The Â鶹´«Ă˝ Book Club has been reading Claire North’s space opera Slow Gods, in which a civilisation has to work out how to deal with a supernova that will kill everyone on a planet – but not for 100 years. Claire joined us to dig into the details of the book, chatting about everything from how their hero “is the protagonist you write when you are an adult diagnosed with autism late in your life” to the parallels between the climate crisis and the book’s world-ending supernova (“subtle metaphor it is not”). We also get into their terrifying version of faster-than-light travel – and how even the “science-iest” science fiction can need a little magic.

by Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

I started my colleague Karmela Padavic-Callaghan’s first book, , with trepidation. How could they deliver on its subtitle, “a life according to quantum physics”? I finished it with both a better understanding of all things quantum and a deeper desire to understand myself after reading Karmela’s own thoughtful journey as a queer, millennial immigrant.

This is a unique blend of memoir and science writing, in which Karmela interweaves growing up in Croatia, moving to New York, doing a physics PhD, teaching in high school and working as a Â鶹´«Ă˝ reporter with big physics concepts.

So, how do you make links between, say, indefinite causality and a life-threatening tooth infection, or wave-particle duality and the realisation that you are queer? Somehow, Karmela does, and it all works to create a book that is clear and friendly on a scientific level, and candid and insightful on a personal one.

“You don’t acquire Homer; Homer acquires you.” So writes Adam Nicolson in , his paean to that indispensable pair of ancient epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Christopher Nolan’s of the latter makes Nicolson’s book essential reading now for anyone interested in the story’s greater significance.

Nicolson’s work follows three trains of thought. In the first, he waxes philosophical about what Homer – always referred to in the singular, but acknowledged to have been multiple people, spanning generations – has to say about the meaning of life and the clash between civilisation and depravity. He delves into the fascination literary giants have had with Homer, including John Keats, whose poem Endymion gives the book its title, and Alexander Pope, whose translations leave much to be desired.

The other two strands are more rooted in the tangible world. Nicolson digs into the text of the Iliad and the Odyssey and parses out variations in the Greek, tracing the language’s structure back to the Linear B of the Mycenaean era and beyond, and uses this linguistic examination to attempt to pin down exactly when the poems were first composed – much earlier than we’d previously thought, he argues. The standardised, written Homer that we know came down from a much older oral tradition, says Nicolson, as far back as even 2000-1800 BC.

Finally, he finds traces of Homer’s writing in archaeological treasures from around the ancient Mediterranean, from a papyrus found at the Hawara site in Egypt to a pottery shard discovered in a tomb on the island of Ischia, one of the oldest surviving examples of written Greek. The papyrus dates to about AD 150; the pottery, to the 8th century BC. Much attention is also paid to the shaft graves of Mycenae, and what they can tell us about the world before the Bronze Age collapse.

Nicolson isn’t interested in the historicity of the poems themselves – they are myths, after all – as much as he is in the world that produced them. He draws a compelling portrait of a complex ancient realm, and of people for whom these stories provided a link to their nomadic, warrior-centred past.

Rereading The Mighty Dead, with its focus on relics and remnants, reminded me of my honeymoon to Crete. My husband and I visited the archaeological museum in Heraklion and saw a boar-tusk helmet on display; in book 10 of the Iliad, you will find Odysseus described wearing one, too. It is a reminder, as Nicolson’s book impressively contends, that the world of Homer is still very much all around us, if we know where to look.

Who were the enigmatic Sea Peoples blamed for the Bronze Age collapse?

Around 3000 years ago, several empires and kingdoms in the Mediterranean collapsed, with a group of sea-faring warriors implicated as the culprit. But new evidence shows that many of our ideas about this turbulent time need completely rethinking

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(UK: Channel 4; US: not available)

In 2015, an amateur trophy hunter from the US shot and killed the largest lion in Africa. The vitriol unleashed after Cecil’s death isn’t surprising (or entirely unwarranted), but what is remarkable is how this delicately-crafted film uses the case as a locus for all sorts of arguments about conservation. A symbol in life and in death, Cecil and other large, charismatic animals exist in a complex balance with humans who, one way or another, invariably stake a claim on them.

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(UK: BBC iPlayer; US: not currently available)

Almost everyone in the world now needs to have some knowledge of how AI technologies work, from all the chatbots they encounter to driverless cars and more. Mathematician Hannah Fry is an excellent person to impart such knowledge: across three episodes, she guides us through recent cases where AI has become entangled with very human problems. The series breaks down complicated topics through clear metaphors, and it benefits from Fry’s warmth, humour and complete lack of judgement towards those at the sharp end of this ultimate technological revolution.

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(UK: BBC iPlayer; US: Discovery+)

While we eagerly await Artemis III in 2027, why not revisit this year’s Artemis II mission, which returned humans on a flyby of the moon for the first time in more than 50 years? This all-too-brief film is the product of three and a half years of filming with the Artemis programme, and it’s the story of countless humans – all those behind-the-scenes engineers and designers who worked on the mission alongside the four astronauts who travelled further from Earth than anyone before them.

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(UK: BBC iPlayer; US: PBS)

The best of the many, many documentaries released to celebrate David Attenborough’s centenary was this behind-the-scenes look at the most iconic natural history series ever made. Released in 1979, the structure and tone of Life on Earth became the blueprint for almost every nature documentary that has been made ever since, and consequently has helped to define how we view the world around us. Making Life on Earth is crammed full of fascinating details from the production process, from a terrifying near-miss with armed guards in Rwanda, to Attenborough discovering that he has an allergy to donkey fur while riding the animals to the bottom of the Grand Canyon – and how it ended up ruining a close-up.

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(UK: for rent; US: HBO Max)

Fifteen years ago, a devastating earthquake and subsequent tsunami killed 20,000 people across northern Japan and caused vital cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear power plant to fail. Told through the most stomach-churning footage and eye-witness accounts, this film sets out exactly what went wrong and charts how a natural disaster turned into a nuclear emergency. Amid the grim details, one bright spot is the bravery of the so-called Fukushima 50, who remained onsite and risked their lives to prevent a full-scale meltdown that would have rendered vast swathes of Japan uninhabitable. Because of their actions, only one person has so far died as a result of the accident.