text by placing them strategically so the picture is directly with the text that refers to it. Many are photographs, though some are effective paintings by Jana Lenzová. T...

This book in the MIT Press ' Radium Age ' series somewhat stretches the 'and other stories' label as the title work is a complete novel, followed by a number of stories from Francis Stevens, real name Gertrude Barrows Bennett, written in the first 20 years of the twentieth century. Stevens' writing style is very much of the period at the popular end of the market - think Conan Doyle, for example. This is a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing for the series, which is supposed to explore proto-science fiction from the period before the pulp SF magazines, but after pioneers such as Wells and Verne. Although Stevens uses some of the props of science, most of the content would be more accurately described as fantasy (but I'm allowing it to slip in here). The title novel propels three main characters (two male, one female) into a strange world that acts as a gateway to an alternate future version of Pennsylvania. It's entertainingly done, doubtless with some ins...

The Hubble was the space telescope that launched a thousand picture books destined for the coffee table, such as Hubble Legacy . Inevitably, its new, more capable brother, the Webb is following suit. Thankfully, though, this is more than just a picture book as you can only marvel so much over pretty pictures from space. The book is structured into three sections - the first is about the telescope itself, beginning with its predecessors, including, for instance, some interesting material on the pros and cons of using a Lagrange point for a telescope. The second looks at Webb's mission - what it's intended to capture and how it will do that. And the final section, around twice as big as the other two added together, takes us through the already impressive range of Webb imagery. That final section is where many such books descend into pure picture book territory, but Maggie Aderin-Pocock continues to include pages of informative text with diagrams showing, for example, how the sol...

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question.  Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book...

It has always seemed that combining fiction and non-fiction should be a good way to put popular science across. After all, SF provides a great vehicle for exploring places where we can't actually go. In practice, though, it seems extremely difficult to successfully pull off the crossover without the result seeming overly contrived. Thankfully, John Moores and Jesse Rogerson make it work well. It's interesting to make a comparison with Interstellar Tours , which takes a tour of our galaxy on a fictional starship. There, the setting is provided by fiction, but what's experienced around the galaxy is based on best current science. In Daydreaming in the the Solar System we stick to our near neighbourhood: each location from the Moon out to Pluto starts with a short fictional account of 'being there', followed by a chapter on the science behind that scene. This is like a more effective version of the approach attempted with mixed results in the Springer Science and Fict...

This is a fascinating and unique book about the parallel development of, and occasional interactions between, modern physics and contemporary classical music. It’s also a far easier and more enjoyable read than its narrowly academic-sounding title might suggest. If it had been called ‘Music and Quantum Physics’ then I suspect far more people would be motivated to check it out – and, for the most part, I think they’d get exactly what they were looking for. I deliberately moved the word ‘music’ to the front of my version of the title, because that’s what the book is primarily about – with physics being a background thread, rather than vice versa. Equally, Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin is essentially a professional musician with a sideline in the history and philosophy of science – a far less common combination than the other way around. He also seems to have been something of a musical prodigy, mentioning physics-inspired compositions that he wrote as far back as 2013, when he was just 14 years o...

You know you've discovered something special when immediately after reading a book you start looking for other titles by the same author. I came across Lavie Tidhar in a passing reference on TwitterX (though I had unwittingly read a short story by him recently) from someone whose opinion trusted, took the plunge and bought this book - to be captivated. Tidhar does here for science fiction what Gene Wolfe did in his fantasy novel peak with the likes of Castleview, Free Live Free, There are Doors, Pandora by Holly Hollander and The Sorceror's House . We get something set in what appears to be our everyday world, but where something is at a slant to that world. Here the 'something' is a book, that some say was never written, but if it does exist is hugely desirable for obscure reasons. This is just one part of multipart novel, each section of which seems to add another layer of complexity and fascination. Where's the science fiction? In once sense it's a meta-con...

There have been several Twelve Tomorrows collections from MIT Press since the original in 2018 - stories that are supposed to make the reader think about the impact of future technology. This latest addition focuses on 'science fiction exploring the future of art' - which presented a distinct danger of pretentiousness taken to the extreme. Thankfully, editor Indrapamit Das has been able to avoid this trap. Like all such collections, there is a mix of good, bad and indifferent - but on the whole the balance is positive. Even a story like the opener The Limner Wrings His Hands by Vajra Chandrasekera - which scores fairly high on the pretentiousness stakes, and is far too clever clever somewhat in the manner of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - is surprisingly readable if you force yourself to focus hard on the word salad (though it is fantasy rather than SF).  To pick out two favourites, The Art Crowd by Samit Basu was a significantly more readable piece, well structure...

Tom Salinsky is a writer, podcaster and corporate coach living in London with his wife and too many cats. With Deborah Frances-White, he is the author of The Improv Handbook (Methuen Drama, 2008). With Robert Khan he is the author of five plays and many audio dramas for Big Finish. With his podcast colleagues John Dorney and Jessica Regan, he is the author of Best Pick: A Journey Through Film History and the Academy Awards (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). As a solo author, he has published Star Trek: Discovering the Television Series (Pen & Sword, 2024), the second volume of which is due for release in 2025. His latest title is   Red Dwarf: Discovering the TV Series . Why science fiction? I’m sure there are countless theories about why awkward teens gravitate towards science fiction and fantasy, but everyone likes a bit of escapism. And if your ordinary life is dull or scary or isolating or confusing, then you may well be drawn to escapism which is set in a world as unlike you...

This is a single longish short story in Amazon's Far Reaches collection - and proved pleasantly engaging. I hadn't come across Veronica Roth before (apparently she wrote the Divergent series) but she has a light, readable style in this rather classic setting of 'working class folk on the spaceship'. This is the home of Elton John's Rocket Man , which was very common in 1950s SF films  and lasted through to Star Trek, when the writers were still essentially modelling their crews on nautical vessels, with their inevitably working class characters to do the dirty jobs. In Void , we meet Ace, one of the team who does onboard maintenance on a craft that shuttles between Earth and Proxima Centauri. She and her colleagues deal with everyday problems like malfunctioning toilets. You would probably think that by the time we can build near-light speed ships, we could also make a robot that could mend a toilet - and real life experience of space travel so far is that there is...

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho...