This 2024 novel is the first of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books I've read - I can certainly see what the fuss is about, though there were a couple of things I really disliked about  Alien Clay . Let's get those negatives out of the way first, so we can get onto the positives. I'm no fan of dystopian fiction - if I want to be depressed, I can read the news. Tchaikovsky sets his book in a space travelling future totalitarian world state, using remote planets as one-way prison colonies. Initially this seems to make no financial sense, but the political prisoners are shipped out because they are cheaper and more disposable than machinery. The central character and narrator, Professor Arton Daghdev has been taken from his relatively privileged lifestyle to be the lowest of the low. Jolly it is not. The bigger negative, though, is the character himself. Of course rebelling against a totalitarian state should be seen as a positive - but Daghdev's politics are all too reminiscen...

Networks are of huge significance to life and technology, so it was refreshing to read a popular maths title on the subject. I was a little concerned when, in the introductory chapter, Anthony Bonato spent quite a while discussing network/graph theory jargon - we really don't need to know that a network is referred to as G with nodes represented by V and edges by E, let alone the meaning of 'heavy tailed'. There is absolutely no need to have such technical-speak in a popular title.  Unfortunately, he goes bombarding us with terminology in further chapters: it can be painful, especially when we are told a directed graph is known as a digraph, when I suspect most people outside of the graph theory community would consider a digraph a two letter phoneme. Despite the relentless terminology we do learn a lot about networks and their applications, from Google's PageRank to Bacon numbers and from COVID infections to optimising security camera placement. As a writer, I was inte...

As a big fan of Alastair Reynolds’ Prefect Dreyfus books I have struggled with some of his earlier novels set in the same universe, and was distinctly nervous at the prospect of 634 pages. I’m also not a huge fan of novels that interlace multiple storylines, so after being gripped by the opening sequence with a space elevator disaster, it was worrying to then plunge back to the origin story of the planet’s human habitation, though to give Reynolds his due, this is not entirely what it first seems.  Thanks to the skill that Reynolds often demonstrates, he keeps the reader engaged in both the ‘present’ experiences of the central character in the dangerous mix of ruin and extravagance that is the titular city, and the past story of the founding of his (separate) home world. I think the reason I prefer the Dreyfus novels is that in that setting the civilisation has not collapsed, so despite the dire threats they feel more upbeat. Here amongst the devastation caused by the nanotechnolog...

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 ...

Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dutch newspapers and magazines, but he also has written for New Scientist, Science and BBC Sky at Night Magazine, and he is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope. He wrote dozens of books (including a couple of children’s books) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, many of which have been translated into English, German, Italian, and Chinese, among other languages. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named asteroid 10986 Govert after him, and in 2014, he received the David N. Schramm Award for high-energy astrophysics science journalism from the High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society.His latest book is Target Earth . Why science? We live in troubling times. Fake news and conspiracy theories abound, and trust in science is diminishing. Many adults don't seem to realize that almost everythi...

There's a real shortage of popular chemistry titles, which made this book seem very appealing, but unfortunately that's not what it is. There is far more on fertiliser than phosphorus in its own right, interspersed with folksy site meetings that add little more than atmosphere. Sometimes the deviation from topic is dramatic. For example, the treatment of small boat illegal immigrants by Australia, sending them to a camp on Nauru, takes up around 10 pages without a mention of phosphorus. This is a social and political history book with a light seasoning of science.  All too often this deviation from topic occurs - for example in chapter 1 we get a story of nineteenth century agricultural arson in East Anglia and the life of John Henshaw for around four pages, followed by a similar amount on geology. Even the very opening, which makes use of a decaying whale in the ocean (and throws in the nature of near death experiences) seems to meander far from the subject. This isn't hel...

Usually a mystery novel is based on a straightforward puzzle - whodunnit (or occasionally howdunnit). But now and again you get a mystery that's far more sophisticated, where initially the reader hasn't a clue what's going on. The master of such books was the late Gene Wolfe with novels like Free Live Free and There are Doors . These were fantasies, but Stuart Turton achieves a similar level of intriguing, slowly revealed complexity in a science fiction novel (though it feels quite fantasy-like with an Arthur C. Clarkesque 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' way.) Of course, anyone can write something that is bafflingly incomprehensible. What made Wolfe's, and now Turton's work so special is that the initial confusion doesn't put the reader off - instead we are drawn enthusiastically into the web of the mystery.  Turton takes us to an island where the only survivors of a worldwide, life-destroying 'fog' are kep...