This month seems to be full of celebrity, whether as subjects of our latest science books or as their authors. There are new books from physicist Carlo Rovelli, doctor and presenter Xand van Tulleken, broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili and leading scholar of our relationship with tech, Sherry Turkle, as well as a biography of Stephen Hawking. As ever, we range far and wide, from great biographies to the world’s darker, problematic corners.     

by Carlo Rovelli (translated by Simon Carnell)

Carlo Rovelli’s latest offering, On the Equality of All Things, certainly looks like a broad-ranging virtuoso. �鶹��ý reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan has already gone the distance with the book, and their review will be published soon. They write that physics, as the science that describes all the ingredients of our physical reality and how they interact with each other, has a strong claim on how we understand our surroundings – but what about its grasp on meaning-making more broadly? Rovelli apparently tackles this question to great effect, arguing that with the advent of quantum physics, science underwent a revolution, but philosophers haven’t fully caught up, and he aims to offer them – and the rest of us – a crash course. Padavic-Callaghan finds his final lesson inspiring: “We face the world not as an ‘I’ faced with a ‘this’ but as a ‘me’ faced with a ‘you’. We are in the world. We are here. And we are home.” Rovelli is saying that seeing ourselves as abstract consciousnesses disconnected from the world and looking for truths beyond how the world touches us is a fool’s errand. “Interesting” barely touches the sides with Rovelli.

by Xand van Tulleken

“If anyone can drag the wellness industry into the light and make you laugh while doing it, it’s Xand van Tulleken. Beautifully researched, clear-eyed and very funny,” said mathematician Hannah Fry of Make Me Well: A quest to understand the confusing world of wellness. Xand van Tulleken (one of identical twin brothers, both doctors, and both writers) sets out to take a hard look at a sector already worth billions – and largely unregulated. He digs into everything from the supposed benefits of vitamin D supplements and turmeric tablets to wearable health technology, blood tests and so-called anti-ageing pills. And he finds that the claims made for the above by influencers, tech companies, podcasters and their ilk mostly don’t stand up to hard science. This may be unsurprising to regular readers, but it can’t be documented too many times as we face an extraordinary surge in innovation, transforming drug design, genomics and diagnostics that yields ever more complexity and confusion. So how do we stay healthy, facing such an onslaught – and naked corporate greed? Quite likely, we could do worse than start here…

by Graham Farmelo

What a challenge: write the first major biography of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, a man who faced enormous physical challenges just to stay alive beyond his twenties, who lived on to defy the odds and contribute pioneering science – some of which has only quite recently been worked through. Factor in both the Hawking estate (which supported the work) and the whole scientific world (especially many of the stars also interviewed by the biographer) all watching closely to see the result. But it would be surprising if veteran science writer Graham Farmelo dropped the ball in Hawking: His life and work. Hawking is the man, after all, who travelled the farthest reaches of the universe from his wheelchair, and ended up shedding important light on the mysteries of black holes and our understanding of the beginnings of the universe, not to mention selling more than 25 million copies globally of his A Brief History of Time. Kudos all round. 

by Jim Al-Khalili

Anyone who’s tangled with Carlo Rovelli’s elegiac approach to physics will come away enriched and full of wonder. His book The Order of Time, published in English in 2018, was a case in point – as much a meditation as an exposition. Jim Al-Khalili on the other hand is our go-to for a seriously comprehensive overview – plus his own share of lofty questions. �鶹��ý’s Joshua Howgego found his latest both excellent and meaty, as it tackled the various tricky problems in grappling with time. Al-Khalili, he wrote, is known as a “brilliant explainer of science and his focus here is explanation… He is at pains to be clear, fair and methodical.” Howgego found the earlier parts of On Time “supremely helpful” in teasing apart the deeply interconnected strands, separating them into two categories. First are the problems of “manifest time” (that’s how we experience it, flow, the sense of past and present), then, second, there is physical time (to do with how various fields of physics interpret time differently and how to resolve the tensions that result). Just one word of warning – it’s not a fat book, but it is dense. Enjoy.

by Seven Rasmussen

It is billed as “an entertaining tour of the seemingly simple formula guiding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence”, and the first part of the title certainly raises a laugh – Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake equation reveals the odds of life in the cosmos. The author Seven Rasmussen is an astrobiologist, so should know how to take the readers off on what is probably a rather irreverent trip round an equation that has become important to many within and around the scientific community: after all, who doesn’t want to know how likely ET really is? The Drake equation calculates the number of civilizations in our galaxy that humans could potentially contact and was first proposed in 1961 by another astrobiologist, Frank Drake. It begins, say the publishers, with well-known numbers for the rate of star formation in the Milky Way and the fraction of stars with planetary systems but gets more complex with a dive into areas such as the number of planets suitable for life, the fraction of suitable planets on which life appears and the likelihood of intelligent life emerging on a planet and becoming technological. The publishers say Cloudy with a Chance of Starships guides readers from the basics of astronomy to the frontiers of planetary science, calling it an “extraordinary book” which “shares a tantalizing vision of the dawning era of space exploration and invites enthusiasts of all ages to join in the discovery”. Buckle up then. 

by Patricia Nilsson

You might need a strong stomach for this one. Guilty Pleasure: The pornification of the internet, the economy, and everything else is billed as “the story of one of the most influential – and least examined – industries on earth” – that is pornography in the online age. Worth billions and generating, says the book, an almost unbelievable tenth of global internet traffic at peak times, it is changing our world at every level, from tech to work and culture to love and relationships – even our sense of self. Investigative journalist ���Ի��������reporter Patricia Nilsson draws on five years of reporting to show how the internet turned pornography into “a vast, secretive industry dominated by obscure owners, platform logic and profit at almost any cost”, as her publisher puts it.  Nilsson takes on what can only be a difficult, unpleasant task that few would countenance. Sounds like we may at least owe her our attention.

by Merritt Turetsky

There are few places on earth quite like bogs and boglands. Their ecology is truly unique, and they are home to abundant amphibian-eating plants and acid-flinging mosses. This is the world conjured by ecologist Merritt Turetsky in her book, Boglands: The hidden world of Earth’s most extraordinary ecosystems. She should know; Turetsky is a climate scientist, with hundreds of scientific articles on the importance of bogs to global climate. She advises governments, communities, and professional networks worldwide so they can understand the importance of bogs to the global climate. Above all, say the publishers of Boglands, “bogs are places of paradox, where past meets present in the remarkably preserved artefacts and bodies entombed in their depths, land meets water in an otherworldly landscape, and safety meets danger for those who dare to venture into the heart of the bog”. There’s a beguiling, if somewhat unnerving, invitation, and one bound to challenge how you see the natural world.

by Maggie Aderin and Sarah Wild

Insider books are often full of interesting knowledge you just can’t get at any other way – and James Webb’s Ancient Cosmos: A journey to the beginning of time certainly sounds like it will be one of them. Maggie Aderin has huge hands-on expertise and insights to share because she worked on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which, with its six-and-a-half-metre primary mirror, achieves a very high resolution. Working with science journalist Sarah Wild, the book promises to be an “essential guide to the latest James Webb images, revealing what these discoveries mean for our understanding of the universe and human history”. It’s quite a journey, beginning in our own galaxy and using the James Webb images as “route markers towards this cosmic dawn.. explaining some of cosmology’s greatest mysteries, from the shape of the universe to the nature of dark matter”. It will be interesting to see what it adds to her 2024 book, Webb’s Universe, reviewed in �鶹��ý, which featured JWST pictures including of the Carina and the Ring nebulae, The Pillars of Creation and the Cartwheel galaxy.

: by David R. Montgomery

With wildfire, flooding and El Niño dominating the news agenda, global food scarcity can hardly be far behind. Enter earth scientist David R. Montgomery and his new book, Regen: A new future for farming, food, and health. His message is that a century of conventional farming has left our planet with sick soil, accelerating the interlinked crises of food security, biodiversity loss, water pollution and climate change. But thankfully he has a plan in the shape of regenerative farming, honed from a decade of research, interviewing farmers and seeing how they restored degraded farms all around the world. ReGen, say the publishers, “breaks down common myths around conventional and organic farming, animal agriculture and plant-based diets to frame ten policy recommendations for sustainably nourishing the world”. It also looks to build on Growing a Revolution, a previous book by Montgomery. Reviewing it, New Scientist called Montgomery “one of our most eloquent and precise earth science communicators… [He] has a knack for opening our minds to large, critically important questions.”

by Sherry Turkle

As of 2025, nearly a third of US adults on AI for companionship and emotional support. This is the scary background to Sherry Turkle’s latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who we become when we talk to machines. She’s had years at MIT researching digital culture, writing 10 previous books exploring many facets of how technology has reshaped our outer and inner worlds, sometimes isolating us and leading us to “expect more from technology and less from each other”. Now, Turkle has an “urgent warning about how ever-increasing reliance on AI chatbots is eroding our capacity for empathy”, as we redefine human capacities for care, solitude and intimacy in terms of machines. She “evokes the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots” as they work hard to be our “‘perfect’ companion.. and ask for nothing in return”. Intimate machines, says Turkle, are producing a generation more alienated, depressed and lonely than ever – and less equipped to reverse course, as machine relationships offer no practice for getting along with people.

by Jillian Scudder, illustrated by Lily Fossett

You really need the subtitle here to get the whole, er, picture. The Universe: A graphic guide is unusual among general science books for adults, but it offers a perfectly serious, well-illustrated entry point to a topic that’s literally as big as it gets. Jillian Scudder, an astrophysicist and associate professor of physics and astronomy, is an ideal intergalactic tour guide, making sure that you work your way through the building blocks of life, the mysteries of dark matter, how stars are classified, the moon’s origins or why stars collapse. You need never worry about just what Cosmic Noon is either – the answer’s here, easily explained. And Lily Fossett’s illustrations are also gloriously unintimidating. Like a soothing cup of tea, The Universe is one of life’s instant small pleasures.

by Darian Leader

Given the current disquiet over the nature of autism, it may be a timely thing that Darian Leader, a psychoanalyst and writer, has titled his book Austisms. With Uta Frith, one of the original leaders in autism research, calling in May for a return to the drawing board in the face of rising levels of diagnosis, there are many issues muddying the waters. The radical split between the ways autism is perceived means that for some, it is a condition or a pathology, while for others it is an identity or a natural variation in human cognitive and behavioural diversity. Drawing on years of clinical experience and research, and the testimonies of autistic people, Leader’s book promises to be “an up-to-the minute account of the many indicative features of autism and how they have been assessed and treated over almost a century”, the publishers promise. Clarity amid the complexity and contradiction from an “illuminating guide” ought to be welcome.

by Stephen Ellcock, Helen Scales, Harriet Rix and more

If you love brilliant curation and stunning images of the natural world we need to save, then this compilation definitely sounds worth a shot – especially if you like your call-to-arms a bit glossy. The images range from tiny microscopic wonders and networks of fungi to medicinal plants and the animal species that share our world – drawn from every culture and era. The point, say the publishers, is that Ark “reveals the unique importance and beauty of the living things depicted and, in doing so, prompts readers to reevaluate humanity’s place in the natural world”. It’s been curated by Stephen Ellcock, who has made a name for himself as a curator, writer, researcher and an online collector of a huge number of images. He’s backed up by an impressive group of nature writers and academics: the foreword comes from Robert Macfarlane (Landmarks and Is a River Alive?), with essays helping to tie it all together by the likes of Harriet Rix (The Genius of Trees), marine biologist Helen Scales (What the Wild Sea Can Be ���Ի���The Brilliant Abyss) and birder Stephen Moss (Ten Birds That Changed the World).����

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Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Picking a winner

An epidemiologist walks into a casino – what happens next? Feedback is tempted to say he wins the black spot, or some other top-quality pun, but our editor is giving us a long, hard stare, so we had better get on with it.

Epidemiologist and mathematician was recently bemused to learn that the internet is making up stories about him. Two posts on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, told the same tale: that he had walked into a casino for the first time in his life and won “500K”. The currency wasn’t specified in one instance, while in another, it was US dollars.

One of the X posts even seems to quote Kucharski directly: “One evening I made 500K at a casino. I had never gambled before – but I’d spent my whole life studying probability theory, and I decided to test one formula in practice.” This quote apparently came from Kucharski’s debut popular science book (2016).

So far, so people making stuff up on social media. But mark the sequel: these stories at one point made their way into the AI Overview hosted at the top of Google Search when Kucharski looked up “kucharski 500k” – “with some extra AI invented detail”, . The overview added that Kucharski has made a “lifelong study of roulette dynamics” and that he won by “applying probability theory and physics-based insights to roulette wheels, similar to the principles studied by Claude Shannon”.

Feedback genuinely has no idea what that last bit is about. Shannon was a researcher who laid the theoretical groundwork for digital circuits and modern cryptography. He wasn’t known for spread-betting on roulette.

Yet again, AI systems are readily poisoned with nonsense from somewhere else – and that’s assuming the original X posts were written by humans in the first place, which nobody should assume at this point. It’s a particularly insidious example because Kucharski did write a book about gambling strategies, so the story is plausible enough to pass an initial sniff test: one needs actual knowledge of Kucharski’s life and work to know that it’s not true.

We will give the last word to Kucharski’s wife, entrepreneur Emily Kucharski. Responding to the claim that he had won half a million of some currency or another in one night, Emily , simply, “If only this were true”.

Carry on carrot

How big does an ocean wave need to be to tower over a roadside model of a carrot? This was our question on 29 July, after we saw a wave forecast from New Zealand’s weather service, claiming that “combined wave heights in eastern offshore waters could reach or exceed the height of the Ohakune Carrot”. The Ohakune Carrot proved to be a 7.5-metre-tall fibreglass sculpture placed outside the town of Ohakune to commemorate its carrot-growing industry.

The issue, Feedback felt, was whether or not the Ohakune Carrot was sufficiently well-known in New Zealand that it could be safely used as a unit of wave height. For instance, certain British landmarks could probably be used in a similar way in British weather forecasts, like the London Eye or Blackpool Tower, but was the Ohakune Carrot the New Zealand equivalent? Current and former residents of Aotearoa have now weighed in on this point.

“As an Aotearoan/NZer who hasn’t lived there in over 13 years,” writes Kirsten Cameron, “my immediate reaction and I imagine that of most in Aotearoa/NZ: Yeah quite high. The actual height is irrelevant, it’s enough information to know it’s high enough to be a problem!” Feedback isn’t sure we agree: depending on what kind of watercraft you are using, a 7.5 m wave might be trivial or dangerous. We recently had to transfer between a cruise ship and a zodiac boat, and we can assure you that a swell of a metre or so was enough to turn this into a tricky operation.

On which note, “third-generation NZer” Brenda Solon makes a much more dramatic point. “It occurred to me that while the Carrot might be only 7.5m tall, Ohakune is 582m above sea level,” she writes. “That would be a dangerous ocean wave indeed that could reach its top.” Fortunately, she notes, “this wave didn’t eventuate”, hence she is alive to email us with this thought.

Finally, and with a certain inevitability, Simon Bird suggests that a suitable unit of height for London-based phenomena would be the Camberwell Carrot. Initially, Feedback’s literal-minded brain protested: the notable thing about the Camberwell Carrot, as featured and indeed smoked in Withnail and I, was its width, not its length or height. Then we realised that Simon wasn’t talking about physical height.

Trees galore

Over the years, Feedback has encountered a number of examples of nominative determinism related to trees. Who can forget research forest products technologist Marlin E. Plank, or Tree Hunting author Paul Wood?

A couple more examples have trickled into our inbox over the past few months. First, Andy Maloney directs us to an article in The Guardian about volunteers who are trying to 8 million native trees in Scotland. Inevitably, these virtuous activities are being supervised by Roz Birch.

Meanwhile, Janet Dowle tells us: “I have just had a flyer put through my letterbox from a tree surgeon called Edward Wood.”

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

If there was a paucity of new science fiction in August, then September more than makes up for it, with everything from a long-awaited piece of speculative fiction from China Miéville to a short story collection paying tribute to the genius of Ursula K. Le Guin, with contributions from names including Ann Leckie and Kelly Link. Then there’s a new near-future novel from Station Eleven author Emily St John Mandel, a fresh sci-fi series from the bestselling Brandon Sanderson (and co-author Janci Patterson) and a strange but intriguing tale from one of my favourite writers, Naomi Alderman.

edited by Jonathan Strahan

This is something I absolutely cannot wait to read: a collection of 15 new short stories, inspired by the work of the one and only Ursula K. Le Guin and intended to honour her amazing legacy. The names contributing are super impressive, including Karen Joy Fowler and Charlie Jane Anders: what a treat.

by China Miéville

China Miéville is one of our great contemporary writers, master of the weird and author of masterpieces including The City and the City and Embassytown (my personal favourite). New book The Rouse comes in two whopping volumes, and its publisher promises it is a “decade- and continent-spanning epic of grief, global tumult, and grim conspiracy”. I can’t tell you for sure that it’s science fiction, as I’ve yet to tackle the two doorstopper tomes I’ve been sent, but I can predict it will definitely be weird, and speculative. Michael Moorcock, no less, calls it “completely without parallel”. Exciting times.

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by Garth Nix

In my younger days, I was an avid reader of Garth Nix’s young adult Old Kingdom series, so I’m interested to see what this excellent author’s first venture into sci-fi will be like. It’s a military space opera, set in a universe where interstellar war rages between Earth and Mars – and where for over two centuries, humans have travelled into space on huge sentient mountain ranges known as Massifs. Then the crew of the ship Sassafras starts asking questions about why the Massifs carry humans to the stars – and talking to the powerful avatars piloting the ships.

by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson

This is the first in the new Skyward Legacy series from the mighty Sanderson, co-written with Janci Patterson. It’s a complicated set-up: humans have warred against alien oppressors for decades. Now they’re free, and Arturo Mendez, leader of Skyward Flight, is sent on a mission to make contact with a settlement of humans isolated during the long war. But Blightfall, the planet he’s sent to, is more dangerous than he’d anticipated.

by Naomi Alderman

I am such a Naomi Alderman fan. We read her previous novel, The Future, with the �鶹��ý Book Club, and I loved it. This latest sounds much stranger and more speculative, but I’m here for anything from this author (her recent non-fiction book, Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today, is also a big recommendation from me). Anyway: the plot here is that the novelist Naomi Alderman, grieving the loss of her mother, sets up a wildlife camera in her parents’ garden, and takes the first photo of a new animal, the “mimmoth”. These creatures spread across the world, harmless apparently, but strangely intelligent – what will their eventual impact be?

by Emily St John Mandel

Emily St John Mandel, author of Station Eleven, is very good at thoughtful, near-future tales, and here comes another. Set in 2031, this is a world where America is in the middle of a civil war – but where something even stranger might be going on. Ari, newly out of prison, goes to a party in Los Angeles, where she meets someone who looks exactly like her friend, but isn’t… Living in Paris a long time later, Ari is haunted by what happened at the party, and by what might lie beyond the boundaries of her world. I’ve started this one, and it’s living up to its promise so far.

by Ken Liu

This collection of short stories from the award-winning speculative author moves between science fiction and fantasy – from techno-witches battling a world ruled by machines, to a consciousness on a starship watching the cosmos die and be reborn.

by Jo Martin

This new Doctor Who novel sees the Fugitive Doctor and Martha investigating a strange object in the British Museum. Apparently a medieval toy, it refuses to stay in one place, time or identity.

by Hernan Diaz

This novel by the heavyweight literary author Hernan Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, takes place centuries in the future, following the adventures of a pincher, someone who steals electricity from the grid and sells it on the black market. This pincher, an orphan, goes on to discover an experiment that, if she can power it, could “change the fabric of reality itself”.

by Chloe Benjamin

Laurel is a biologist turned dishwasher at an Antarctic research station. She doesn’t tell anyone in her new life about the tragedy which made her leave her old one – but she becomes convinced that the mysterious Arc that appears across the ice could lead her to a new world where she could turn back the clock. I’m halfway through this one and am loving the biology and the Antarctic side of it. Can’t wait to see how the physics holds up.

by James Islington

This sci-fi thriller is set in a world where the poor die young, and the rich live forever. Assassin Azure is usually hired to kill the richest of people – but then he’s given a job to protect one of them. The publisher promises that this fuses “the dystopian morality of cyberpunk with the explosive action of anime”, which sounds pretty cool.

by Jordan Prosser

Abby, suffering the burden of being in her 30s without having achieved any of her dreams, decides she has a new purpose: becoming the first person on Mars. Luckily for her, a Danish entrepreneur is planning a one-way mission.

by Ai Jiang

Jiang, who also has a story in the Ursula K. Le Guin anthology out this month, sets this piece of “science-fantasy” in a world where the royal advisors are plotting to overthrow emperor Yun. Yun’s sister Xilian escapes to the drowning continent of Opera, a place filled with strange tech and dreams of immortality.

by Adam Simcox

It’s 2026, and time travel is a luxury commodity. So, Rachel, who killed Oliver in a car crash in 1997 when she was 18, goes back to save him – only for the future to change in bad ways that may have something to do with Oliver, with whom she’s now fallen in love…

by Django Wexler

Taj is a scrapper, living in a junkyard and keeping his family alive with the scrap he finds there. His one salvation? A “construct”, or robot, that he built himself, and which he hopes will win big in the construct fighting circuits.

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If I could go back in time and tell my younger self something about life as a theoretical physicist, I might say: mind the gap between what’s exciting about physics and what the job actually is. My new book, , was born in part out of thinking about the physical questions that get pushed to the margins in professional physics. Big-picture questions like, what is the material nature of space? What is a quantum theory of time? It is very difficult to build a professional life working on these questions – even as books tout them as the most exciting ones in the universe.

I was recruited into the world of physics by the Errol Morris documentary about Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. Eventually, I read Hawking’s book of the same name and my impression of a working life in physics was that, for the most part, physicists think big thoughts about wonders of the universe every day.

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Today, I’m a tenured professor of physics at a major research institution, and a lot of my job is sending emails about bureaucratic things, like asking whether anyone can tell me the policy that is governing changes that the university is making to my grant. On a good day, I get to have conversations about science with the postdoctoral fellows I employ in my research group – but that’s not every day. And in either case, the kind of research that we can get grant funding to do is quite limited. The sort of work Hawking did on the nature of time is financially out of reach for most physicists, a situation that is getting worse as the UK and the US both slash and burn basic science budgets.

The Edge of Space-Time was born in this gap between what we say science is and the reality of living it. I began it at a moment of transition. I had just been awarded tenure, which, in the US, historically has meant my position is permanent, and I am free to research whatever interests me without worrying about being fired. At the moment my tenure became official, I was thinking about what I had given up to get there, the strategic choices I had made.

I gave up working on quantum gravity, for example, both because of racism I experienced as a PhD student and because the job prospects weren’t good. I never took a class where we were asked to think deeply about time, space and the fundamental nature of space-time. Mostly, I learned to calculate and pursue questions that were broadly agreeable to the physics community, like understanding the nature of dark matter. And while I think these questions are important and interesting, they live at a kind of margin that physicists are pushed to by economic and social forces that determine which questions we can be paid to pursue and which we won’t be.

When I began working on the book in 2023, I was in the midst of a five-year stint working in US science policy, alongside colleagues from around the world (mostly the UK, Europe and Canada). As I learned more about the politics of science at the government level, it became clear to me that particle physics and cosmology were in trouble. Politicians were no longer sold on the fundamental importance of our research and didn’t see how it was beneficial to the capitalist economy or the military, which historically is how that support has been rationalised. The cultural arguments – that a well-cultured civilisation does things like try to understand the universe – didn’t seem impactful at all. And the general public, struggling with climate change and economies that don’t serve the 99 per cent, couldn’t see how we had anything to add.

I could see that we were about to be on the margins in a new way. And so The Edge of Space-Time became not just a return to my roots and the big-picture questions that once drove me, it also became a plea: don’t let me be the last of my kind. The cuts that are being made to science in the UK and the US right now seem like a political problem that is easily remedied, but it is more complicated than that. Even one year where there is a gap in funding means we haemorrhage workers who may never return. As those researchers leave, they take with them knowledge. Because the sciences work through apprenticeship, if there is no senior instructor to pass on knowledge, it doesn’t matter if there is money and an apprentice waiting in the wings.

With The Edge of Space-Time, I take readers on a journey through huge questions, like why does my favourite physics experiment foist the structures of quantum physics on us? And will we ever know what space-time really is, or is it always just going to be a useful mathematical construct that allows us to calculate motion in environments where gravity plays a significant role, like near black holes?

While thinking through the physics, I also try to make the case for why any healthy democracy needs people who live at the edge of what is known and what is unknown – the keepers of these cosmic stories that have fascinated humans for millennia. I make the case that, like poetry, physics gives us a viewpoint on the universe that we need because it is our ancestral inheritance. I also argue that spending time with what feels strange about physics can help prepare us to better reckon with difficult political questions.

Given the crises we face – genocides, climate change, attacks on transgender people – we need our critical faculties now more than ever. Thinking a bit about the various edges of space-time, like black holes and cosmic event horizons, can help us build the better world we need.

by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Canongate Books) is the September read for the �鶹��ý Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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The �鶹��ý Book Club moved from a far-future space opera in July’s read, Claire North’s Slow Gods, to a much nearer future on Earth in our read for August. Peter Heller’s takes place after a flu pandemic has wiped out the majority of Earth’s population, and follows the story of Hig, a lonely pilot, his dog Jasper – and their somewhat problematic neighbour Bangley. If that pandemic-struck world sounds like Peter was riffing off the real events of 2020, he wasn’t: he wrote it well before covid, and (as he wrote in an essay for the book club) found it extremely eerie to find life imitating art, as the world shut down around us six years ago.

I have to start with an admission: I am a big Peter Heller fan. He was an adventure writer and journalist before turning to fiction, and I really enjoyed his thrillers The River and The Guide for their unique blend of gorgeous nature writing and heart-in-your-mouth survival. Somehow, I’d never got round to reading The Dog Stars, and when I discovered that it was about to be released as a film by Ridley Scott – and that it was a piece of post-apocalyptic fiction – I couldn’t wait to read it with our book club.

I wasn’t surprised to also love this novel. It combined all my favourite things: wilderness survival, a post-disaster world, lovely writing – and a Very Good Dog. I was fascinated to learn, in Peter’s essay, how he wrote the novel cold – no initial research, no planning: “It was as if Hig were on the other side of a campfire on an October night, with the wind blowing the flames around, telling me what had happened to him a few years before. I wrote in a white heat. I was constantly surprised, awed, devastated by what happened. I’d have tears dripping off my chin onto the coffee shop table.” In our interview, Peter also told me about how he decided on the nature of the apocalypse that would affect his world, and what it was like to see his characters appear on the big screen, courtesy of Scott – spoiler alert, there were tears.

There was more of a mixed response to The Dog Stars from book club members. Karen Warren “found the first half a bit tedious, and probably wouldn’t have carried on if it hadn’t been a book club choice”. But ultimately she was glad she did, and “couldn’t put it down towards the end”. “I loved the way that there was hope even in a seemingly impossible environment,” she wrote on , describing the novel as “a testament to the triumph of the human spirit”.

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The writing in this book is very distinctive – jumpy and disjointed, reflecting Hig’s state of mind. Readers entered into an interesting debate about the reason for this. “I read it as him losing some of his expressive power while living with Bangley: not much real conversation, not much novelty, a lot of silence and repetition,” wrote warsaw_sun. “There’s a suggestion of fever in his history, is that supposed to have affected his language, or is it just that ‘men of action’ try to cut the descriptions right down following Hemingway?” wondered Alan_P.

Overall, Alan was not a fan. “I’m sure a lot of people will enjoy the book – but for me the view of human nature is just too grim and not realistic,” he wrote. He compared The Dog Stars to Tim Winton’s Juice – another book club read that is also set post-apocalypse, this time a climate one. “What bothers me is how these stories naturalise the idea that the only way to survive is to become the very kind of armed, unchallengeable patriarch that helped create the violence in the first place,” he wrote. “As humans we do well when we cooperate and badly when we don’t. Perhaps I wouldn’t survive a holocaust, but I don’t think empathy is weakness, I don’t think that kindness is naivety, and I don’t want to read any more dystopias.”

For Kelly, The Dog Stars was “not so much an apocalypse story (the how and the why) but a people story”; for Barbara Howe, it was “as much an old-fashioned Western as it is science fiction, if not more so”. “As in, isolated men with guns defending their claim and their women against marauders.” Dee55, meanwhile, was left pondering the very nature of science fiction. “I’ve been meaning to ask other readers here – does anything set in the future automatically count as science fiction? Or does the epidemic make it science fiction because that’s not a known type?”

It’s a great question! For me, science fiction is a broad and generous church, ranging from the science-light writing of the likes of The Dog Stars or another book club read, Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time, to the hard sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars and the space opera of Slow Gods. Next month, however, defining sci-fi isn’t something the book club will need to worry about…

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