This latest book from the master of intellectual science fiction, Adam Roberts, is a mind-bending delight - and nothing like the combination of the title and the cover suggests (yet even this deception is not entirely straightforward). Anyone versed in the genre would instantly make the leap, with the combination of 'The Thing' and a polar setting, to the classic science fiction film The Thing - and indeed Roberts does make a passing bow to this in the opening of the book. However, the monster in the movie is about as crude as they come - here, what we experience as alien is both horrible and transfigured as a possible reality for the concept of god. Another classic theme we meet in the book is SETI - the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - but, once again, Roberts subverts the standard genre concepts. Here what is alien is not just not-human, but involves a different perception of the universe itself. The way that Roberts makes this near-impossible portrayal ...

If you don't enjoy book reviews, I must apologise: as I work through my Christmas gift pile there will be quite a few. I am a huge fan of Bill Bryson, so his new tour of Britain, The Road to Little Dribbling was an essential for me. I absolutely loved the way he gave an outsider's view to both delight in and be infuriated by Britain in his original Notes from a Small Island , and I expected more of the same. And to a degree I got them. As usual with a Bryson book there is a mix of anecdotes, fascinating factoids and shrewd observations. I must admit these days I'm a little more suspicious of his content after reading he does fabricate a tad, and certainly his factoids are occasionally a little adrift from reality, but on the whole he knows his stuff, and this is the kind of book it's very difficult to resist reading out little snippets to friends and relations as you go. (In fact, I didn't resist.) Bryson manages once more to entertain most of the way, with a...

It's that time of year when no one can be bothered to do any real work. So here's a few little Christmas challenges for you. Answers down the bottom. 1. Which well-known Christmas song is almost always performed as just the chorus without the less familiar first verse starting like this: 2. Just mixing up my imp nieces? What Christmas delicacy am I cooking? 3. The Twelve days of Christmas song has 11 what? 4. Which Christmassy Poirot story by Agatha Christie is set in the fourteenth century manor house Kings Lacey (bizarrely made a 1920s building in the TV version)? 5. Ilex and Hedera. Not two rejected reindeer but...? No Googling, please - all your own work. While you get your answers together, the ad break... / / / / If you enjoy a little mental quizzing, there's only one book to get your hands on this Christmas: / / / / And here come the answers: 1. White Christmas 2. Mince pies 3. Pipers piping 4. The Adventure of the Ch...

If you are panicking about last minutes presents, I can (in an entirely unbiased way) heartily recommend my bargain priced science quiz book How Many Moons Does the Earth Have?  You can get it at book stores, Amazon.co.uk and (with free worldwide delivery) Book Depository . But there has been a certain amount of confusion about what's actually in it. The book is divided into two 'quizzes' - each has six rounds of eight questions, plus two special rounds with things like pictures questions and puzzles. So you could use it in a traditional pub quiz format. But the main intention is just to read through and enjoy testing yourself, so it's much more than just a collection of questions and answers. It's probably best if I come up with a specific example, and as an anonymous commenter berated me about doing a Santa-related post yesterday, I know exactly which one to give. A question page looks like this, with the question itself and a few 'while you're ...

I was impressed to read some impressively logical thinking about movies featuring Santa Claus / Father Christmas the other day. You know the kind of film I mean. Those like Elf and The Santa Clause , where cynical adults who don't believe in the jolly rotund fellow get their come-uppance. There's a distinct logical flaw in these movies. Before I disclose the gaping hole, I need to address an obvious objection to my endeavour. Surely to worry about logic in a merry seasonal fantasy misses the point? However, I've always argued that, while fantasy can clearly change whatever rules it likes, once the nature of the fantasy world is established, it should be logically consistent. This is why I don't have trouble with vampires and werwolves and slayers and magic in Buffy the Vampire Slayer , because that is the part of the rules of the world. But I do have a bit of an issue when a hobbyist manages to come up with a robot that is all but indistinguishable from a human bei...

If you have managed to avoid the Star Wars hype so far, you live in a concrete bunker, and only read this blog when someone pushes a printed copy under your door. I couldn't even escape it on the train to Bristol this morning, as one of my fellow passengers had a ringtone of the Star Wars theme and a text message alert of R2D2 blurping. The novelty value soon wore thin. Don't get me wrong. I absolutely loved the original Star Wars film. I saw it three times and even got an abridged version of the first act on 8mm film (no, we didn't have DVDs back then). My favourite computer games ever were those in the X-Wing series. However, I am convinced part of the reason the movie was so good was that, like most science fiction fans, I went along to see it with almost zero expectations. I knew it was going to be Saturday Morning Cinema, 1920s space opera schlock. And it was - but what took me by surprise was that it was absolute brilliant Saturday Morning Cinema, 1920s space oper...

I do like something irritating to wake my brain up on a Monday morning, and today the best newspaper in the UK (genuinely), the i , managed to do this with a double whammy. They ran a story in which the only 'news' was that an astronaut's dad had said something stupid, and then had the nerve to label the story 'science'. The entire basis for the story was a comment from the father of British astronaut-to-be, Tim Peake. His father, Nigel, is quoted as saying 'I'm more worried about him driving home on the M27. That's far more dangerous, believe me, than going up there.' So, in what sense is this news or science? The only vaguely scientific thing in the story was the extreme misuse of statistics, which we'll examine in a moment, and though I'd rather we had astronauts in the news than X-Factor winners (I'm pleased to say that I neither know nor care who won), I really have very little interest in Nigel. I'm sorry Nigel, but I d...

Car engines could be a lot better than they currently are. This is not some oil industry conspiracy, but a simple reflection that the design is pretty creaky. It has been around a long while. And, of course, cars are currently about as green as something that isn't very green at all. It's remarkable that the internal combustion engine, the heart of travel industry still, is so impressively inefficient. Around 25% of the energy generated from the fuel is actually used to move the car. Eventually I have no doubt we'll all be driving electric cars - we're just waiting for a shift in battery technology that seems pretty close on the horizon. (If I had the money, I'd be driving a Tesla right now.) But there are bound to be decades of gradual transition when we still need to make use of fossil fuels. I've had pointed out this remarkable project to produce an engine that should increase efficiency of an internal combustion engine more than twofold. It's a t...

Poster for one of my top 10 ten influential SF movies  (Image from Wikipedia ) As a result of the recent publication of Ten Billion Tomorrows , examining the interplay between science and science fiction, I recently did an article with Business Insider on what I consider to be the ten most influential movies. I'm not going to list them here - you can find out in Business Insider 's fun article ,  but I did think it worth mentioning the way that I selected them. It all depends, of course, on what you mean by 'influential.' If, for example, you meant 'shaping the way Hollywood viewed science fiction', then I would have to have included Star Wars , which dragged SF kicking and screaming out of the B movie slot. But instead I was looking at movies that were (or will be - two were from 2015) influential on individuals to take an interest in science or become scientists. This explains two woeful omissions, if I had been attempting just a 'best science ...

Rather embarrassingly, two books I have been involved with are published today. The first is Ten Billion Tomorrows . Like many people involved with science I was (and am still to some extent) an enthusiastic reader of science fiction as a teenager. In this book I explore the relationship between science and science fiction. It's not always what we expect. Clearly science fiction is inspired by science, the clue's in the name - but what happens the other way round? There's a tendency to think of science fiction as predicting the future, at which it is, frankly, very bad. The vast majority of 'predictions' from science fiction, even from impeccable sources like 2001 a Space Odyssey have had a terrible hit rate. Luckily, though, that's not what it's really about. Science fiction uses the threats, challenges and experiences generated by science and technology to ask 'What If?' - to see how humans react in the face of those provocations. That being th...

Anyone who has had young daughters will know that the chances of them going through a pink-loving phase are pretty strong. It may be purely a matter of peer pressure, but those horrible Barbie pinks are likely to become part of your life. We'll come back to this preference, but the reason I bring this up is a result of thinking about gender preference for scientific subjects.  I think I am right in saying without checking (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong) that biological sciences have more female than male undergraduates and postgrads, where the reverse is true of physics. There's a lot of debate as to why this happens. Neither subject, of course, is exclusive. I know plenty of male biologists and female physicists. But there is a bias. This was echoed by the general public according to a recent YouGov survey , which asked the oddly worded question: One hundred years ago, on November 25th 1915, Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity...

I have a horrible feeling there will be plenty of younger science fiction readers for whom the names of Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth mean nothing, but for those of us of a certain age they are among the greats. I've just re-read this classic title, Gladiator-at-Law. It's over sixty years old (I see on Amazon.com you can buy the June 1954 Galaxy Magazine part of it first appeared in), and yet apart from a few niggling details, it is as fresh as ever. This bread and circuses dystopia, with an early focus on the dangers of corporations and lawyers having too much power is superbly crafted. It's a page turner, but thoughtful as well. Those niggles? There are inevitably technology flaws - in this case, most notably the use of microfilm to store data. And, as is common for writing of the period, the female characters mostly fit within limited stereotypes (although some of the younger female characters are pretty violent). While you can argue also with aspects of the ...

If you've read a fair number of my blog posts, you'll be aware that I am always a little suspicious of statistics used in the news, and I think it's worth regularly digging a little deeper to see what lies beneath those numbers, and whether they really tell us what the media say they do. A little over a week ago, there was a fair amount of coverage to say that for the first time, possibly influenced by the Paris attacks a few days before, there was a majority of voters in the UK in favour of leaving the EU. But was that really true? After a bit of digging (none of the newspaper reports I looked at had a link to the data) I found the results from the ORB International survey . (It's on page 8, as this is a summary of a range of surveys.) The survey was of 2067 people and, indeed, 52% were in favour of leaving over 48% against. But there are two issues here. Can we be sure that such a tight margin is representative when we blow that 2067 up to the 45 million or so vot...

A recent piece in the Economist proudly proclaims The Real Future of Electronic Literature . I read this and groaned. I have read so many times how the electronic platform will allow a transformation of literature - yet there is a very good reason that most of these forms drop by the wayside. They are novelties that aren't as good as just reading a boring old book, whether in paper format or as an ebook. As the Economist piece points out, modern story-led video games are the closest we have to a true electronic book that truly makes use of what the medium can offer. And, of course, they have been a huge success. But they are very different beasts in terms of the investment required to produce them than is a novel. In fact, they are probably closer related to that other alternative medium form, the movie. And just like movies, games will always be relatively small in number and no challenge to the written word because the market is so different. The Economist article is partia...

I gather from the excellent i newspaper that this has not been a good year for [book] publishers, with 128 going out of business compared with 81 the previous year. I assume these are mostly smaller outfits. The article blames the rise in use of ebooks, with failing publishers struggling to make books available in this format. This is both sad and baffling. I have been published by both large and middle-sized publishers and in my experience the smaller companies are much lighter on their feet and able to quickly adapt to new opportunities like ebooks.  Admittedly, the chances are many of the failed companies were one person and a dog publishers, rather than mid-sized operations, but I'm amazed that these days, when ebook publishing is so much easier than it was even 5 years ago that the failed companies weren't on top of the state of today's publishing. I do wonder if it could be that too many of them were rather prissy about ebooks as somehow inferior to the pri...

This is the time of year when many of us are looking for good presents for those difficult-to-buy-for people. I have done my bit for this cause with the science quiz book How Many Moons Does the Earth Have (traditional shameless plug), but even I, through gritted teeth, have to admit that not everyone would greet a science book in their stocking with a cheery smile. And if that's the case, you are recommended to get hold of The Homecraft Book by Ann Hathaway. In case there's a suspicion that the Hollywood actress is following her colleague Ms Paltrow into telling us how to run our lives, this was the pseudonym of an Irish writer of home tips. Written at the end of the Second World War, the book has been edited by the author's grandson, who has the even more unlikely pseudonym of Thaddeus Lovecraft.  The reader knows that there is a fun trip ahead when seeing the 'mostly non-lethal advice' comment on the cover, reinforced by being informed that we won...

I am, as I not infrequently do, feeling rather sorry for the Church of England. This most inoffensive of religious organisations is being lambasted by certain parts of the media and by atheist bloggers for an attempt to place an advert in cinemas alongside the showing of Star Wars this Christmas. Now I confess that my knee-jerk reaction was much the same as those who want the ad not to be shown. It didn't seem quite right as not everyone in the audience would appreciate it. To quote a spokesperson for the company responsible for the advertising, Digital Cinema Media: 'Some advertising - unintentionally or otherwise - could cause offence to those of differing political persuasions, as well as to those of differing faith and indeed no faith at all.' However. When I actually think about this action rationally, I am less happy with the decision. First of all, I am never comfortable with any curtailment of free speech, unless said speech is inciting a crime. Too many pe...

No, I haven't got delusions of grandeur - the master in question isn't me. However, I do quite often get asked for writing hints and tips, and I think there can be no better example to point an enquirer to for fiction guidance than Joss Whedon. If you were expecting Steinbeck or Proust or Shakespeare, you might not know who Whedon is. His first big success was as a writer on Toy Story , and he's now involved in the Avengers series of films, but his personal masterpieces, to my mind, were a set of TV shows, including Firefly, Angel, Dollhouse and, most notably, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I can almost feel those with literary inclinations fainting with shock. How can real writers who pour their soul into books learn anything from a screenwriter? And you may well also be writhing at the mere title of the show, but anyone familiar with Buffy will tell you that this programme was far more than the name suggests. I am sad for a new generation coming up who may never wat...

 I've heard about a new project from Germany, aiming to make physics more approachable. With a background in natural sciences and industry, Ottmar Koegel works to support foundation issues in teaching science in Germany: Pumping Physics is his baby. His idea was to pick up on the kind of exercise-based learning that is found in musical instrument training, making the educational side more fun with a mix of illustrations and real-world scenarios, providing straightforward multiple choice questions to test and learn. At the moment there is no English version, but for English readers, here's a taster (the translation is not a polished one). More importantly, for any German readers, you can find out more about the book and see some of the actual examples at the Pumping Physics website . I don't think this kind of approach is ideal for a popular science audience - I admit, the English example above was one of the less technical, but some of the questions do expect the...

Many people have changed their Facebook image to incorporate a French flag, in solidarity with the French nation over the atrocities in Paris last week. I certainly don't think we should be critical of people who haven't - I haven't, for one. There are a number of reasons for not doing so, but one objection that I think is suspect is the kind made in  this article by Nathalie Bonney on the Good Housekeeping website. The broad argument is that to show solidarity with the French this way is parochial. There have been thousands of people killed by terrorists this year, and yet no one is putting up flags of other locations. (Actually, not no one - one of my Facebook friends has made his own Lebanese flag cover for his Facebook photo.) I have two problems with this complaint. One is that it seems petty to discourage someone from doing something positive for one group because they aren't doing something positive for another. It's a bit like saying 'I would nev...

An office chair, today Many years ago, when I worked for a large airline with the initials BA, I had a back problem, which due to some problems pinning down exactly where the physical sensations were coming from led to a fairly unpleasant time. (Suffice to say that it was only diagnosed as a back problem after I had been asked to attend an STD clinic.) With some excellent exercises from a physiotherapist, the most embarrassing of which appears in my murder mystery novel A Lonely Height (great Christmas gift - shameless plug), the back pains came under control, and disappeared altogether many years ago. Now the pains are back, if you'll pardon the circular expression. And I think I know why. Ever since I started working for myself I've had a good quality office chair (I think I'm on my third now) with effective lumbar support. Even though I can often spend most of my working day at the computer - with frequent breaks, of course - I never have back problems. Howev...

Not long ago I reported on a piece in the Metro paper claiming that a 'maths theorem could pave the way for installer travel.' I was delighted to receive an email from one of the paper's young authors, Ivan Zelich, pointing out that the media had distorted his message. The Metro carried a quote from Zelich that read  'The theorem will contribute to our understanding of intergalactic travel because string theory predicts existence shortcuts in space, or so-called "wormholes" to cut through space.' However, I'm told that this 'quote' was never said.  Zelich pointed out ' I actually meant the following, and you will understand how it could be misinterpreted': The main lemma we developed to prove our theorem was highly projective in nature, which indicates to us that it could be generalised to possible more complex structures in high dimensional projective spaces. Since we are talking about applications, I would like t...

Mmmm! Dice World! I've just come across this short video that intercuts an interview I did on the book Dice World with a few remarks from one of my talks on it. The filmmaker seemed to take to heart the idea that Dice World is all about randomness by randomly inserting odd little asides. I can't decide if it's clever or just bonkers...

I have the perfect upbringing to wear a white poppy today. My father was a Manchester Guardian reader who encouraged a healthy distrust of the establishment and had little time for the military. None of my friends or blood relations served in the armed forces - you have to go back to the First World War to find any relatives who did. Yet I always wear a red poppy. I understand where the supporters of the white poppy are coming from, and I absolutely support their right to wear it, but I think they miss the point. You can't re-write history, and it doesn't make sense to throw away the symbolism of the red poppy. If you are aware of its conceptual origins you know that it has nothing to do with triumphant militarism and everything to do with a tragic human sacrifice, even if that sacrifice has sometimes (if certainty not always) been justified. If I am honest, I'd much rather the poppy, as a symbol of remembrance, were separated from the Royal British Legion, an orga...

A lot of physicists like to say that time doesn't exist. This is, to be honest, showing off, and they don't really believe it. (If they insist they do, wait until dinner time and see how they react to not being fed because dinner time doesn't exist.) However they have a number of different arguments to support their claim, one of which is that many physical processes are totally reversible as far as time is concerned, showing no interest in the 'arrow of time.' A classic example of this is a pair of pool balls which head towards each other, collide and bounce off each other. They will point out that if you run a video of the event in reverse, it is indistinguishable from the video shown running forward. The direction of time is irrelevent. However, in making this assertion they are cheating, both subtly and in a very big way. The subtle cheat is one that they will admit, but get around. You can point out that in traversing the pool table and in hitting each ot...