Daydreaming in the Solar System - John Moores and Jesse Rogerson ****

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 Fiction series, such as Plato's Labyrinth, where a shortish SF novel is followed by a breakdown of the science featured.

The science bits of Daydreaming work effectively to explore what was experienced in the ‘fiction’, in a way that is rather more mathematical than most popular science, though that's not a bad thing. Having said that, I don’t share the authors’ assertion that, having explained what an astronomical unit is 'A fun challenge would be to figure out what the Earth-Moon distance is when expressed in astronomical units instead of kilometres.' If they think that’s fun, they need to get out more.

One thing I didn't like about the generally bland but passable fiction is the use of the second person throughout. It is too specific for this to work in such a setting. A statement like ‘Your first job here on the Moon was at one of those observatories’, which is not about the scene described but a reference to an imaginary past, doesn’t ring true because it gives the reader a back story for which they have no point of reference.

Despite this, I felt that Daydreaming provided an effective way to explore our current understanding of an impressive 15 solar system locations. I enjoyed the book, and anyone with an enthusiasm for space or 'hard' science fiction should do so too.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Phenomena - Camille Juzeau and the Shelf Studio ****

I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly hyperbole. But I enjoyed Phenomena far more than I thought I would. The idea is to cover 125 topics with infographics. On the internet these tend to be long pages with lots of numbers and supposedly interesting factoids. Thankfully, here the term is used in a more eclectic fashion. Each topic gets a large (circa A4) page (a few get two) with a couple of paragraphs of text and a chunky graphic. Sometimes these do consist of many small parts - for example 'the limits of the human body' features nine graphs - three on sporting achievements, three on biometrics (e.g. height by date of birth) and three rather random items (GNP per person, agricultural yields of various crops and consumption of coal). Others have a single illustration, such as a map of the sewers of Paris. (Because, why wouldn't you want to see that?) Just those two s...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

Search This Blog