In the old days books were described as 'X meets Y', while more recently it's the fans who get the mention - in this case 'perfect for fans of Orphan Black, Killing Eve and Keeping it Real ' though we also get in the title tag ' Blade Runner meets Barbie '. There's an element of truth in most of these, but Maud Woolf has nonetheless pulled off an entertaining and different novel. Lulabelle Rock is a film star who over the years has accumulated 12 Portraits - these are not human (so not clones as they are described in the blurb), but are replicas, pretty well only distinguishable by not having palm prints or the usual stuff inside their body. The idea is that the Portraits can be used to do boring tasks that Lulabelle can't be bothered with, from social media to guest appearances. But for whatever reason she has create a thirteenth Portrait, the first person narrator of the book, who is given the task of decommissioning all the rest. (If a human did...

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can  circumvent human in...

The sub-genre of alternate history has always felt an uncomfortable fit with science fiction - but where else are you going to put it? Two of my favourite classics of the genre both posit a modern England where the Reformation didn't happen and the Catholic Church is still a powerful force. I've already reviewed The Alteration by Kingsley Amis, but I've now re-read Keith Roberts' 1968 classic Pavane . Though usually described as a novel, this is really a linked set of short novellas, featuring an 1960s Britain that follows on from Queen Elizabeth I being assassinated, resulting in a clamping down of Catholicism that also has ended with an iron grip across half the world. The novellas present (mostly) charming snapshots of a rural, low-tech England where steam traction engines pull trains of wagons across the country, long distance communication is largely by semaphore towers and monks work on lithographic printing presses. Roberts does a wonderful job of giving us the ...

The central thesis presented by Roopika Risam is that information gives us (and particularly countries) the power to organise, control and dominate others. Although I have a couple of issues with the presentation, this is a genuinely interesting trip through the history of our use of stored information from the earliest tallies to the latest information technology. I loved a quote from Lisa Gitelman that data is is always 'cooked' so 'raw data is an oxymoron'. This neatly underlines Risam's thesis that data and information are not neutral facts, but rather tools that (like everything from fire to electronics) can be used for good or evil. As we are taken through the historical context, it can sometimes be a little difficult to judge whether Risam regards a particular example as bad or good, even when the outcome is disastrous. One thing I didn't like too much is the adherence to a popular science writing approach that has got distinctly hackneyed: opening chapte...

Remarkably for those who came across it in the early days, this classic of popular science writing is now 50 years old - and like many of us who reach a certain age it has become somewhat overweight: a reasonable sized paperback has morphed into a 500-page monster. Even so, we have to recognise the importance of the book, despite its message not being as clear as it once was. One major change is that Dawkins, with his God Delusion hat on, was once the hero of the provisional wing of the progressive movement, where now he has been pushed aside for daring to suggest that there are only two sexes. The other change, of course, is that the science has moved on and some of the genetics certainties of Dawkins' day have reached the scientific stage of 'it's more complicated than we thought.' In a couple of chapters that weren't in the original book and about 120 pages of discursive end notes and an epilogue, Dawkins attempts to clarify some scientific developments and to ...

Reading Victorian fiction can be difficult without context - in some cases, an annotated version can work wonders. The best remains Martin Gardner's wonderful annotation of the Alice books and The Hunting of the Snark , but while the annotation of Jules Verne's moonshot tale lacks Gardner's light touch it still delivers plenty of useful background. I started devouring science fiction when I was around 11 and worked my way through both Verne and H. G. Wells alongside more contemporary books. I found Verne stodgy and slow compared with the dramatic power of War of the Worlds or the humour of The First Men in the Moon , but it was still interesting, and Walter James Miller's 1995 translation works better than the version I came across way back then. What I doubt pre-teen me picked up was the way Verne pokes fun at America where the book is set, though even then I was doubtful about the concept of sending men to the Moon in a projectile from a huge cannon. Surely, I though...

If there was an A to Z of SF greats, while even younger science fiction readers could probably come up with A for Asimov, far fewer are likely to make Z for Zelazny - which is a shame. Unusually, Zelazny spanned science fiction and fantasy - although a touch pulpy, his Princes in Amber series of books were a genuinely different fantasy series - but he was also, without doubt one of the leading SF writers of the twentieth century. Here we get collected what should be some of his greatest short stories and novellas, starting with the classic and poignant A Rose for Ecclesiastes. For some reason in the intro we are told about a story that's not included that should be - 24 Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai - why isn't it here, then? In some ways, the experience of reading the book was a disappointment, because I think I prefer the lowbrow version of Zelazny's writing in those Amber books, rather than his new wave, more intellectual work, which mostly features here. I did enjoy...

It can be difficult to come up with a new and different way to look at basic science - but Trisha Muro manages this by using the applications of a whole list of satellites and probes to illustrate basics of physics. This could have got messy, but Muro keeps the reader on an even keel as we travel from topic to topic.  Sometimes the spaceflight missions are fairly obscure - readers may not have come across, for instance, the very first mentioned (TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which is linked into the geometry of orbits. I thought this would be one of the weaker points, as exoplanets didn't strike me as a great link into the topic of orbits, but it worked surprisingly well. Others include the familiar favourites from the James Webb Space Telescope to the Voyager probe. Mostly the topics are managed without much dipping into mathematics - the odd equation, but nothing scary. There are two 'interludes' that do include more mathematical physics, but there...

There have been plenty of good books on black holes, such as Marcus Chown's A Crack in Everything but it's a subject that will always benefit from a different take, and Jonas Enander manages to bring in some new viewpoints as well as exploring the basics of the concept well. After a journey into a black hole described (with the observer's inevitable destruction), we jump back to Michell's dark stars, then start to get the theoretical basis from Einstein and Schwarzschild alongside observational work. This starts, interestingly, with supermassive black holes before getting onto the common or garden variety. Enander's writing style is light and conversational - no danger here of being overwhelmed with technicalities. It's good, readable stuff. In some ways the most interesting part of the book is the final section that addresses the subtitle 'black holes and our place on Earth'. This (admittedly sometimes at quite a stretch) tries to link the study of bla...