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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.
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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

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