Popular Science Books
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
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 direTheodore 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 actu...| Popular Science Books
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 ha...| Popular Science Books
Apparently the biogeochemist (who even knew there was such a thing) Karsten Pedersen 'coined the term "intraterrestrials" to describe the ab...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Having recently been hugely impressed by Machine Vendetta , the closing part of Alastair Reynolds' Prefect Dreyfus trilogy, I was delighted ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
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 yea...| Popular Science Books
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 ...| Popular Science Books
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 y...| Popular Science Books
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 Cos...| Popular Science Books
I’ll get onto the details of this specific book a bit further down, but first it’s worth taking a more general look at the series of which it’s the latest instalment. Coming from Reaktion Books, the series is called Kosmos and several of the previous titles have already been reviewed on this site – on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and Asteroids. Looking back at those reviews, there’s a clear common theme. They’re all nice-looking, lavishly illustrated books th...| Popular Science Books
Anne Toomey is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Science at Pace University in New York City. Her research explores how science can be applied to solve real-world environmental and policy challenges and she is the author of the award-winning 2024 book Science with Impact: How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy. Anne holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from Lancaster University, a dual M.A. in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development from American Unive...| Popular Science Books
As the title suggests, this new book from Kate Kelly is a kind of mirror-image counterpart to her earlier novel, The Arid Lands , from 2023....| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
If I'm honest, I assumed this would be another 'oh dear, we're horrible people who are terrible to the environment', worthily dull title - so I was surprised to be gripped from early on. The subject of the first chunk of the book is one man, Tim Searchinger's fight to take on the bizarrely unscientific assumption that held sway that making ethanol from corn, or burning wood chips instead of coal, was good for the environment.The problem with this fallacy, which seemed to have taken in the US ...| Popular Science Books
Dete Meserve structures her novel around four characters, each getting their own chapter in rotation until storylines start to cross. This is a difficult approach to engage with, as after the first four chapters it's hard to have any connection to a character, but in the context of the storyline it makes sense, and after a while everything does start to fit into place.Each of our four is making a journey back in time using new technology developed by Californian startup Aeon Expeditions (foun...| Popular Science Books
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 def...| Popular Science Books
Mark Gomes is a writer and tech executive who uses fiction to ask the questions our systems won’t. His latest novel, Age of Extinction, explores AI as a man-made extinction event—rooted not in rogue machines, but in profit-driven logic. At its core is The Equation—a simple but urgent framework for understanding what it takes for humanity to survive. He’s also the author of The Heavy Butterfly, a work of mystical realism that uses quantum theory and surreal imagery to explore consciou...| Popular Science Books
In his introduction, James Kimmel tells an attention-grabbing story that surely could only have originated in America. After years of bullyi...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
On first handling John Gribbin's book, it's impossible not to think of Carlo Rovelli's Seven Brief Lessons in Physics - both are very ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
We should be truly grateful to John and Mary Gribbin for this opportunity to find out more about two stalwarts of 17th/18th century Britis...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Feynman is a personal hero of mine and I have made it something of a mission in life to consume all the books, audiobooks, videos, p...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There is always a significant danger when a member of the literari takes on a science fiction theme - the result can easily seem derivative ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is by no means a jolly read - with vivid stories, Liz Kalaugher takes us into the world of zoonotic diseases, both where humans are infected by largely wild animal diseases and where we spread disease among other species.The book voyages around the world and into the prehistoric past (entertainingly in a chapter that begins at Bristol bus station, the way all prehistory stories probably should), suggesting that perhaps the Neanderthals were wiped out by a lack of disease resistance. Kala...| Popular Science Books
Summer is the ideal time to take a dive into popular science - until 18 August 2025 there is 50% off all Brian Clegg signed books, as long as the total price of the book(s) before discount is over £5. | Popular Science Books
If we are to believe the media we are bombarded with misinformation and disinformation - there's certainly a lot of it out there and Alex Edmans sets out to give a guide to the many ways that information can be badly or misleadingly presented, and how we can defend ourselves from it.At the heart of his argument are two biases. I'm so glad he limits it to two - I get totally lost trying to keep on top of all the biases that psychologists introduce, so sticking to confirmation bias plus black a...| Popular Science Books
Niayesh Afshordi (left) is professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and associate faculty at the P...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Athene Donald is Professor Emerita in Experimental Physics and Master of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Other than four years p...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
One of my favourite illustrations from a science title was in Fred Hoyle's book on his quasi-steady state theory. It shows a large flock of...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I've a huge amount of time for Peter Forbes as a writer. Both his The Gecko's Foot on the science behind some of nature's most remarkable abilities and Dazzled and Deceived on mimicry and camouflage in nature and human endeavour were brilliant. But I'm afraid I found it harder to engage with Thinking Small and Large. There's plenty of good stuff in it, but it didn't grab me in the same way.The topic here is the fundamental importance of microbes to life on Earth. By microbes, he is referring ...| Popular Science Books
It may be a cliché that many scientists are bad communicators - but that doesn't make it untrue. All too often, scientists either don't want to communicate outside their own circle, or are very bad at it - but the reality is, both from a funding viewpoint and to make sure science has a positive impact (a keyword in Anne Helen Toomey's assessment of how scientists should look at their communication) we need scientists to be better at engagement.The opening of the book leans quite heavily on S...| Popular Science Books
I'm giving this dive into a dystopian AI-dominated future four stars despite some significant flaws because I enjoyed it. Mark Gomes likens the impact of AI on humanity over the next few years to one of the palaeological mass extinctions, though in this case potentially destroying a single species - us. Set in the present and near future, we see the AI-driven technology of billionaire Nolan Scent (a musky scent, I suspect) beginning to take away the majority of jobs that aren't manual labour,...| Popular Science Books
Joe Tidy is the BBC’s first Cyber Correspondent and the author of Ctrl+ Alt+ Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet. Joe has built a reputation for investigating the darker sides of the internet and how technology affects the way people live. He is known for tracking down and speaking directly to hackers and criminals who are responsible for some of the biggest cyber incidents of recent times. His top six BBC News documentaries, including The Teenage Millionaire Hacker and The Russi...| Popular Science Books
It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it g...| Popular Science Books
At first glance at the title you might assume that this book is another Oppenheimer biography - and of course he features - but it's far mor...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I've come back to this book after a couple of decades and it still holds up well as one of the two great alternative history books where the...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Wow. This is quite simply the best biology book I've ever read. At its heart are two essentials: one is the science mantra 'It's more comple...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The popular science and science fiction book review site| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
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 ve...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This 2024 novel is the first of Adrian Tchaikovsky's books I've read - I can certainly see what the fuss is about, though there were a coupl...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Networks are of huge significance to life and technology, so it was refreshing to read a popular maths title on the subject. I was a little ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
As a big fan of Alastair Reynolds’ Prefect Dreyfus books I have struggled with some of his earlier novels set in the same universe, and was ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Govert Schilling is an acclaimed and prize-winning freelance astronomy writer and broadcaster in the Netherlands. His articles appear in Dut...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's a real shortage of popular chemistry titles, which made this book seem very appealing, but unfortunately that's not what it is. Ther...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Usually a mystery novel is based on a straightforward puzzle - whodunnit (or occasionally howdunnit). But now and again you get a mystery th...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
A classic curate's egg of a book. Some aspects of it are brilliant, but there is enough that isn't to make it frustrating. Wisely, Oliver Jo...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This was a difficult review to write. The idea is a good one - sixteen innovative scientists whose ideas were first doubted but came to be m...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I was biased in favour of this great little book even before I started to read it, simply because it’s so short. I’m sure that a lot of peop...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Kevin Mitchell is a graduate of the Genetics Department, Trinity College Dublin and received his PhD from the University of California at Be...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Although they are often bracketed together, 'nature' and 'science' are only loosely related topics. Sönke Johnsen's look at life in the open...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Mary and John Gribbin are bestselling authors and science writers. As a pair, they have written several science books, including Being Human...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is a weird one with a capital W. It really is about auras - or should that be aurae? (The plural surely isn't 'aura' as the title seem...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It feels as if there have been way too many SF books about humanoid robots with artificial general intelligence set in the near future, beca...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Free will is one of those subjects that you have to be brave to take on: Kevin Mitchell makes an impressive job of defending a concept that ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic to...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This seemed to be a book that had a lot going for it. The topic of 'the science of certainty' appealed to a reader like me who is fascinated...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This wasn't the book I expected it to be from the subtitle 'exploring classic Sci-Fi stories through the lens of modern science'. For me, to...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that th...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is an extremely engaging read on a subject that everyone is aware of, but few of us know much detail about. Usually, if I'm honest, geo...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
For a particular audience, this is an interesting book. Specifically, popular science readers who want to get their hands a little dirty - t...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science t...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I'm reviewing this book at the suggestion of one of my Buy me a Coffee supporters. I put off reading it for quite a while due to a perverse...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I am always a bit suspicious of books that are highly illustrated or claim to cover 'almost everything' - and in one sense this is clearly h...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Jason Steffen is associate professor of physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A longtime science team member of NASA’s Kepler miss...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Having recently looked into the way we use story to inform, influence and manipulate others , I was interested to see how Mara Einstein woul...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Bruce Sterling is one of the key figures from the cyberpunk phase of SF. In a way, that term is misleading - unlike punk music, cyberpunk is...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This introduction to the relatively short-lasting Kepler space telescope's search for exoplanets from a researcher on the team opens with th...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There are many interpretations of the word 'classic' - in the context of science fiction many would assume this referred to the 'golden age'...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I was surprised recently by something Simon Singh put on X about Sabine Hossenfelder. I have huge admiration for Simon, but I also have a lo...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is an odd one. I'm reviewing it because it's science fiction, but while it is very weak as an SF novel, if you totally ignore the techn...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Every author is allowed a title that isn't up to their usual quality, and for me this book is a low point in the output of the usually relia...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Brian Clegg's Brainjacking is a captivating exploration of the subtle and pervasive ways our minds are manipulated in today’s world, offeri...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
I very much enjoyed Lucy Jane Santos' previous title Half Lives , which covered 'the unlikely history of radium'. Her enthusiasm for the top...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's been something of a trend for 'big picture' books that trace a feature of life, the universe or whatever from billions of years ago ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is long-time Mars enthusiast Robert Zubrin's paean to the red planet. It's fascinating in two ways. One is the detail of what it would ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Shannon Vallor is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Philosophy at the Uni...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Every now and then we get a graphic novel designed to put across some aspect of science and technology while simultaneously entertaining the...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Two of the best ever fantasy writers - Alan Garner and Gene Wolfe - both wrote books that over the years got more sophisticated and harder t...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It's not often you start reading a book and within a few pages are thinking 'this is something special.' Peter Lamont writes with a distinct...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Neil Lawrence is the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge where he leads the university-wide initiative on ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's no doubt that Matt Parker can make practically anything interesting - this is one of the few books I've ever read where I genuinely ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Some titles tell you nothing about the book itself - but The AI Mirror puts Shannon Vallor's central argument front and centre: that artifi...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Popular mathematics can be hard to make engaging. Though some topics (such as infinity or zero) can be made interesting in isolation, usuall...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is a real curate’s egg of a book. Let’s start with the title - it feels totally wrong for what the book’s about. ‘The Atomic Human’ con...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Defining science fiction is tricky. The most obvious way this interesting novel is SF is the catchall ‘it’s by an SF author’, which is why I...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Harry Cliff is a particle physicist at the University of Cambridge working on the LHCb experiment, a huge particle detector buried 100 metre...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
Sadly deceased in 2023, Karen Bakker combined geographical, environmental and technology interests, a crossover that she presented in her la...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
This is a remarkable book, pulling together two key threads - chaos theory and economics. Doyne Farmer has a reputation as someone who break...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
After an introduction to exoplanets - planets orbiting stars other than the Sun - Alien Earths concentrates on the theory of and the search ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known ...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I w...| popsciencebooks.blogspot.com
