Brian Clegg's Blog, page 17

The Christmas Guest - Peter Swanson ****

This novella gives us a highly engaging Christmas-set (technically it's in Advent) mystery. We start in the New York apartment of the female narrator, who, at Christmas time, unearths an old diary from exactly 30 years before, covering the days leading up to a horrible event in a Cotswold manor house. 

The majority of the book consists of these diary entries from student days, which are mostly appropriately fluffy and young adult in feel. But at the heart of it all is something much darker.

It's hard to say more without giving anything away, but it's all very neatly done, with two big twists in quick succession about three quarters of the way through. 

The only  criticism I have is that once you've hit those twists, the ending is a little bit of a let down, as it feels like there should be a final twist to really finish things off - but it remains a really good, intriguing seasonal read, if you like Christmas with a murderous side.

I don't honestly know why Christmas and darkness go together so well, whether it's in the form of ghost stories or murder mysteries - but they do make excellent book-fellows.

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The Christmas Appeal - Janice Hallett ****

Janice Hallett has rapidly become the best active light crime writer, bettering her first two books with the outstanding The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels , so I rushed to purchase her latest, a Christmas sequel to her remarkable debut The Appeal . Written in her distinctive modern epistolary style - in this case primarily featuring emails and WhatsApp messages, it is an entertaining piece of fluff, but not up to the usual standard.

Let's get the good part in first. The storyline features a pantomime, and there is a particularly strong thread of humour here - more so than usual in her books. Christmas always makes a great setting for a cosy mystery, and this comes across nicely here. There was one point (featuring a dog and a bone) when I laughed out loud and plenty more to smile at. As always, Hallett manages brilliantly at using the apparently distancing style of collecting written communications to really get us into the heads of the characters and to keep track of a tangled plot.

The downside, though, that does make this feel a little rushed as a book (it's also more novella than novel) is that the plot itself lacks the wow factor that the previous books have provided. When all is revealed, it's a bit 'Okay, fine. So that's what happened,' but it's hard to get engrossed in it. I'd also say that a sub-plot where an order for wrapped sweets to give out after the production goes horribly wrong was just too farcical, even for a pantomime, let alone a crime novel.

All in all, by far Hallett's weakest outing. Yet she is so good that it still beats a fair number of the Christmas mysteries that will be new on the shelves this year.

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On reviewing old books

This week I'm reviewing two books on the Popular Science website, neither of which was published this year. Usually, book reviews are of the latest titles. This is partly because these are the titles publishers are enthusiastic to get seen, but also tend to be selected to ensure that the reviewer seems current. I think, though, that there are several reasons to consider a book that's been around a while.

Sometimes it's because there's a new edition. This may not make much difference to the content, but the book might have been out of print or otherwise hard to come by. Occasionally there may also be genuinely interesting new content (as opposed to yet another preface no one wants to read). I've got a lot in the past out of some annotated books, though my experience with Frankenstein 'annotated for scientists, Engineers and Creators of all kinds' was not great. One of my reviews this week will be a new edition.

The visibility created by a new edition (even if it's just a paperback following the hardback) can also mean that a book you overlooked the first time around comes to your attention (or, frankly, becomes more affordable). This is the case with my other review this week - a book that I initially missed and then, frankly, intentionally avoided because it got so much hype that I was put off. Not at all fair, but I find i easy to take this stance. Finally, though,  when the dust was settling (and some of the comments were getting more critical) I gave in and bought a copy.

One other way an older book review might get published is a look back at an old review. This may be simply to bring a forgotten delight back to visibility, or it could be that, on a re-read, the book seems very different from the experience the first time around. 

It's entirely possible that your reaction to a review of a book published in 1999, as is the case with one of my reviews is 'So what? It's old news.' But I don't think books necessarily become old, nor is a review news. I'm not generally a great enthusiast for 'the classics' - I confess, I struggle, for instance with the verbosity and silly names of Dickens. But I'm a sucker for Jane Austen. In non-fiction, and popular science in particular, there are fewer classics that hold up well, partly because science moves on, and also because non-fiction styles from, say, the 1930s or 1950s can seem very turgid now. However, I believe it would be a mistake to stick purely to the latest titles, and hope that I will continue digging up the occasional blast from the past.

Image by Chris Lawton from Unsplash - when I say 'old books' I don't mean ones likes these

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Revenge of the boffinophiles

I was going to call this post ‘lovin’ a good boffin’, but it felt too much like a double entendre. 

The term 'boffin' is an outdated British term for a scientist, which now only crops up in tabloid newspapers. It's an affectionate term, but with an element of mad scientist about it. For some time now, the Institute of Physics has been running a campaign to 'bin the boffin'.

In a Physics World article, Rachel Youngman puts the case for binning the boffin: 'We believe that boffin is a lousy way to talk about scientists. The term has negative impacts – it is poorly understood, strongly associated with the male gender and is confusing. When we surveyed our members last year, they told us that the term was unhelpful and inaccurate, with younger members stating it actively puts them off science.' You might wonder, if they were put off science what they're doing being members of the Institute of Physics, but that's a different story.

I love the Institute of Physics (and their magazine/website Physics World) dearly - but there is a real danger of coming across as humourless, perhaps even po-faced, in this campaign. You don't stop people using a nickname for you that you don't like by moaning about it - that just makes people double down. And there's even an argument that it's not a bad name for a certain kind of scientific announcement.

Part of the IoP's campaign involves publicising the week's 'best worst example of boffin in the media'. One week in October the headline they picked up on was ' Boffins use science to calculate the scariest scenes in horror movie history'. To be honest, when someone (usually a PR company who get the assistance of a gullible scientist) comes up with this kind of pseudoscientific guff, they deserve to be labelled boffins (or something far worse).

The IoP's PR effort is made for the best reasons - and Youngman describes it as a 'good-humoured call', noting that they aren't seeking to ban the word: 'If a pub quiz team, say, wants to be called “Brilliant boffins” that’s fine and if scientists don’t mind the word, then we would consider that a matter of personal taste.' If it is indeed true that 'boffin' conjures up an image of only one kind of scientist (white, male, lab coat...), then it's not ideal for general use. But to be fair, it isn't in general use and hasn't been since the 1950s. The word didn't originally mean a scientist at all - it was a term for an elderly naval officer in the early years of the Second World War, that expanded to mean someone in backroom science and technology, who was away from the military front line, particularly those developing radar. It was already dated by the 1970s.

For me, the campaign distracts from the message of science. When my Twitter/X list about science is full not of science stories but stories about whether people are using the right words, I don't think that science does itself justice.

Image from Unsplash/National Cancer Institute - n.b. boffin images should always be black and white

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Obvious in Hindsight - Bradley Tusk ***(*)

The premise of this novel is excellent - it's a cross between House of Cards and The Circle. A tech company is attempting to get its flying cars off the ground (both literally and metaphorically). The company's erratic CEO has brought in a political lobbying company, because it's no easy job to get permission for flying cars in the skies of a city (their initial targets are New York, Los Angeles and Austin). Meanwhile it's also no easy job to get the car to fly safely at all.

Bradley Tusk - who has been both a political operator and a venture capitalist, so has an ideal background - brings to the fore the two people at the top of the lobbyists - the ruthless Nick and his number two, Lisa (arguably the main protagonist), Susan the CEO, and her chief engineer, Yevgeny. They join a large cast of characters from FBI agents to corrupt city mayors and union bosses. Tusk also gives a very cynical (but probably accurate) picture of the totally self-serving nature of US politics.

It's a great storyline, even if it does verge more into Tom Sharpe territory later on (more on that in a moment). And I enjoyed reading it. I'd definitely give it four stars for the ideas. But it could have been better. Tusk's writing style isn't particularly engaging. We get too many characters thrown at us, without the space  to develop (or even, occasionally, to keep track of who is who). And the dramatic tension isn't particularly well handled. It's not really a page turner. 

In case you aren't familiar with Tom Sharpe, he was a British satirical novelist who particularly took on academia (both new universities and Cambridge), using sledgehammer-unsubtle farcical situations. What I really wanted Obvious in Hindsight to be (what is that title about?) was a sizzling political thriller, like House of Cards, with the added fun of the dodgy goings on of the tech billionaires (hence my reference to The Circle). And there are bits where this happens. But, presumably in an attempt to add humour, we also get deeply farcical elements, such as FBI agents (one of whom is obsessed with disgusting sounding eating contests) operating from a kosher Mexican Korean food truck - and then there is the public test of the flying car where the passenger is a steer (a bullock in English English) that also happens to be the mascot of a college football team. What could possibly go wrong?

It was so close to being a really good book that I genuinely do recommend giving it a go - but it should have had more of an editorial steer (not a bullock). 

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Losing our culture

My favourite comic strip of all time is The Perishers. Published in the Daily Mirror from the late 50s until 2006 it could be taken at first glance as something of a Peanuts rip-off. After all, it features only children and animals - and the central characters are a boy and his dog (whose thoughts are revealed to be very human-like). However, in reality the feel and the humour is totally different and entirely British. At its best, The Perishers is a total delight.

One of the strip's features is a series of running jokes, some of which carried on for decades. For example, on summer holiday excursions, the characters regularly take a look in a rock pool, where the crabs believe they are being visited by their equivalent of UFOs which they refer to as 'the eyes in the sky', often having failed protests or attempts to take on the invaders. Other continuing jokes are just small features that bring on a smile, one being the teddy belonging to Baby Grumpling, a cynical toddler who is generally out for what he can get (pictured above). The teddy is called Gladly.

And this is where the culture bit comes in - because my children's generation simply wouldn't get the joke behind that name. The key to it is that the teddy is cross-eyed. So, it is 'Gladly, my cross-eyed bear', a reference to a now obscure Victorian hymn called Keep Thou My Way, which includes the line 'Kept by thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear'. (Most people, me included until I looked for it, thought there was actually a hymn named 'Gladly my cross I'd bear'.) This was not by any means an original joke, but beautifully incorporated into the comic strip.

When my generation was growing up, hymns were familiar things. I didn't go to church as a child, but we sung them in school every day. Since then I've had a lot more exposure, because at university I joined my college chapel choir, got hooked on church music and have been singing in church choirs ever since. But that's just an underpinning. I've never sung that hymn - it's not commonly used in Anglican settings. (To be honest, I doubt if it's commonly used anywhere, as it's pretty awful Victoriana.) But the idea behind the joke was very much part of the culture 50 years ago.

We are now very enthusiastic that people celebrate their cultures. It feels rather sad that what was a rich vein of British culture is now being left behind.

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Nowhere does it better

I'm delighted to say that I'll be giving my talk based on my new book Interstellar Tours at the Royal Institution in London on 16 March 2024 (see the Ri website for details/booking).

Speaking at the Royal Institution is always something of a thrill. When I first gave a talk there, they had a terrifying introduction. It went something like this. 'Welcome to the Royal Institution, where lectures to improve the public understanding of science have been given since 1800. Ten of the chemical elements were either discovered or first isolated here. Michael Faraday lectured many times from this very desk. Now Brian Clegg is going to talk to you...' For the pedants amongst you, it's now reasonably widely known that the desk was reconstructed - nonetheless it was certainly the same space with a very similar desk. It was a distinct challenge to follow that.

Now they're a little less scary to their speakers, but even so there's a certain necessity to perform well that goes with speaking there that I suspect makes most of us a little nervous. Certainly you get a discerning audience and can expect some challenging questions - but it's all part of the fun. 

When I gave my first talk there (based on A Brief History of Infinity) someone came up to me afterwards and said that he'd never been to a lecture before, but saw it in Time Out and thought it looked interesting. Now he was hooked, and he'd be coming regularly. That was a wonderful moment.

If you're in London (or able to get there) on the day and fancy coming, it would be great to see you. There's nowhere quite like it.

P.S. No, that's not my car - I travelled by train.

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Where are the SF classics?

I was wandering around a bookshop the other day (after the obligatory check to see if they had my latest in stock), and was struck by a significant difference between the general fiction books and the science fiction section*.

In the general fiction, there were plenty of classics. Books that we may now feel are a little dated in some ways, but nonetheless are great works of fiction and deserve to be read still. But amongst the science fiction, apart from a few Asimovs and the inevitable Dune (for obvious movie reasons), most of the great names of the past were simply missing. This feels wrong.

I don't think my reaction is pure nostalgia. Admittedly, not every past SF title has aged well. But, for instance, the last two SF books I've read were by Pohl & Kornbluth and Bester respectively, and both were still far more engaging than whatever this week's Brandon Sanderson title is. For that matter, many of the classics aren't good pieces of writing when measured by some modern metrics, but that's not the point - they stand the test of time despite this. And that's the case with the SF greats too.

Gollancz (or, rather, its parent company), one of the big names of science fiction publishing, has at least helped by resurrecting many old SF titles with their impressive SF Masterworks and SF Gateway series - and the bookshop did have a couple of books from these ranges. But even so, it's such a shame that younger readers are not getting the same opportunity to be confronted with the classics in this genre as they are in the general fiction section.

*  Actually it wasn't a science fiction section, it was science fiction and fantasy, which I find distinctly irritating. I do read both, but I prefer my browsing more clearly defined. (I also hate, incidentally, the way Waterstones has merged popular science into a vague smart thinking topic, and has lost its crime section entirely.) 

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Multiverse fine tuning and why Stephen Hawking was wrong about philosophers

In their 2010 book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow told us that there was no longer any need for philosophy because science was ready to answer all the big questions. I thought they were wrong at the time, and reading the book Why? by Philip Goff underlines how valuable good philosophy (I am the first to admit that the field contains plenty of hot air - I'm not talking about all philosophy) can be.

I'll be reviewing the book on the Popular Science website, but I wanted to pick out one example of where taking what you might call a mathematically philosophical view neatly disposes of a piece of cosmological sophistry that has always got on my nerves.

I have often seen the fine tuning of the universe used an argument for the multiverse existing. Many variables of nature have to have values very close to the ones we observe if life is to exist. It's not generally considered scientific to attribute this fine tuning to some sort of divine or panpsychic cause, so it is used as evidence for the existence of a multiverse.

The argument goes something like this. The fine tuning is incredibly unlikely. It's a bit like winning the lottery with a single ticket. But people do win lotteries every week, because there are very many tickets sold, making it much more likely that at least one of those tickets will be drawn. If we lived in a multiverse, where our universe is just one of a vast number, each with different potential settings for the physical constants, then it's not particularly unlikely that at least one universe has the right settings for life. We then invoke the anthropic principle to say that this has to include our universe, otherwise we wouldn't be here to observe it.

This argument has always felt specious to me. It seems to be misusing probability, but I could put my finger on exactly why it was. Goff, though, has a beautifully clear description of why the argument simply doesn't hold up.

We are asked to envisage a casino (it's no coincidence I used a gambling analogy above too - gambling and probability are, of course, intimately linked). This is not a direct quote, but puts across Goff's approach. Imagine you walk into this casino with your friend who is a cosmologist, and the first person you see is winning time after time. Your friend says 'Look at that, the casino must be full!' This seems a bit of an odd assertion, so you ask her why she thinks this. She says 'If the casino were empty, it would be really unlikely that this person would keep winning like that. But if the place is packed, it's a lot less improbable that someone would be on a winning streak.'

Unfortunately, the cosmologist's argument, which is exactly the same as that used to suggest there should be a multiverse, is just as wrong as the traditional gambler's fallacy: the idea that if you toss a lot of heads in a row, the next toss is likely to come up with a tail. The coin has no memory. Each time, you are observing a single throw, unconnected to all the others. Similarly, you have only observed one person's success. Players at the casino are not probabilistically connected. You can't deduce anything about other players from what is happening to that single individual. In the same way, cosmologists have only observed a single universe that is fine tuned - they can't use this to deduce anything about other universes.

Just in case the cosmologists resort to the anthropic principle, Goff has an answer to this too. The principle might incline them to say 'Ah, but we are bound to see a universe that is fine tuned, because that's necessary for life to exist.' True, but again, how can it tell us anything about other universes? As Goff points out, all you need do is add in a sniper to the casino scenario, aiming at the lucky player; the sniper will kill the player if he doesn't win. You can only observe the player if he is alive to still be playing. But it still doesn't allow you to deduce whether or not the casino is busy.

I agree there are plenty of philosophers talking tosh. But, personally, I'm very happy to disagree with the late Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. We certainly still need philosophy.

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The battle of the middle of the road political podcasts

Every morning I listen to a podcast on my walk, and more often than not it's a UK political podcast. Where once they were sparse, there are now huge numbers of middle of the road podcasts to suit my taste - but I have found that some old favourites have become less appetising, displaced by newcomers.

The first to drop off its perch was the BBC's Newscast. I'm generally a supporter of the BBC, if not the licence fee (or some of its recent news reporting), but the whole point of a news podcast is to be able to be more informal and get away from the restraints of conventional media. The presenters of Newscast are certainly informal, but they dance around issues because of the BBC's efforts to keep to its sometimes strange ideas of what being impartial is. Also they rarely dig into anything with the depth that a podcast can offer - they cover too many topics, as they aren't pure politics.

The second that I'm losing patience with is The News Agents. I always really enjoyed Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel as the heart of the BBC's Americast (which was a lot better than Newscast) - initially, their podcast with Lewis Goodall was a comparable mix of entertainment and insight. However, its middle-of-the-road positioning seems to have drifted to the left - Goodall particularly has some left-of-Labour views that can come through strongly, and it seems to have lost the idea that a podcast has to be entertaining as well as informative. Interestingly, their US spinoff (without Goodall) is much better.

A podcast I've only dipped into recently is the fairly longstanding The Rest is Politics. The concept seems appealing - it brings together a Labour and a Conservative ex-politician - Alastair Campbell, Labour's former spin doctor, and former junior cabinet minister Rory Stewart to chat over political issues, able to debate the topic from both sides. Unfortunately, I find both of them irritating and self-congratulatory, and they are both almost identically placed on the political spectrum, so there is no real debate. That's another one for the dustbin.

I've replaced The Rest is Politics with what could have been an upstart copycat: Political Currency. The format is very similar, but first of all this gives us two top end former politicians, the ex-Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne, and the ex-Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls. They are far more likeable than the other two, have more real experience to draw on, and do actually disagree about things. There was considerable criticism after the first episode - I didn't bother to listen to this, as it was bound to be a bit bumpy, but the remainder have, for me, far outpaced Campbell and Stewart.

A final offering is the podcast I've stayed with longest - Times Radio's Red Box. To those who have an aversion to all things Murdoch, this might seem a ridiculous thing to label middle of the road, but it very much is. Presenter Matt Chorley has a wonderful light touch and sees the humour of politics, while the columnists who open each podcast are always very much middle of the road, but with enough individualism to not always agree. The show then features a 'big thing' item, which varies from an annotated version of Prime Minister's Questions, or a monthly focus group to pieces on unlikely topics (most recently 'secrets of a political cartoonist'), which I often don't think I'll enjoy, but in reality find really interesting.

There are, of course many others out there, but we are seeing a real distinction between the best and the also-rans emerge.

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