I love popular science books, but it's a quiet sort of love: it's not often a book like this gets me really excited - but Meet the Neighbours (sorry, I know it's Neighbors, but it grates) does just that.  Once upon a time there was quite a market in books speculating about life on Mars, but of late most Martian titles have focused on getting to and colonising Mars (though often avoiding the 'c' word). Steven Benner drags us back to see the evidence for life having existed there, and does so with a vengeance. (Almost literally - he really lays into those who are dismissive of what evidence there is.) Do we have proof? Well, no - but proofs are for mathematicians. As Benner says 'science does not deal in proof... Rather, it relies on a 'preponderance of evidence' standard to shift the burden of proof.' Benner points out the weird reality that since the Viking landers, which arrived in the 1970s, there hasn't been a mission looking for organic sig...

The title tells you exactly what this book is about, if a little cryptically. The ‘pale blue dot’ is our own planet Earth, seen from a cosmic viewpoint – and, as far as astrobiology is concerned, it’s actually the only data point we have, counterbalancing centuries of theorising, speculation and fantasy. The book’s scope is summarised in less poetic terms in the subtitle: ‘An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life’. Over the years we’ve reviewed quite a few books about astrobiology on this site, but while many of these have made the point that useful things can be learned about the subject by studying our own planet, it’s generally only been a few tantalising comments in passing. So a whole book on this topic is long overdue and very welcome. Having been interested in space and astronomy for over 50 years now, it irritates me how some misconceptions just refuse to go away, generation after generation. One example is the notion that the Earth and space are two completely s...

Astrobiology is an unusual science in that there’s no clear, undisputed evidence that its subject of study – extraterrestrial life – even exists. It’s still an active field of research, though, with observational astronomers scouring the skies for telltale signs of life, and theoreticians tying themselves in knots trying to explain why we haven’t seen any of those signs yet. This book deals almost exclusively with the second of those topics. Before going any further, it’s worth defining exactly what we mean by ‘life’ in this context. If you’d asked Aristotle or Shakespeare or Charles Darwin to define life, they’d give pretty much the same answer, relating to biological processes. If we can’t detect such processes at a distance of many light years, that’s not really a great surprise: the latest generation of telescopes has only just got to the point where it might be possible even in principle. But many popular discussions of extraterrestrial life, this book included, aren’t talking abo...

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...

After an introduction to exoplanets - planets orbiting stars other than the Sun - Alien Earths concentrates on the theory of and the search for life on these planets. Written by astronomy professor Lisa Kaltenegger, who runs the Carl Sagan Institute for the Search for Life in the Cosmos at Cornell University, it's a gentle guide to one of the most imaginative aspects of astronomy. A fair amount of the content looks at what makes a habitable planet (which is not always an Earth-like situation), what life is and how we may be able to detect it a great distance. There are some good details here, though I would have appreciated more depth. Given this is such a speculative subject, there is also relatively little questioning of assumptions. For example, there's a description of the gold records sent out on Voyager 1 and 2, with detail of how to put a time interval across to aliens. 'The team [behind the records] solved this problem by using a time constant that any spacefaring c...

I was a bit wary when I saw this book because there seem to be almost as many books about exoplanets and astrobiology as there have been planets discovered around new stars. However, it proved a pleasant surprise, as a result of the approach that Chris Impey has taken, and I found it an enjoyable read. In four sections, Impey takes us through the search for exoplanets, the potential habitability of different worlds, from gas giants to Earth clones, what can be done to search for the existence of life in other planetary systems, and space exploration. The last section, to be honest, really is unnecessary - it's a distinctly different topic covered better in other titles, and I would have been happy to have had more on the earlier subjects. But in the first three sections, the great thing about Impey's approach is the way he drives the discoveries and ideas (there aren't, of course, any astrobiology discoveries per se as it is all theoretical so far) from the individuals invo...

This is one of those attempts we quite often see from academic sources to combine science fiction and popular science education. It's probably one of the better examples in terms of the contents, and yet as is often the case, it falls between two stools, not being ideal for either purpose. What we have is 27 SF stories, each accompanied by a science essay, inspired by the fiction - all with an astrobiology theme. Let's take the fiction first. A fair number of the stories do feel amateurish - the kind of thing scientists turn out in their spare time. Often this comes across in wooden dialogue or a lengthy series of descriptive statements from authors who've clearly not got the hang of 'show, don't tell'. There are enough good ones to make it worth reading, though - I really enjoyed Lisa Jenny Kris's Ranya's Crash (translated from German by Simone Heller), which features intelligent dragonflies, for example, while  Heavy Lies by Rich Larson was imaginati...

This is a book about extraterrestrial life, and it isn’t all science. For me, that’s what made it such a rivetingly good read, although (speaking as a former astrophysicist) I can’t imagine saying that about any other popular science subject. I’d be very dubious, for example, about a quantum physics primer that contained a detailed account of Ant-Man’s experiences in the Quantum Realm. That’s because quantum physics is real science, with real experimental results and real practical applications – and it doesn’t need a sci-fi take on it to bring it to life. Aliens aren’t like that. Yes, I know there’s a well-established branch of science called astrobiology – I’ve even written a book about it. But astrobiology deals with the search for extraterrestrial life, not the nature of extraterrestrials themselves, about which there’s no data. Books like mine are interesting for people who want to know how real scientists think and work – how they decide what sort of evidence to look for, and th...

Some might regard a 'history and analysis of American [alien] abduction claims' as more science fiction than science fact, but Nigel Watson makes a reasonable case that either the abductions are real - in which case we're talking astrobiology - or they are in the minds and imaginations of the alleged abductees, in which case it's an interesting psychological phenomenon. As someone who really enjoyed the X-Files,  it was fascinating to see how much of that TV show appears to have been based on 'real' claims. Far and above my favourite show was a season three episode called José Chung's "From Outer Space" . Not only is it extremely funny, it explores well the multiple layers of how incidents can be seen from different viewpoints in totally different and entirely contradictory ways - and this seems absolutely typical of the experts that Watson calls on (some believers, others sceptics) in looking at how abductions have been handled. The backbone ...

From the book’s enticing subtitle, ‘The Greatest Scientific Detective Story of All Time’, I was expecting something rather different. I thought the authors would kick off by introducing the suspects (the various forms life might take on Mars, either now or in the past) and the kind of telltale traces they might leave, followed by a chronological account of the detectives (i.e. scientists) searching for those traces, ruling out certain suspects and focusing on others, turning up unexpected new clues, and so on. But the book is nothing like that. Continuing with the fiction analogy, this isn’t a novel so much as a collection of short stories – eleven self-contained chapters, each with its own set of protagonists, suspects and clues. Some of the chapters work better than others. I found the first three – which despite their early placement cover NASA’s most recent Mars missions – the most irritating. For one thing, they unfold in a way that’s at odds with the cerebral ‘detective story...