Skip to main content

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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Target Earth – Govert Schilling *****

I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of people who buy popular science books just want an overview and taster of a subject that’s brand new to them – and that’s likely to work best if the author keeps it short and to the point. Of course, you may want to dig deeper in areas that really interest you, but that’s what Google is for. That basic principle aside, I’m still in awe at how much substance Govert Schilling has managed to cram into this tiny book. It’s essentially about all the things (natural things, I mean, not UFOs or space junk) that can end up on Earth after coming down from outer space. That ranges from the microscopically small particles of cosmic dust that accumulate in our gutters, all the way up to the ten kilometre wide asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Between these extremes are two topics that we’ve reviewed entire books about recently: meteorites ( The Meteorite Hunt...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...
Post a Comment
Read more