Around Christmas, a good murder mystery goes down well - and all the better if it's set at Christmas time. I've got mixed feelings about this one. It's an entertaining premise - various family members stuck in a country house, with a clue to solve on each of the twelve days of Christmas. The winner of each gets a key, one of which will take them to a secret room where they can claim the title deeds of the house. And the book is reasonably readable. But there are some issues. The first person central character, Lily, spends far too long agonising over life, the universe and everything. In fact, she's a bit of a misery. Right at the start she is given a way to just have the house and end the whole thing, but doesn't bother for no obvious reason. Meanwhile, the storyline, which involves several deaths without anyone doing much about them, seems far-fetched to say the least. The 'clues' in the form of a sonnet a day are pretty much unguessable by the reader. And...

There are broadly two types of urban fantasy. Ones where the setting is primarily the normal world, intruded on by the fantasy - think, for example, of fantasy books where conventional police officers investigate supernatural crimes - and ones where there is a parallel magical society. The latter was the case with the Harry Potter books, and is also what we find in Benedict Jacka's excellent Alex Verus books. This series, beginning with Fated , is now complete with Risen , its twelfth title, which seemed an excellent point to review it. I was a touch suspicious about this 'new master of magical London' tagline that appears on some of the books - apart from anything, I'm fed up with urban fantasy books set in London. But Jacka gives us something genuinely original. This is a society where the small, magically endowed subset of the population is impressively self-centred. I'd go so far as to say that most of them are psychopaths. But the central character, Alex Verus ...

As someone who writes murder mysteries (see  https://www.brianclegg.net/fiction.html ) I also love reading  them and watching them on TV, but perhaps because of spending time thinking about book plots, I've noticed that sometimes the relationship of the reader/viewer to the medium makes it possible to get clues that the characters can never access. In TV mysteries, for example, there is always the 'well known actor' syndrome. This says that actors who are famous are likely to have an important part in the proceedings, as they wouldn't be hired just to do a bit part. Then there's the weird placement effect. What we are shown on TV or read about in a book is carefully controlled. So although we have to deal with red herrings, the fact that something is mentioned that doesn't need to be alerts us to its possible significance. However, I've just come across an even more meta* example of a piece of information providing the solution to a whodunnit where not only ...

A little while ago I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the Royal Institution in London - arguably the greatest location for science communication in the UK. At one point in the talk, I put this photograph on the screen, which for some reason caused some amusement in the audience. But the photo was illustrating a serious point: the odd nature of mirror reflections. I remember back at school being puzzled by a challenge from one of our teachers - why does a mirror swap left and right, but not top and bottom? Clearly there's nothing special about the mirror itself in that direction - if there were, rotating the mirror would change the image. The most immediately obvious 'special' thing about the horizontal direction is that the observer has two eyes oriented in that direction - but it's not as if things change if you close one eye. In reality, the distinction is much more interesting - we fool ourselves into thinking that the image behind the mirror is what's on ou...

 I've had a bit of a flurry of publication, mostly due to dates shifting thanks to Covid, resulting in three books being published in September. Two of these were Ten Days in Physics that Shook the World and Ten Patterns that Explain the Universe (in an attempt to corner the market in books with 'ten' in the title), but the most unusual one by far was How it All Works , written with Adam Dant. In fact, 'written with Adam Dant' is a huge understatement - this is very much Adam's book. He is a remarkable artist who produces wonderfully detailed crowd scene drawings. All I did was suggest some scientific principles and phenomena to go in the illustrations, and added a few words on each. The result is a sort of cross between Where's Wally and a popular science book. You really don't have to care much about the science to enjoy the remarkable illustrations.  Rather than do what appears to be blowing my own trumpet (though my enthusiasm is all for the drawin...

Every now and then a use of numbers pops up on the news that mildly irritates me. One of the worst thing the news media often do is to use a percentage without giving absolute figures to put that percentage into context. For example, imagine that we hear that the murder rate in a city has gone up by 100% compared with last year. Shock, horror, sack the police. But if it happens that the murder rate last year was 1 victim, that 100% increase is 1 extra person. Not exactly a massive change and highly unlikely to have any statistical significance. The latest version of this problem has been repeated over and over. We are told that unless the triple lock on pensions is suspended, the state pension in the UK could go up by 8% next year. A vast increase. But again, without the context it's impossible to tell what 8% means. As it happens the UK has an unusually low state pension for a European country. There current maximum is £718.40 (confusingly, this is over four weeks but isn't th...

The author, Paul Mason, always came across as a thoughtful presenter on the TV, but released from the constraints applied to broadcast news, his unashamed Marxist viewpoint shines through in this history and analysis of the threat of fascism. I found the historical aspects really interesting - we did the Second World War as part of history when I was at school, but there was very limited material on what drove the rise of Fascism and how it operated. I also found Mason's expectation of a second major rise of Fascism and analysis of what to do about it interesting, but in a different way - here it was more an opportunity to see how an intelligent person's thinking can be painted into a corner by his ideology. For example, Mason spends a considerable amount of time exploring why the left failed to stop the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany - but doesn't touch on the more useful potential of why fascism failed to take off in the UK, which would be a far better source of le...

Time for a short rant.  I occasionally peruse Apple's News app, which puts stories under topic headings. Recently one such topic was 'Science Fiction' - and it included something about a new Marvel superhero film. In practice, the majority of films that are labelled science fiction are really sci-fi - an approximation to the real thing with very little attention to the science, or for that matter to decent fiction. For that matter, I loved the first Star Wars - but it was a fairy tale with SF trappings, not the real thing. However, the majority of superhero movies are not even bad science fiction. While Iron Man and Batman, for example, just about makes into sci-fi (though in practice they break the laws of physics with painful regularity), the vast majority of superheroes are out-and-out fantasy characters. Their abilities are nothing more or less than magical. There is no possible real-world explanation for them.  Again, this isn't a criticism per se. I enjoy a good ...

This is one for the real SF nerds. It's a collection of articles, framed around reviews but giving more opinion on what makes a good science fiction story than would be common in a review, written by James Blish in the late 50s and early 60s. Fairly obscure stuff, admittedly - I've only heard of about 10 per cent of the stories and half the authors mentioned - but it is still interesting both from the insights Blish (writing as William Atheling Jr.) gives and from the sheer vitriol he pours on stories he doesn't like, even from revered names such as Asimov and Bradbury. Part of the usefulness to would-be writers of science fiction is that Blish underlines some of the pitfalls they face, whether they be basic writing errors (he tears into a couple of newish authors for the wild variety of alternatives to 'said' they use in reporting dialogue, a classic beginner's mistake) or problems that are specific to the SF genre. The only one of Blish's complaints I woul...

We've just had the latest report for the government to ignore on the National Food Strategy. You can see the BBC coverage of it here .  I absolutely agree with finding ways to encourage people to eat healthier food, and I have no particular aversion to taxing sugar and salt in manufactured food. Don't get me wrong. I love the occasional burger and chocolate biscuit and suchlike. But I'm all in favour of keeping the junk in moderation, and clearly a lot of people need help with that. So it's not a case of disagreeing with the report or its findings. But I do think they have been guilty of misuse of statistics in presenting their results. I had a look at the review's report (176 pages in the 'evidence' part alone, though it's not quite as scary as it sounds as each page is essentially a slide, often with graphics). The evidence is divided into two main sections: nature and climate, and health. My issue is with something in the health section, though I do ...

A commonly-held misbelief is that science fiction is about predicting the future. It really isn't. However, this doesn't mean that SF views of the future are not useful in hindsight. They are very good for highlighting the ways in which the imagination misfires. One of my favourite examples was  a James Blish novel, where the author pointed out that electronics would be useless in Jupiter's atmosphere, because the immense pressure would collapse the valves (vacuum tubes) that were required for pre-transistor electronics. But the particular case I would like to use here is more about SF's approach to information. Science fiction from the 1960s and early 70s had a huge miss in envisaging something that is commonplace now - ready access to high bandwidth information flows. A classic example of this was on the original series of Star Trek, where Mr Spock is regularly seen inserting little plastic rectangular objects into a console to access different data stores. Of course ...

The hidden connector on the router Some revolutions happen so quietly that many people don't notice - and one such revolution is happening to the telephone system right now.  Our traditional phone system is, frankly, an anachronism. We have a connection to the house designed to bring us voice calls. The internet - frankly our main use of these copper wires now - is clumsily piggybacked onto this antiquated system via the dreaded ADSL filter. But, without any fuss - without, I suspect, most people yet knowing about it - this approach is being phased out. As of today, the phone sockets in our house no longer work. Instead, the phone is plugged into the back of the broadband router, into a connector hidden behind a sticker. Our 'phone number' is now a dummy thing, with calls arriving across the fibre optic link as Voice over IP and being translated to a fake old phone signal at the box. Gone but not missed It was only a matter of time. The old system was well past its sell-by ...

When I was at university and in my 20s I took listening to music seriously. I had chunky speakers and a big, scary-looking amplifier to wrangle the output of my record deck. As much as possible I listened to music seated appropriately to get a good stereo image. How things have changed. More often than not (as I write this, for example) I listen to music on reasonable, but not exactly mega speakers attached to my computer. On the move I use AirPods - wireless earbuds - and, again, the sound is fine. And I've now got rid of the final iteration of my home stereo to replace it with what's shown above - a pair of HomePod Minis, each about the same size as my fist. And that's it. No other equipment, no vinyl or CDs cluttering up the place. Is the sound as good as those chunky speakers and hefty amplifier produced? Well, no. But do I care? Not at all. It's good enough. And in exchange for some loss of audio quality I've got access to the vast majority of recordings that e...

Philip Ball is one of our most esteemed science science writers, so it's easy to think of his new book The Modern Myths as a hobby project. However, Ball brings to this exploration of the idea that stories about the likes of Robinson Crusoe, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Batman are our modern day myths the same erudition, attention to detail and careful research as he does to writing about the physical world. Ball's thesis is that there is something about certain stories that enables them to escape the bounds of their origin to mutate and become something quite different - and further reaching - than the original. Often, many of us haven't ever read the originals. And if we have, they can be quite disappointing. As Ball points out, to become a myth, it helps a lot of the original work is ambiguous in interpretation and loosely written. As a result, we are unlikely ever to find 'great literature' taking on mythical form - it is far more likely to come from genre fict...

 Every now and then I get an email from a reader pointing out an error in one of my books. I'm grateful for  the opportunity to put things right, even though it's hard not to feel like a parent, having a fault in one of your children pointed out.  The other day, though, I got a correction that felt quite different. The problem was with this illustration from Quantum Computing : A reader wrote to me to point out (correctly) that the number in the picture should in fact be 0.70710 6 7811... - obvious, I'm sure you're thinking, but I missed it.  I couldn't help ask if the reader could do amazing mental arithmetic in his head. It turns out not to be the case. He told me that his job was writing graphics software, and this meant that a few key values come up all the time, one of which happens to be this number. The number will be fixed in future editions. My thanks to Icon's editorial director, Duncan Heath, for pointing me to this Fry and Laurie sketch, which seemed...

(Photo: Sky UK Limited)  I was interested to see a press release announcing that Sky News was to begin broadcasting a daily Climate Show, highlighting the latest information on climate change. It is obviously extremely good that a broadcaster is taking climate change seriously, but it looks as if Sky has fallen for one of the oldest problems in the book when it comes to reporting data: spurious accuracy. I can only guess, but my suspicion is that the show has a bit of a problem with daily reporting on a topic that is changing relatively slowly. There's only so much drama you can put into a slow moving topic, but by making the show daily, Sky would need some impressive graphics, including their huge on-screen display. When I saw this, something leapt out at me. Apparently the average global temperature has gone up by 1.123456789 °C  since 1880. Clearly this was just a test number for the display (though it's a shame it appeared in their publicity photo), but equally i...

I have always been very wary of non-coffee substitutes for the real thing, and wouldn't normally think of buying any. However, we get a monthly goody box of odd products that manufacturers are trying to get people aware of, so sell relatively cheaply - the latest including this stuff called Barley Cup. To my surprise, it's not bad. Not great, admittedly, but not bad either. Its main ingredients are barley, rye and chicory. When I saw the C word I was distinctly nervous, having been exposed to the horror that is Camp 'coffee' in my youth. But it only seemed fair to give it a try. First impressions is it's a kind of anti-coffee. With real coffee, by far the best thing is the smell - the taste is definitely a relative let-down. Here the smell is... well, odd. Certainly not coffee. Not particularly unpleasant - perhaps roasting barley - but not coffee. The taste, however, is not unlike a cheap instant coffee.  As a drink it's warm and wet (as they say), but is never...

I much prefer fantasy novels set in the real world, rather than some swords and sorcery kingdom, so was delighted to come across Rotherweird , with its cracking concept of an establishment from the sixteenth century that still exists in the present day as a town and surrounding countryside cut off from the rest of England with its own rich traditions. Rotherweird hides a dark secret involving gateways to an alternate world and a phenomenon that can produce strange combinations of creatures and abilities. Andrew Caldecott builds particularly, I'd suggest, on the tradition of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books, in the gothic complexities and rules of Rotherweird and the odd names, with a touch of Harry Potter thrown in from some aspects of mixing this with modernity. However, the book stands in its own right as a piece of hugely imaginative writing. Some of the characters verge on cliché (to be fair, this is also true of Gormenghast ), but there is some interesting development of ...

History is one of those subjects that ought to be fascinating, but all too often is dry and dull. Ian Mortimer had the excellent idea of doing a series of 'time traveller's guide's - telling you what you will experience on a visit to medieval England (here considering roughly 1300-1400). As you might expect, there's a fair amount of dispelling of clichés about the period, while at the same time showing that others have a reasonable basis. It really was dirty, smelly and often nasty for many, yet there was also, for example, a surprisingly high level of literacy in the middle and upper classes. The class divisions are stark and multifold, both interesting as (as we will see) producing the biggest problem for Mortimer in making this book approachable. I was particularly shocked by the statistic that the population of England halved in the period, primarily down to a series of waves of plague. And this was in a population that seems tiny now. Mortimer lists the estimated p...