Skip to main content

How to alienate a chunk of your readership

I've read one of Hugh Aldersey-Williams books, and enjoyed Periodic Tales, and the Popular Science Anatomies, but I hadn't come across his 2015 title The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century and when coming across its existence in an interview with Aldersey-Williams in the Guardian, I was thinking about paying money to get hold of a copy, but then I came to this rather remarkable paragraph:
site has reviewed another,
While The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century was much praised, Aldersey-Williams now feels its message was missed by readers of popular science. “There’s no point in making ultra-subtle points about how science is done,” he says. “You have to bang them over the head with it. They want scientific facts and they want science explained to them, which I’m less and less interested in.”
Frankly, I think that is profoundly condescending and insulting to the readers of popular science. The best popular science writing manages to give the reader both context and the science - Aldersey-Williams has never been particularly strong on the science, but because he finds science difficult to write about doesn't mean he should take it out on his readers. I think I will be giving his books a miss from now on.

UPDATE - after the author pointed out this was something of a petty response I have read and reviewed his book on Browne.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Unknown23 June 2016 at 10:00

    You do so well in communicating difficult concepts to your readers, that's terrible a popular science author has that attitude.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...
122 comments
Read more

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why backgammon is a better game than chess

I freely admit that chess, for those who enjoy it, is a wonderful game, but I honestly believe that as a game , backgammon is better (and this isn't just because I'm a lot better at playing backgammon than chess). Having relatively recently written a book on game theory, I have given quite a lot of thought to the nature of games, and from that I'd say that chess has two significant weaknesses compared with backgammon. One is the lack of randomness. Because backgammon includes the roll of the dice, it introduces a random factor into the play. Of course, a game that is totally random provides very little enjoyment. Tossing a coin isn't at all entertaining. But the clever thing about backgammon is that the randomness is contributory without dominating - there is still plenty of room for skill (apart from very flukey dice throws, I can always be beaten by a really good backgammon player), but the introduction of a random factor makes it more life-like, with more of a sense...
6 comments
Read more