The third novel in a series can be a bit of a let down, but Robert Jackson Bennett makes this the best so far. In his beautifully imagined world which has advanced biological technology while otherwise being near-medieval we once more encounter the unlikely pair of investigator Dinios Kol and his boss, Ana Dolabra whose ability to pull together information from multiple sources to come to deductions isn’t quite human - and whose personality is abrasive to say the least. They are called in to deal with what appears to be a relatively simple murder with a clear perpetrator, but that conclusion risks political instability as the daughter of one leading family is killed by the son of another - the two lines being close to Montagues and Capulets in their hatred for each other, even though their businesses are intertwined. What gradually becomes revealed is a far more complex plot involving a horrendous biological mechanism that, at the same time, gives Bennett a chance to tell us much more ...

It's a truism that we now live in a 'me' world, where many people have a toxic inward-looking attitude that is all about self-fulfilment and 'my truth' rather rather than worrying to much about facts, reality and making things happen. Climate books come in a wide range of types, some of which, like Bill McGuire's excellent The Fate of the World , explore the scientific reality and help us to work through its implications. But the environmental lobby has always had a branch that had no time for science and was, instead about how the environment makes us feel . And this book fits comfortably into that world. In itself, this isn't a problem if all you want to do is appreciate the joys of nature. But if, as this book's publicity suggests, you want to 'transform the deep ache and overwhelm many feel into a journey of purposeful action' we need both guidance on that action and a scientific basis to underpin that action.  Unfortunately, there is not an...

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Over the years, Dacher Keltner has covered a range of really interesting topics. Take, for instance Born to be Good on 'the science of a meaningful life' from 2010 or The Power Paradox on 'how we gain and lose influence' from 2016. Now he's done it again with Awe , exploring 'the explorative power of everyday wonder'. And just as with the other two, I was drawn in by the concept only to be disappointed by the content - it's a bit like popular science clickbait. To be honest, I'd forgotten I'd read the previous books when I bought this one, but referring back to the earlier reviews, I'm getting the same feeling all over again. I noted that Born to be Good was 'strung together rather haphazardly' and that The Power Paradox felt like many business books - a good magazine article strung out to make a tissue-thin book. It's deja vu all over again. Keltner divides the book into four sections. Only the first is directly about 'a ...

In their book, Andrew Simms and Leo Murray tell us that ‘the enabler of [a] great shift in expectations and attitudes has been the advertising and marketing industries. Advertising is selling us an imagined lifestyle – the premise is that we can only we feel we are all living our best lives by flying around the world, driving ever bigger SUVS [sic], eating beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, and enjoying a vast array of consumer goods like there was no tomorrow.’ This book covers two of my interests, climate science and influencing the brain, so I thought it would be right up my street, but I found it depressingly bad. It's a polemic by enthusiasts that isn't really science driven. I don't like advertising, I think it can be manipulative - but the whole story was wildly overplayed here. I am certainly not aware, for example, of advertising making me eat beef from cattle raised on cleared rainforest, I have rarely seen advertising for beef per se, and only buy Bri...

The MIT Press's 'Radium Age' series is based on the premise that between the scientific romances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the 'golden age' of science fiction starting in the mid-thirties, there was an intermediate period of proto-science fiction that has been largely ignored. I'm not convinced this is a meaningful split - something like H. G. Wells's  The War of the World s may have been labelled as scientific romance because the SF term hadn't been devised yet, but it is pure science fiction already - and still very readable today. The Radium Age books to date have either been interesting as novels or, if not, notable for doing something special that gives them a place in science fiction history. So even though, for instance, Wells's novel The World Set Free from 1914 is hard going, it is nonetheless interesting because of its introduction of the concept of atomic bombs. Unfortunately, Cicely Hamilton's 1922 novel ...

This book was a disappointment - more on that in a moment. The aim is to give us the picture of the development of nuclear fusion as a power source leading up to the latest and best incarnation of a fusion reactor, ITER. In principle, fusion offers us the best option to balance out the variability of wind and solar - an on-demand energy supply that is green and doesn't produce the same level of nuclear waste as fission. But the timescales are mind-numbing. Fusion energy has already been in development for over 60 years. ITER, a project that was first conceived 34 years ago is expected to fully operational by 2035 with experiments continuing for 20 years. This would take it to 67 years from first conception. And ITER isn't even a prototype for a working power station - that's the next stage. In part, Alain Bécoulet does give us a picture of why things have taken so long - because, for example, handling the lively, ultra hot plasma at the heart of a magnetic confinement react...

This is a really big book. I don't mean big in the sense of important, but physically enormous for what it is - it's roughly the size of a children's annual, though a lot thicker. Interestingly, the format appears to be a Paul Hawken speciality - he did it with his previous title, Drawdown ,  though that was far less glossy. Paul Hawken's aim is to put forward a solution to climate change driven from humans rather than from the science. The tag line on the back of the book reads 'The climate crisis is not at science problem. It is a human problem.' And that itself is a problem. It's not that climate change isn't a human problem, but rather that it's both a human problem and a science problem - requiring human and science-based solutions. But the approach taken in this book is anything but scientific. It's a bit like saying the Covid-19 pandemic is a human problem, not a science problem. The pandemic is indeed a human problem, but if we'd tr...

Many science fiction fans enjoy also reading books about science fiction (me included), so this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series is of interest - particularly as Sherryl Vint tells us that she isn't taking the usual route of a history or describing key works, but rather focussing on what 'science fiction can do, how it has been described by a variety of constituencies in distinct ways for multiple ends.'  Vint does recognise that science fiction is many things to many people - but rather than embrace this diversity, she seems determined to force it into a particular image (that you are only likely to appreciate if you can cope with somebody using ‘imaginary’ as a noun rather than an adjective). We are told SF is about change - but I'm not convinced that's accurate. It is about storytelling (which is hardly mentioned here) that asks 'What if?' - so it's not so much about change as things being different. The obsession with change prod...

The Tarot is a fascinating and often beautiful thing. A variant of the traditional card pack dating back to the fifteenth century, the four suits have an extra face card, while there's effectively a fifth suit of 21 permanent trumps and a joker or fool. There are a number of ways to play Tarot, but primarily it's a game similar to whist. A couple of hundred years ago it began to be used for cartomancy (fortune telling with cards) and this use has come to dominate popular knowledge of the card pack, including the renaming of the suits and trumps plus fool to be the minor and major arcana. The somewhat bizarre attempt to use the Tarot to educate in this popular science pack replaces the major arcana with 'powerful ideas in science' and the minor arcana with 'important women in science.' The suits (in many traditional packs swords, batons, cups and coins) become 'nano, micro, macro and astro' to divide up the fields in which those women worked. The cards th...