After my voluntary break from popular science over the Christmas period, I've also had a dearth of review copies for books out in January. But there's a whole heap of both science and science fiction titles sitting on the review pile - so while reviews themselves are in short supply, here's a few books where the reviews are coming soon: Already published (awaiting copy) - I nto the Great Wide Ocean - Sönke Johnsen - takes readers inside the peculiar world of the seagoing scientists who are providing tantalizing new insights into how the animals of the open ocean solve the problems of their existence. 4 February - Hoodwinked - Mara Einstein - from viral leggings to must-have apps, exposes the hidden parallels between cult manipulation and modern marketing strategies in this eye-opening investigation. Reveals how companies weaponize psychology to transform casual customers into devoted followers. 6 February -  Phenomena  - Camille Juzeau and The Shelf Company - from ...

When I wrote my first popular science book, Light Years , I got some lovely reviews - and one or two stinkers. I asked my editor if I should respond to the negative remarks. She said 'Definitely not - unless the review contains something that's factually untrue, you only do yourself damage by attempting to put straight what is, in the end, an opinion.' This is an attitude I've stuck with through thick and thin. Since then I have also reviewed many hundreds of books. I have only twice had an author or publisher kick back against a negative review. One was of an adult colouring book (a genre, I confess, I detest - I ought to stress I didn't ask for a review copy, I was sent it unsolicited), where the author felt that, as an author myself, I was letting the side down - we've all got to earn a living. I did, as a result, remove my review from Amazon. The other has just happened - and the response was not just a moan. Either an author or the publisher put in a DMCA ...

Having recently had a week with sole charge of the TV remote, I've taken the opportunity of catching up on a couple of new series in my favourite fantasy sub-genre. I'm not a fan of swords and sorcery (with the noble exception of Lord of the Rings ), but I love what you might call real-world fantasy. This is pretty much the same as urban fantasy, but doesn't have to be in a city. You could also see it as magical realism without the pretentiousness.  The idea, then, is to incorporate fantastical occurrences in the normal world. The first example of this was ITV's Passenger . This sets what should be a normal police procedural story in a weird village (Chadder Vale) in Lancashire. There are strange occurrences, some sort of unexplained dangerous creature and a cast of misfits. As such, you can see it as a mix of Twin Peaks, Stranger Things and Happy Valley . Perhaps the weirdest decision by Andrew Buchan, the man behind the series, is to set the show in the present, but ...

Until recently, I'd classified Richard Osman's cosy murder mysteries as 'not worth reading as it's only successful because he's on the TV'. But a friend's write up persuaded me to give them a try - and I confess they are better than expected, if not what I expected.  I'm reviewing the first two books in the series together here because the first, The Thursday Murder Club , feels as if Osman hasn't quite decided what he's writing, while it becomes much clearer in the second book. After reading that, my impression of the first improved significantly. The basics sound more than a little silly. A group of four OAPs in a retirement village attempt to crack old, unsolved murders as entertainment, but this activity draws them into sorting out a current case with the help of a pair of friendly police officers. (It also helps that one of the OAPs is ex-MI6.) What we get in that first title is a perfectly reasonably cosy murder mystery (a genre I generall...

Hugely impressed by Janice Hallett's The Appeal , I had to buy her second novel, The Twyford Code and was equally pleased, though for slightly different reasons. Once again, what we have here is an ingenious mystery novel, constructed in an unusual fashion - where The Appeal was primarily made up of emails, the bulk of The Twyford Code comprises 200 voice notes, left by one-time career criminal Steve Smith. Transcriptions of these (supposedly made by software, and so containing a series of transcription errors) have been sent by a police inspector to a professor to ask if he can throw any light on them. At the heart of the story are a series of books by a variant of Enid Blyton called Edith Twyford. The equivalent to the Famous Five is the Secret Six, and a Secret Six book that Smith encounters while at school seems to both contain mysterious coded messages and to be linked to the disappearance of his school teacher, an event that still haunts him from many years in the past. Sm...

If I am honest, I'm not a great fan of books with a disaster, 'end of civilisation as we know it' scenario. In my teens I hoovered up vast quantities of these from War of the Worlds to Day of the Triffids , and absolutely loved them in my typical teen enjoyment of misery, but as I've grown older I have become increasingly fond of it all ending happily ever after. I think my problem with disaster books (and films) is the cavalier way that millions are slaughtered by the author. We are expected to feel connected to the main character, who usually miraculously survived, but I am always kept at a cold distance, because I am so sad for everyone else, the bit part players who are killed off for the sake of the scenario. This meant I was a little nervous coming to Kate Kelly's young adult novel Red Rock , as this is 'cli fi' - fiction based on the world being transformed by climate change, and on the whole that's a pretty disaster-laden scenario. I needn...

I review SF books on the Popular Science website , but this is a review of a science fiction magazine, which seems a sufficiently different prospect to find its way onto my blog instead. Interzone is the classic British science fiction magazine dating back to 1982 - I last read it many moons ago when David Pringle was the editor and it was formatted like a magazine - now it's in more of a glossy digest format. As it happens, this double edition marks the change of an era, as it is the last from current editor Andy Cox, who is handing over to Gareth Jelley.  Apparently, the Science Fiction Writers of America don't consider Interzone a professional magazine due to the unusually low rates they pay (just 1.5 cents per word) and the circulation - I think it's a shame. Frankly, they ought to pay more and it's sad that this magazine seems to be looked down on by the SF establishment as it is practically the only such magazine we have in the UK. As a reader primarily of SF b...

Each year I attempt to find at least one Christmas murder mystery - after all, what would Christmas be without a good murder? I thought I had hit the jackpot with A Christmas Railway Mystery - not only a Victorian Christmas setting, but the location of the murder was the Great Western Railway village in my home town of Swindon. And there is no doubt that the book had its enjoyable elements, but it also had some severe limitations. Perhaps the best bit was the evocation of the Railway Village, built by the GWR adjacent to the railway works where it built its rolling stock, reflecting the mix of benevolence and patronising control that seemed to accompany some of the better Victorian employers. Edward Marston evokes the detail of the village and its life well, apart from the oddity of describing the (still existing) buildings as red brick - they aren’t. Marston also gives a satisfying mix of strands, with the main murder investigation in Swindon set alongside developments in the...

I'm always on the look out for good new British crime fiction and someone recommended He's Gone by Alex Clare. To be honest, this meant I bought it without looking at too much of the detail, and my first reaction on taking a closer look was one of disappointment. The reason for this negative reaction is that it has become such a cliché for police officers in crime novels to have a personal problem - and the protagonist here, DI Robyn Bailley, looked likely to be exactly such a cliché. But I am pleased to say I couldn't have been more wrong. Firstly, He's Gone works superbly as a police procedural. It's always difficult to get the balance between giving too much detail (because in the end, most police procedure is boring) and making the whole thing trivially easy. The crimes - a missing toddler, a 3-year-old murder and a series of burglaries - are handled by Clare in a way that simply keeps the interest throughout. It's an excellent book on that leve...

I can think of few better antidotes to a grey and miserable English winter than Matthew Fort's Summer in the Islands . It features a food writer and TV presenter in his sixties, setting off for six months of puttering around the Italian islands on a pink Vespa, obviously bringing us the eating highlights, but much more, the enjoyment of slowing down and simply living life in a series of fascinating landscapes, rather than the everyday battling through it back home. In a puff on the back of the book, Jamie Oliver mentions the term 'midlife crisis'. Leaving aside any concerns about the definition of midlife, I'd say that Fort's adventures are the absolute antithesis of a midlife crisis. This isn't about showing off to your peers in an unsuitable sports car - it's about stepping into a different culture and gently absorbing and enjoying it. The strange thing about the enjoyment of this book is that the reader does not need any sense of wanting to be in F...

I've recently made an executive decision to add science fiction to the Popular Science book review site . For some time now I've been doing SF reviews on this blog, but it seemed more sensible to move them over to the science book review site. In part, this is because there was already some fiction on there. I'd featured a number of SF (and maths fiction) books which claimed to concentrate on serious science, using fiction as a way to get it across. So, the borderline was already a little fuzzy. It's also the case that many popular science readers (and scientists) enjoy reading science fiction too - so why not put them together? The Popular Science site will still carry just as many reviews of popular science books - but with a little added SF to spice things up. To kickstart it, I've duplicated all the SF reviews from this site, and will be going live with the first all-new fiction review this week. I'll still continue to review other fiction (e.g. f...

Every now and then I like to re-read an SF classic, and there are rarely safer hands to be in than those of Pohl and Kornbluth. I was surprised as I got into it that I couldn't remember a thing about this book - I suspect it's because despite featuring a number of 'adventure' scenes, it is so cerebral. And that is a limitation - but its one that reflects a daring and impressive piece of writing. Wolfbane  starts with what seems to be a fairly straightforward 'rebel in a straight laced society of the future' storyline, with the 'What's in it for me?' main character Glenn Tropile getting in trouble in a society where everything is buttressed by ritual and formality - but that's just the beginning. We get an Earth that has been ripped away from the solar system, just about kept alive by the Moon, recreated as a sunlet every few years. And we have some of the most enigmatic and alien aliens I've come across, pyramids that rarely move and th...

Not surprisingly bought as a holiday read, Resorting to Murder was pleasant enough to pass the time, but didn't really hit the spot. Part of the problem is that by comparison with the opening Sherlock Holmes story ( The Adventure of the Devil's Foot: itself not one of Conan Doyle's best as a mystery, though decidedly an atmospheric piece of writing), it becomes obvious that a lot of the classic crime writers featured here weren't very good at crafting an entertaining story. It was fun to discover the holiday locations, many of them in the UK or France, and some of the stories worked well, but too many seemed to lack either literary or mystery value. In a couple of cases, the storyline really didn't hold together - it was difficult to make any great sense of what had happened - or the whole thing was a little too far-fetched (as in the otherwise quite entertaining mystery of the mother who disappears from a French hotel, along with the room she had been staying...

If your immediate thought on seeing a book about the Bible is 'I'm not religious, so it's not for me,' don't worry - it still could be. Without doubt, the Bible has had a huge impact on the world - and, Simon Loveday reminds us - in some forms, notably the Authorised Version (King James Bible), it is also an impressive piece of literature and a big part of our cultural heritage. What Loveday sets out to do is to see how the Bible was put together, telling us why it is in the form it is and helping us understand the combination of different types of literature that don't really correspond to modern day forms - and he does this very well. This book is to biblical scholarship what popular science is to science. Loveday is not trying to come up with a new and different analysis of the Bible, but rather to help the vast majority of us (both Christians and non-Christians) who really don't understand its geo-political context, what is historical and what is mor...

I'm a sucker for consumer programmes, especially those that give us an expert opinion on everyday products, such as Channel 4's Tried and Tasted . It's cheap and cheerful stuff - but there's something highly entertaining about a panel including Michel Roux Jr and Jay Rayner blind tasting meat pies and ice cream (not simultaneously). However, this show presents us with an extreme example of the problem facing most comparative reviews - how do you choose the products to be in your sample? Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the journalists who suffer their way through a comparative test. I once tested getting on for 70 laptops (over a year, not all at once) for a magazine, and it's an arduous job. But the fact remains that unless you try absolutely everything you can get your hands on, as I did with those laptops, there is a hidden selection process going on, which can strongly skew the results. To take a recent example, I saw in a newspaper a compariso...

I am a huge fan of well-produced annotated books. For example, Martin Gardiner's annotated versions of Lewis Carroll classics such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are superb - a highly readable contextual introduction, followed by pages festooned with delightful points that bring out the context of a reference or simply provide an entertaining and relevant tidbit of information. This being the case, I was really looking forward to this annotated version of Frankenstein , expecting a similar wonderful elucidation. And to be honest, Mary Shelley's book (conceived when she was still Mary Godwin) needs all the help it can get. Apparently the original book is well under 80,000 words long, making it a relatively short novel, but it seems far longer. There is no doubt that Frankenstein has been hugely influential, not just in the direct movies and spinoffs but in its influence on the development of science fiction - but oh, it's hard work to read, with endless wordy m...

I originally read Ray Bradbury's  Dandelion Wine when I was young, and found it really disappointing. I've just re-read it for the first time, and realised that I was entirely wrong in how I looked at it. The trouble was that Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes was (and is) one of my favourite books ever - and the edition of Dandelion Wine I own (the Corgi SF Collector's Library paperback with the crinkly purple cover) makes it sound like another Something Wicked . The tagline on the front says 'It was a fantastic summer of terror and wonder - a fantastic summer he would never forget...' I can imagine the young me thinking 'But this isn't right. It's not fantasy at all.' And it isn't. At its most basic, Dandelion Wine is an affectionate portrait of a smallish US town in 1928, with a linking thread of a twelve-year-old boy. It's straightforward, sometimes a little mawkish, sometimes dramatic fiction. And it's Bradbury ...

This book seemed to combine two of my favourite activities, which go very well together: good all-day walks and a pint of proper beer. And it does to an extent, as we shall see. Wild Pub Walks combines fairly strenuous hill walks, often around the 10 mile mark with some serious ups and downs, with recommendations of places to sink a pint at the end of the walk. It's divided into England, Scotland and Wales - I'll concentrate on the England section as I'm more familiar with the walks there. When opening a book like this, the natural tendency is to go straight to the overview map and look where the walks are - I must admit to being dismayed at this point as all the English walks in the Lake District, Peak District and Yorkshire Dales. That's the entire country as far as this book is concerned. That was a real disappointment - I'd have much rather they were spread around more effectively. To take the West Country as a example, you can have just as interesting a ...

I've generally loved the Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels, but was decidedly disappointed when I happened on Consider Phlebas,  (admittedly his first) - but thankfully  The Hydrogen Sonata was much more the kind of on-form writing I've come to enjoy. I will get one moan out of the way up front - it's too long. I can't be doing with these doorstop books as a whole, and quite a lot of it felt in need of a good tightening edit. But having said that, there's a whole lot to enjoy here in the complex machinations between different races and seeing different Culture ships exhibit behaviour that isn't necessarily quite what you'd expect. As usual with Banks there's plenty to ponder in the 'what if' department, here particularly around the concept of 'subliming' where individuals or whole races opt to become part of a disembodied multidimensional spacetime - probably some people's idea of heaven and others of hell. But equally...

I'm not quite sure where I picked up a recommendation for this book, but I'm glad I did as I've been able to add Cory Doctorow to my fairly short list of contemporary science fiction writers that I truly enjoy. In this entertaining short novel, Doctorow takes on the classic SF question of 'What if?' for something that genuinely could come to pass - the no wage economy, where everyone gets the basics they need and it's up to them, through ad-hoc arrangements, to find ways to earn social credit to get more, should they want it. In a way, the social credit (known for unexplained reasons, unless I missed it, as Whuffie) is the equivalent of the rating system in the  Black Mirror episode where everyone constantly rates everyone else. The other major change to society, which is far less likely to happen, is that when someone dies they are recreated from a clone which is imprinted with their backed up memory - so death becomes a minor irritation (unless you aren...