The forensic scientist's work forms a fascinating part of crime drama, with the pathologist playing a big supporting role in many police procedurals, while some shows such as the various CSI series , Silent Witness, Bones, Waking the Dead  drive the action from the forensics. It's not surprising, then, that Sanjukta Mondal makes good use of this TV introduction to this science both to introduce real concepts, but also to point out where the fictional versions get it wrong. It's also essential to cover, as she does, the reality that forensic work has itself slipped up. The book's introduction finishes with a reference to the key phrase 'every contact leaves a trace' becoming a guiding principle, but then tells us 'Does that mean forensic science is foolproof? The answer is no. It comes with its own set of pitfalls.' And these pitfalls will form a significant part of telling the story of the development of forensic science as a discipline. Although TV show...

The sequel to Artifact Space is another wrist-busting, high class space opera, again featuring a sort of Star Trek future but where the ships are primarily merchant/military instead of exploration/military. I gave the original book 5 stars, but I've marked this one down, partly because I've already read the third in the sequence, Whalesong , and that one is significantly better. There's still a lot to like about Deep Black . Its action sequences are engaging. There's lots of impressive detail about the ships and life on them - and a far more realistic impression of the less exciting rest of life onboard than you get from most space opera. And there is a lot more on the difficulties of communicating with aliens, which is cleverly handled. But like its predecessor it is too long, and there is just far too much of the detail of daily life for central character Marca Nbaro as she goes about her daily routine. Routine gets a little dull. To add to the negatives, the writing...

There are many interpretations of the word 'classic' - in the context of science fiction many would assume this referred to the 'golden age' of the 40s and 50s, but Adam Roberts (who knows his stuff) has plumped for what might otherwise be regarded as proto-SF - science fiction-like stories that predate the concept. The earliest here is Micromégas by Voltaire from 1752 and the latest Stanley Weinbaum's 1934 A Martian Odyssey . Before we go any further, I ought to mention the physical book itself - when it arrived I felt a bit like someone who buys dolls' house furniture thinking it's the real thing. It looks like a big grown up book in its picture, but in reality it's tiny, less than 16cm in height. Admittedly not doll friendly, but uncomfortably small to hold (though it does fit in most pockets). I really want to give it both three stars and five stars, so the final outcome is something in between. As someone with an interest in the history of science ...

Isotopes - variants of chemical elements with differing numbers of neutrons in the atomic nucleus - play a major role in our understanding of matter and radioactive decay, as well as being powerful tools for science and medicine. As often seems the case with anything that has some degree of a chemistry focus, it's a topic that isn't heavily covered in the popular science literature, except in passing reference when dealing with the periodic table or radioactivity. Graham Lappin sets out to give us a comprehensive introduction to isotopes, followed by an exploration of how we make use of them. We start with age of the planet Earth, and various estimates of it before radioactive decay became an effective dating mechanism, bringing in along the way both what isotopes are and a touch of statistics to be able to handle the concept of half lives. We then move on to medicine and biology; plants, animals, life and death; and the beginning of the universe coupled with nuclear bombs. Bec...

This has probably been the hardest popular science book to review I've ever read, and because of this I'm going to give a relatively unusual structure to this write-up. The topic is fascinating. It's about the reality of making predictions - in general, and particularly about climate change. David Stainforth is very firmly of the opinion that climate change is an emergency that requires our action - but he is unusually honest it admitting that the problems of forecasting how climate change will proceed are so great because we face a whole pile of issues along the way. He highlights how predicting the way the climate will change is a 'one-shot bet' - we don't get to make a forecast time and time again, improving our technique. There will only be a single climate future. This isn't great because we are dealing with a very complex system, we are extrapolating into an unprecedented situation, and the chaotic, non-linear nature of the systems involved make predic...

There was a lot to like in Sophie Pavelle's debut popular science title. In it, she visits ten locations in the UK (against the backdrop of the Covid lockdowns) where species that are in some way threatened by humans and/or climate change are found. The writing style is extremely light and personal, while the content on the different species was both interesting and informative. I particularly enjoyed chapters on sea grass and dung beetles, which are accompanied by coverage of a species each of butterfly, porpoise, bat, guillemot, salmon, hare, bird of prey and bumblebee. There's a nice mix of three threads - writing about the species itself, about the visit to the location (so something close to travel writing, as Pavelle attempts to avoid driving and flying as much as possible) and about the environmental side. I'm not sure the writing style is for everyone - I found it verged on arch at times, didn't endear me with several enthusiastic references to Love Island and ...

In the 1960s, science fiction underwent a revolution, often called the new wave. For many authors of the time, the 'hard' science and two-dimensional characterisation of Isaac Asimov and other writers from the 30s-50s was considered naive. The new young things preferred more human-centred stories, more experimental writing, darker topics and would sometimes indulge in total abandonment of the conventional story form. A lot of the output of the period could be classed as interesting but failed experimentation - which is not a bad thing. It is arguably an essential for real creativity. This means that much of the output doesn't stand the test of time. But some authors, including Thomas Disch, produced some remarkable fiction. This collection of short stories, first published in 1966 under the title 102 H-bombs  is an effective illustration of both what was good and bad about the period. Some of the stories are powerful, effective and original - others don't work at all. I...

Terry Pratchett was a great writer of humorous fantasy novels, but not everyone knows he tried his hand at straight science fiction before starting on the Discworld books. I had a real problem rating this book - I really need to be able to give it four stars for ideas and three for quality of writing. Pratchett takes us on a whirlwind trip (there's probably not more than about 50,000 words in the book, but he packs a huge amount in) around a future universe where there a few humanish species (plus intelligent robots and a couple of strange entities like a conscious planet that acts as a bank), living in the shadow of a much older, mysterious disappeared species k nown as the Jokers, who  left behind vast, incomprehensible monuments.  The central character, Dom Salabos, is about to take over his planet-wide family company... except first he has to survive increasingly frequent attempts on his life and to discover a destiny put in place by his father. To get the less posit...

Some brief guides miss the point and in reality go on for rather a long time, but this one very much does what it says on the tin. Readable in an hour, it gives us the basics of what modern artificial intelligence is and how it works. To achieve such brevity, James Stone has cut away much of the support mechanism of popular science - so we get very little background and historical context, limited storytelling and not much about applications. Instead, the focus is laser-sharp on delivering the basics of how neural networks work, where modern AI is successful and where it has a long way to go. Broadly, Stone identifies two areas where AI triumphs - image recognition and playing games. If I'm honest, perhaps he is a little generous on the first of these - as he points out himself, tiny elements undetectable to the human eye can be sufficient to totally change what an image is recognised to be, and most of the techniques (he takes us through different types of machine learning...

There’s a lot to like about Entanglement , though it has to be read with a few reservations, which I will come back to. In this first novel by Andrew Thomas, we have a humorous science fiction thriller, with a love story or two thrown in. A top-secret government research station in the Scottish highlands disappears, a colony of moles are mysteriously transported from Cambridgeshire to Lundy Island, and a brick starts behaving very strangely. The main thread of the story is interspersed with the story of another character who repeatedly finds herself in parallel worlds - initially terrifying, over the years it becomes a way of life. Thomas has some really clever ideas and pulls them together in an unexpected way that echoes the book’s title. Although what happens is downright weird, sometimes feeling closer to fantasy than SF, Thomas grounds what is happening in some of the more outré aspects of quantum physics. I found myself wanting to read on to discover how it would all tu...

At one point I went through a phase of reading some of Pevsner's Buildings of England books from end to end. It was a bit of a slog, but I felt it was worth it for the insights I gained. This feeling came back a little with Sarah Dry's study of the 'strange and true odyssey of Isaac Newton's manuscripts.' I could not, in all honesty, give it more than three stars for readability, but I felt I got a lot out of it. Newton left millions of words in piles of unstructured documents, covering science, maths, alchemy, theology and the business of the Royal Mint. Now we would expect such documents to end up in some sort of archive, but in Newton's day there was far less regard for such rough and 'foul' documents. To make matters worse, Newton was destined for scientific sainthood, and the amount of effort he put into the more dubious aspects of alchemy and virtually heretical theology was of distinct concern to those who wanted to preserve this illusion...