This is the latest in MIT Press's Radium Age series, which aims to fill in the largely ignored proto-SF work that was produced between the end of the nineteenth century and the flourishing of science fiction of the 1930s and 40s. These have ranged from the dire Theodore Savage to the interesting opening book of the series Voices from the Radium Age . The idea of this volume is to give us stories with characters who are more than human, with distinctly mixed results. A lot of what we get are actually extracts from novels (or in one case a George Bernard Shaw play), which makes the useful as illustrations, but not particularly engaging as stories in their own right. A starting point would be to point out that most 'superhuman' stories are more fantasy than science fiction. The same applies to superhero comics and films of today. With the exception of Batman and Iron Man, the vast majority of superheroes have abilities that are nothing more than magic powers wearing scientif...

Popular science topics are fairly evenly divided between those that are of pure intellectual interest, such as astronomy or relativity, and those with a direct impact on our lives - such as climate change or quantum physics. There's often a danger with the 'direct impact' that they can be a little worthy and try too hard to be deeply meaningful. For some reason this often seems to be the case with anything food related. But thankfully agriculture is a topic that is both rarely examined and has the potential for plenty of interesting science (and history thereof). Inevitably climate change does come into the mix, both in terms of its impact on our ability to grow crops and in the greenhouse gas emissions from cow burps, fertiliser and more. To make things more complex, with a growing world population and some parts of the world chronically short of food, we need ways to grow more without impacting the climate in a negative fashion. It's purely coincidental that I'm r...

Apparently the biogeochemist (who even knew there was such a thing) Karsten Pedersen 'coined the term "intraterrestrials" to describe the abundant life within Earth's crust.' The idea of this book is boldly go and explore new life that is found below the surface and of which we have historically known very little. I must admit I winced a bit when the introduction yet again featured a diary entry from an author about to set off an expedition of discovery, in this case about to start a deep sea dive. This has become a cliché, which I hope we'll move on from soon. But that doesn't stop the actual content being fascinating. Inevitably we get plenty on extremophiles (living in everything from water well over boiling point to strong acids and alkalis) and the origins of life, something anyone reading this kind of popular science is likely to have come across, but there is plenty more, particularly around life dependent on volcanoes, that was new to me. Karen Llo...

Dete Meserve leads Silver Creek Falls Entertainment, a production company that has produced everything from big-budget dramas and mysteries to star-studded comedies and animated series, including the animated PBS Kids STEM series, Ready, Jet, Go!, a science-based series for children centered on astronomy and featuring live-action interstitials with NASA Jet Propulsion Lab astronomer Dr. Amy Mainzer.  Dete’s Silver Creek Falls Entertainment has two major new kids’ series coming up this year, including Al Roker’s Weather Hunters (PBS Kids) this fall. The new show is designed to support kids’ learning about Earth science and meteorology through adventure and comedy. Her other new series is Not a Box (Apple TV+), based on the award-winning picture book by NYT bestselling author Antoinette Portis, which just launched last month. Her new novel is The Memory Collectors . Why science fiction?  The Memory Collectors uses science fiction as its foundation—the premise that time travel i...

When a book is a classic of the field it can be easy to forget to review it. Richard Feynman's 1985  QED is one of the best-thumbed books on my shelves, and still in print - so it seemed sensible to cover it. Because Feynman has a number of books with his name on the cover from his remarkable anecdotes in Surely You are Joking Mister Feynman? to the anything-but-popular-science Red Book ( The Feynman Lectures on Physics ), it can be a surprise to realise that he never wrote a book per se. What we get in print is either transcripts of lectures, shorter pieces collected or interviews. In the case of QED it was a lecture series given at UCLA to cover quantum electrodynamics - as the subtitle tells us, the strange theory of light and matter (and particularly light and electrons where much of the interaction takes place). Feynman tells us that the book 'purports to be a record of the lectures', but has been significantly edited by Ralph Leighton. Along the way, the reader gai...

I'm always a little wary of popular science books that start with a personal story, but I'll make an exception for Madeleine Beekman's excellent book, which sets out a possible explanation of our ability to speak, because the approach fits in with a well-balanced combination of storytelling and scientific information.  There have been a good number of books that either set out to explain some of our species' physical oddities or abilities that seem to set us apart from other animals. Twenty years ago I was impressed by Clive Bromhall's The Eternal Child , which suggested retaining infantile features (neoteny) enabled us to exist more effectively in large groups, while  many authors have attempted to highlight aspects of being human that set us apart (as was the case with storytelling in Brainjacking ). Here Beekman first takes us through what palaeontology can tell us about the development our biological form, then explores the function of speech and language. In ma...

Frank Close is Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford. He was one time head of theory at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and head of communications and public education at CERN. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and winner of their Michael Faraday Prize for excellence in science communication in 2013. He is the only professional scientist to have won the Association of British Science Writers Prize on 3 occasions. Author of 22 books on science including The Cosmic Onion, Trinity , and Elusive - the story of the elusive Peter Higgs and his boson, his latest book is Destroyer of Worlds - the deep history of the nuclear age. Why this book? One afternoon in 2022 I was walking into town with my 10-year-old grandson, Jack, when he started asking - and remarkably telling me what he knew - about Tsar Bomba, the most powerful bomb ever detonated. I had been thinking about the history of nuclear physics for many years, but it was this conversation that was the f...