How to Kill an Asteroid – Robin George Andrews ***

The cover image and title font leave little doubt that this book is targeted at fans of blockbuster sci-fi movies – which these days means a sizable fraction of the general population. That’s a great marketing ploy, because if potential readers paid too much attention to the words ‘real science’ tucked away in the subtitle, then the audience might shrink to a small fraction of the size. It’s a sad fact that space is only seen as cool when it’s fictional; as soon as it becomes factual then it’s strictly for science nerds only.

The most obvious reason is that, outside science fiction, there’s barely any ‘human interest’ angle to space. On top of that, once you get above the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s almost impossible to give a proper explanation of how objects behave and interact without recourse to at least GCSE-level physics. So I have to give Andrews top marks for avoiding both these pitfalls. He picks the one astronomical topic that really does have a human angle – a potential collision with a ‘city-killer’ asteroid, as he terms it. That’s something that’s bound to happen in the – well, in the next ten thousand years, say (but let’s not emphasise ‘astronomical’ numbers like this too much, or people might not buy the book).

As for the second problem – ‘don’t mention physics or you’ll lose most of your readers’ – Andrews does a pretty good job there too, by taking a purely narrative rather than explanatory approach. He focuses on describing events – including how a hypothetical future collision might play out, as well as historical occurrences such as the Tunguska and Chelyabinsk impacts, and comet Shoemaker-Levy’s 1994 encounter with Jupiter – and a handful of recent asteroid-related space missions. Most relevant to the subject of ‘How to Kill an Asteroid’ is NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which Andrews provides a detailed first-hand account of, but he also touches on the Hayabusa and OSIRIS-Rex sample-collection missions, with their revelations about asteroid composition. The result, I suspect, is pretty much what that core audience of sci-fi movie addicts will be looking for – and while it’s not quite the ‘propulsive narrative that reads like a sci-fi thriller’ promised by the publisher’s blurb, it certainly flows smoothly enough and is a quick and effortless read.

There’s a downside, though, in that by studiously ignoring the physics of the subject, Andrews may leave his more scientifically inclined readers with a lot of unanswered questions. So if you want a detailed insight into how asteroids – and potential defences against them – really work, you might want to look for a more sciencey, less journalistic book. On the other hand, if all you want is a broad overview of the subject, this is as good as any.

[The reviewer is too modest to make the suggestion, but if you’d like a ‘more sciencey, less journalistic’ book, you could try Andrew May’s Cosmic Impact - Ed.]

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