Supporting www.popularscience.co.uk

Thank you so much to everyone who has already used the 'Buy me a Coffee' link below to support my online book reviews, general science and writing life articles.

As it says below, my posts here on the Popular Science website and on my blog Now Appearing will always be free, but if you'd really like to help keep me going (and to avoid running intrusive adverts, which I hate) I've introduced a membership scheme that involves a small monthly contribution.

There are three levels:

Bronze - £1 a month (or £10 a year), like the individual coffee purchases, this will help me be able to dedicate the time to writing these posts and reviews, but makes it more secure.
Silver - £3 a month (or £30 a year) - by moving up to a coffee a month, I'm adding in additional posts and messages just for silver and gold members, plus discounts on signed books. Membership also includes the option to suggest books for review. There will be still be as many free posts for all readers, but there will be some tasty extras for members.
Gold - £5 a month (or £50 a year) - in addition to the Silver benefits you will get a free, signed hardback book (or two paperbacks) at the start of the year if paying the full year, or at the end of the year if paying monthly. You will be given a choice from at least five titles each time, with the book(s) posted to your chosen address.

I hope you will consider helping support my online writing - just click the 'Buy me a Coffee' button below.

These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:

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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 ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...

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