Andrew Smith: Moon Dust I was no more than seven years old, but I can still remember the towering model of a Saturn V rocket in my bedroom. I can still remember, like it was yesterday, or even earlier today, going to Woolworths with five shillings and elevenpence in my pocket (those old copper pennies were heavy) to buy an Airfix kit of the Lunar Module, whence the Apollo astronauts disgorged onto the surface of the Moon. So, so much has changed. Those copper pennies, even Woolworths, are long gone, along with the Apollo space program. But the memory is still green. It all happened in a heated rush, between 1969 and 1972 (the time it took for Led Zeppelin to release their first four albums). But it’s been more than half a century since Apollo 17, the last mission to place a human foot on the Moon. Only twelve people have ever left their bootprints there. All were American, white and male, and they are dying off. When journalist Andrew Smith sought to catch up with as many of them as he could, only nine (as of 2005) were left. None of them was able to answer Smith’s question — what was it like to stand on the Moon? — and have variously suffered in the years since for what seems to be an existential inarticulacy, a failure to quite live up to an experience they can never quite express. To be sure, they have groped for answers in various ways. Some have got religion, of various sorts, from conventional Christianity through Buddhism to New Age philosophy. Others have gone into politics, or business, with varying success. One, Alan Bean (Apollo 12)  has become an artist, trying, and trying again, to capture the moment on the Moon in paint. Almost all suffered a fearful personal toll — the divorce rate among Apollo astronauts was huge. What was it all for, then? What justified the immense cost (though much less than the war in ‘nam)? The personal sacrifice? For Smith this is a personal story — as Apollo will ever be to all those little boys with models of rockets in their bedrooms — and we get a lot of personal anecdotes as well as documentary. He even falls into the trap (as I did once, pointed out by a reviewer of one of my own books) of citing the model of rental car he was driving as he sought his ageing and often reticent interviewees. His conclusion was that Apollo might have, in part, been many things. An urge to put one over the Soviets, certainly. A desire to explore new technology, possibly. A wish to keep people employed in the aerospace sector in three states with large numbers of voters (Florida, Texas and California), cynically. But what it was, most of all, was theatre, spectacle on a grand scale. Spectacle never to be repeated. More than 400 people have since gone into space, but never more than low-Earth orbit. Only the Apollo astronauts ventured further. There are those — a minority, but a sizeable one — that thinks the whole thing, the Moon landings and attendant hoopla — was an elaborate hoax. Perhaps it was all a dream. Even before my Airfix models, I came across a book in my elementary school library. It was called You Will Go To The Moon. Funny, most of one’s dreams are forgotten soon after waking. A few, though, remain vivid.

Mike Gayle: A Song of Me and You I feel I owe author Mike Gayle one. After all, he was on the judging panel for last year’s Royal Society Science Book Prize that selected my recent tome as the winner. Thanks Mr Gayle! I spotted one of his novels on my sister’s sofa so I thought I’d dive in, and selected this one more or less randomly as an audiobook. I had no idea that it was a romantic novel, probably of the genre once patronisingly called ‘chick lit’, but it was very enjoyable for all that, and I looked forward to a daily dose of it while walking the dogs each morning. Two months before the story opens, Helen, a 45-year-old, part-time primary school teacher from Manchester, is deserted by her husband Adam for a younger model, leaving her with two teenage children. The story opens just after Adam has taken the teenagers away on a camping trip. Helen, deflated, sublimates her anger and frustration in housework before the doorbell rings again. At the door is Ben, who just happens to be the lead singer of the world’s biggest rock band. He is hiding from the press and seeking a break from his roller coaster career. He asks Helen if he can lie low for a few hours. But why would Ben turn up at Helen’s door: her, of all people? Well, there’s more to this than meets the eye. Ben and Helen grew up together and were childhood sweethearts before events took each of them in their own separate directions. It’s a good summer read (indeed, I was looking for something suitably light) and it is enviably well constructed, with some twists subverting what might otherwise be a predictable plot. My only criticism is one of style. There are a lot of sentences that begin with phrases starting with a present participle, like this: ‘thinking that this book review was going on too long, Henry sought a convenient ending’. And there were similar sentences of this form: ‘as Henry was winding up his book review, his thoughts wandered to the possibility of making another cup of coffee’. But nothing that a sharp-eyed editor couldn’t have sorted out.

Andy Weir: Artemis You might remember Andy Weir as the author of The Martian, a rather fine near-future SF adventure about an astronaut stranded on Mars, and the mission sent to rescue him. It was made into a heartwarming motion picture film magic-lantern production starring Matt Damon. A characteristic that set The Martian (book and magic-lantern production) apart from much recent SF was its entirely unpretentious style. It was hard SF in the old-fashioned sense. That is, the plot turned around entirely believable and achievable science, without resorting to hyperspace or quasi-mystical woo. The same is true for Artemis, Weir’s second novel. This is set in the eponymous city (really, no more than a small western frontier town) on the Moon, a short distance from the landing site of Apollo 11 (which has its own visitor centre) and concerns the exploits of Jazz Bashara, a porter and sometime smuggler of contraband. One of Jazz’s contraband clients asks her to perform an audacious act of industrial sabotage that propels her into a nail-biting adventure. So as well as being a good old-fashioned SF romp, it’s a great thriller. Weir gets a gold star and a tick for diversity points (Jazz is female and Muslim; Artemis is a wholly owned subsidiary of a Kenyan aerospace company), and even more gold stars and ticks for the hard science (the plot turns, in places, on quirks of  industrial chemistry). But most of all, because it’s a well-knit, pacy read. Highly recommended.

Adam Kay: Undoctored I am sure that you’ll both (if you are in the UK at least) have heard of Adam Kay, a hospital gynaecologist who was so beaten down by the relentless pressure of working for the National Health Service (NHS) that he quit and became a writer instead. He turned his considerable talents to a best-selling memoir, This Is Going To Hurt, which was made into an affecting TV series starring soon-to-be national treasure Ben Whishaw (yes, him, the voice of Paddington Bear). This Is Going To Hurt (and its modest sequel, The Nightshift Before Christmas) were, in places, laugh-out-loud funny, though often in the dark-tinged humour that clinicians use to get through each endless, blood-soaked shift. Undoctored is a collection of further anecdotes from Kay’s medical life, mixed in with recollections from his subsequent often hand-to-mouth existence as a jobbing stand-up comic and writer, until he made it big with T. I. G. T. H. If you have read T. I. &c., you’ll know what to expect — or you’ll think you do — but be prepared. If you thought that some parts of T. I. &c were dark, then Undoctored is as dark as The Dark Lord Sauron teaming up with Voldemort to track down an eyeless black cat in a coal cellar during a power cut. While wearing sunglasses. At night. Snippets of Undoctored occasion a wry smile: whole scads are almost too hard to read. To say that Undoctored is confessional is accurate, but hardly gives the flavour of say, Kay’s pages-long account of suffering from an eating disorder, or of being raped. To put things down on paper is brave. To let such experiences out of doors deserves a medal. Beneath the thin (and often absent) humour is a serious message, and it’s the same as that hammered home in T. I. &c. And that is that many health-care professionals suffering from overwork, stress, fatigue and a range of problems possibly connected (or exacerbated) by the above, do so in silence, fearful of letting the side down. What should change? To say that the NHS is underfunded, as Kay does explicitly, is a given, but then, it’s in the nature of organisations such as the NHS always to be underfunded. What Kay says, more often, but not quite so directly, is that what needs to change is an attitude, found among doctors themselves. Some senior doctors, or consultants, come over as arrogant and entitled, and assume that because they had to suck it up at medical school (and before that, at their public school, and, before that, at home) then everyone else must do so, too. The selection of medical students should also change. To get into medical school one not only has to demonstrate stellar academic ability but still have time for a range of hobbies and voluntary work. This is all commendable, but do such things automatically translate into being a good doctor? Kay thinks not, but does not offer any alternative prescription. As a wise doctor once wrote, ‘h9:{(*&^SH\ £$%^(•¶∞’.

  Robert Harris: Act of Oblivion By now you’ll both know that I am a fan of Harris, writer of peerless historical thrillers (Fatherland, Pompeii); so-so SF (The Fear Index, The Second Sleep); and the best novel about old men in frocks you’ll ever read (Conclave). This one concerned a period of history about which I knew little – the English Civil War and its aftermath. The early 17th Century was a period of pronounced religious strife in Europe. Europe saw the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), in terms of population loss and displacement, one of the most destructive conflicts to hit the continent. In Britain, religious and political turmoil led to the execution of the king, Charles I,  and a decade or so in which England was a republic governed occasionally by parliament, but mostly by the fiat of a military dictator, Oliver Cromwell. After Cromwell’s death England reverted to being a monarchy under Charles II. Parliament forgave all those who’d participated in the interregnum under the so-called Act of Oblivion: all except for those men who’d signed the death warrant of the late king. Harris’ novel concerns the exploits of Richard Naylor, the manhunter charged with tracking down the regicides and bringing them to justice (which was — be warned — unbelievably gory, and described in lurid detail). Two of the regicides, the puritan Ned Whalley and his even more millennial son-in-law William Goffe, managed to elude his grasp by escaping to New England. Just about everything in the novel really happened — Whalley and Goffe were real people. The only fiction is the character of Nayler himself. And given that you can look up all the events, and get some idea of the ending, it’s a testament to Harris’ skill that he keeps the pages turning nonetheless.

Richard Osman: The Last Devil to Die Tucked away in the section of the shop labelled ‘Cosy Crime’ you’ll find the sensationally successful thrillers by man-on-the-telly Osman. The Last Devil to Die is the fourth, after — in order — The Thursday Murder Club, The Man who Died Twice, and The Bullet that Missed. If you were thinking that he sells shedloads of novels simply because he’s the man on the telly, you’d be wrong. Each one is devilishly plotted; beautifully wrought; contains characters you can believe in and root for; and are also very funny. In short, they deserve all the acclaim that has been heaped upon them. If you’ve been living on a remote asteroid for the past few years, the novels concern the crime-fighting exploits of a seemingly ill-assorted group of pensioners living in an upscale retirement village in Sussex, England. There’s Ron, a pugnacious former trade union leader and West Ham supporter; Ibrahim, a semi-retired psychiatrist who’s definitely on the spectrum; Elizabeth, a former MI6 operative who still has Contacts; and Joyce, a chatty ex-nurse who’s always there to solve all problems with bakery products, and through whose eyes we see much of the action. And that’s really all you need to know. Osman sidesteps the pitfall that could so easily befall novels like this — that one could easily get bored of the schtick of doddery senior citizens standing up to (and outwitting) robbers, drug lords, jewel thieves and assorted lowlives, not to mention the police. He does this by deepening the characterisation with each novel by discussing the pains, problems and consolations of age. Without giving anything away, The Last Devil To Die discusses Alzheimer’s Disease in some depth, from the perspective of a sufferer and those looking on helplessly, in a way that is both sensitive and deeply moving. I read the first three in the series in print: the fourth I listened to as an audiobook, read by Fiona Shaw.

R. F. Kuang: Babel Rebecca F Kuang is the new wunderkind of fantasy literature. Babel is her fourth novel out of five, and she is meant to be working on a sixth, if she has not already been crushed under the weight of plaudits, awards, award nominations, advanced degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, and her current work towards a doctorate at Yale. And she’s still only 27. The story unfolds in a fantasy Oxford in the 1830s, where the jewel in the Oxfordian crown is the Royal Institute of Translation — the Babel of the title — the tallest structure in the city and the foundation of the wealth of the British Empire. It is here that translators inscribe, on silver bars, words in various languages and close cognates in English. But no word in one language ever has a precise equivalent in another, and the magic invoked by the ineffable gap in between – the, um, je ne sais quoi, if you like – is used to make steam-powered ships sail faster, rifles shoot truer, carriages run more safely, gardens bloom more prettily, looms spin more quickly, and massive buildings stand tall on otherwise wobbly foundations. Anything, in fact. The Empire runs on silver bars from Babel. And Babel runs on gifted young people brought from all corners of the world to enrich its stock of languages and translations. People such as Robin Swift, rescued by a mysterious guardian from a cholera-infested slum in Canton and brought up to swell Babel’s ranks. But as Robin grows up, he learns that he is a pawn in at least two great games — to maintain the Empire, or to bring it crashing down. It’s a great premise, the writing is lucid and the characterisation is realistic and sensitive. However, the book has its problems. First is the inevitable Harry-Potterishness of a lonely boy finding his feet in what is effectively a special and magical school. Second, it’s that although supposedly set in the 1830s the characters all speak in a very contemporary idiom, which is occasionally jarring. Compared with, say, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, another magical period piece, the tone seems anachronistic. Third, the author loves to show off her considerable erudition in long expositions about etymology. I found this fascinating, but some might find that it holds up the action. Fourth are the copious footnotes, in which the author threatens to wreck the suspension of disbelief by telling us her opinions on events in the real world, as opposed to her fantasy creation. Fifth (and this is my main bugbear) is that it is utterly and quite unashamedly sanctimonious. The British Empire is rapacious, racist, ruthless, misogynistic and exploitative. So it was, but to be harangued about this on every page becomes wearisome. And nothing good can ever be said about any white person who is not working class, especially if they are male. There is virtually no humour: the author obviously missed the parallel with the Peoples’ Front of Judea (in Monty Python’s Life of Brian) when a small and seemingly ineffectual group of characters is plotting the downfall of a vast and powerful empire. And I swear that there is a conversation where one character declares to another, in almost as many words, about the Violence Inherent in the System, a line straight out of that other Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I could have done with a lot more of the fantasy and a good deal less of the social justice warfare. By the end I was left wondering about the source of the author’s deep well of animus. Then I read the acknowledgements, in which she thanks the people ‘who made those strange, sad months in Oxford bearable’. There’s someone on the banks of the Cherwell whose ears are burning.

 Ian Stewart: Loophole  Many will be familiar with Ian Stewart as a mathematician and one of the few of his profession who can explain maths cogently to regular mortals. Many more will know him as an honorary wizard of the Unseen University and co-author (with Terry Pratchett and Jack Cohen, late and lamented both) of the four volumes of The Science of Discworld. But he’s also a considerable author of SF on his own account, and Loophole is his latest. It’s a rambunctious romp involving super-powerful but dotty aliens, a terrifying plague of Von Neumann machines, and a clash of two universes that are not quite as different as they first appear. This is more than just Hard SF. Or Wide-Screen Baroque. With a fiendishly clever plot so twisty it will turn your brain into a Möbius pretzel, it verges on Wrap-Around Rococo. The science is absolutely Out There, but with Stewart as your guide you can be confident that it’s reliable, in one universe or another. At the same time the characters are human, humane (especially the aliens) and there is a generous dose of humour to lighten what might otherwise be a heavy load. If you’ve read The Science of Discworld, or any of Stewart’s books with Jack Cohen (such as Figments of Reality), you’ll know what to expect. DISCLAIMER: I provided an endorsement for the author and received a pre-publication copy.

Dimitra Fimi: The World of J. R. R. Tolkien I don’t often listen to audiobooks. However, having listened to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion courtesy of Audible, this one came up as a suggestion. It’s a series of lectures by Dr Dimitra Fimi, Senior Lecturer in Fantasy and Children’s Literature at the University of Glasgow. The course covers Tolkien’s life and works and delves fairly deeply into such matters as his invented languages; his sources among the mythic traditions of Europe; the nature of evil; his influence on popular culture; and the sometimes vexed questions of race and gender raised by Tolkien’s work. If you have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and possibly The Silmarillion, but haven’t had the energy (or desire) to get stuck into the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth and the other intimidating edifices of Tolkien’s work edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien, his son and indefatigable literary executor, this course is the easiest and most entertaining way to become ridiculously well-informed about the life and works of the Great Hobbitmonger. DISCLAIMER: the author is a personal friend who I’ve bumped into at various Tolkien-related events.

Michael Cobley: The Ascendant Stars This is the final episode in the author’s Humanity’s Fire space-opera trilogy. You’ll find parts one and two reviewed here and here, respectively. By now the redoubtable and horny-handed residents of the colony planet Darien find themselves assaulted on many fronts, not only by the forces described in the earlier episode, but also some completely new ones. It’ll be no surprise to learn that everything turns out well for the good guys in the end — with the help, I regret to say, of a few McGuffins seemingly plucked from hyperspace the air — but the roll-call of characters, civilisations, plots, counter-plots and counter-counter plots has by now grown so long and the story arcs so labyrinthine that I quite lost track of what was going on and in the end had to simply let myself get carried along for the ride. The ride, such as it was, was a lot of fun, but at times I just longed for it all to end. One can have, it seems, too much of a good thing.

William Boyd: Any Human Heart I first came across William Boyd with Brazzaville Beach, a novel about infighting among scientists studying chimpanzee behaviour, and which features entirely appropriately on the LabLit List of novels featuring scientists in their natural habitats. The behaviour in Any Human Heart is, however, entirely and poignantly human. The book consists of extracts from the diaries of Logan Gonzago Mountstuart (1906-1991), a literary figure so insignificant that he is entirely fictional, for all that he rubs up against real people such as Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor during his long and eventful life. For me it has echoes of Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham in its evocation of creative talent just trying to burst through the conventions of their times, not always successfully. It’s a testament to Boyd’s skill that you can’t help but like Mountstuart, despite the fact that he is an adulterous, philandering, voyeuristic drunk. At various times a nerdy schoolboy, celebrated author, art dealer, war correspondent, impoverished pensioner, urban guerrilla (failed), English lecturer, columnist on arts and letters, prisoner of war, paedophile (inadvertent), boulevardier and spy, he is both betrayer and betrayed. His adventurous life encompasses four continents and almost the entire twentieth century. Perhaps it’s the twentieth century that’s the real protagonist, a period that saw perhaps the greatest changes in the entire history of our species,  full of unparalleled marvels and horrors, buffeting its human cargo with haymakers of contingency and fateful swerves like no other, and so richly documented in this affecting novel.

One of the aspects of how my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science) has been received which surprises me the most, is the interest shown in the chapter on women who managed to be active in the scientific arena in centuries past. As an example, this came up in the interview I did for Nature Podcasts. I felt it was necessary to include these early women as a backdrop to the more recent past and to examine how matters have evolved, but there seems more enthusiasm for discussing these historical figures than I expected. That is all the more interesting to me as an early (pre-publication) reader said the chapter should be removed completely, as either not containing enough information or too much.

I have written previously about how I got introduced to Mary Astell, who features strongly in this historical chapter. Known as an early feminist and philosopher, who moved in the literati circles in late seventeenth century London, I was fascinated to be offered a chance to take a peek at her books and accompanying marginalia in Magdalene College’s Library, from which it was clear she had an unexplored interest in the science of the day. One of the post-publication interviewers asked me, on the back of this, whether I thought that there were many such scientifically active, or at least scientifically interested women who we know nothing about, but who are still waiting to be ‘discovered’.

Sadly, I suspect the answer is no. Whereas, as I have also written about before, it would seem that more and more female composers from past centuries are being unearthed and their music given due prominence in concert and media playlists, I don’t think significant numbers of female ‘scientists’ (bearing in mind that term only came into being in the nineteenth century) are likely to be rediscovered in the same way. Even if, lurking in some bibliophile’s library, or an august institution’s collections, are additional books with annotations which some gentlewoman had penned, similar to the sort Astell had engaged in, how likely are they to be identified and put into wider circulation, particularly if they are not part of a wider group of books of known provenance.

Furthermore, had there been such books, even if in small numbers, it seems to me they are likely to have been long since disposed of, if the woman in question was not a personage of some stature: a duchess perhaps, or the wife of someone who is well known today. But so many women of the seventeenth and eighteenth century would have had educations that ill-equipped them for forays into tomes relating to science, particularly as much would have been written in Latin, or as in Mary Astell’s annotated copy of Descartes, French or another foreign language. There may have been women who discussed scientific matters of the day with male family members in their homes, but I’m not convinced they would they have had the (foreign language) literacy and sufficient freedom from domesticity to have the time and space needed to delve into such books and write their comments?

Education for girls along these lines would have been uncommon, as not likely to lead to a good marriage and a robust financial position. Blue-stockings and salons were not a feature of the general squirearchy or wider middle classes and educating women in scientific matters would probably have been limited for most to a smattering of botany, aided by some gentle painting in watercolours of the plants they found. As an aside, I cannot imagine how young girls didn’t get completely stultified by a diet of sewing samplers, toying with the harpsichord/pianoforte and a gentle walk around the shrubbery (or perhaps I have been reading too much Jane Austen or, after a bad day at work, the lighter tales of Georgette Heyer).

Come the Victorian era, of course, things began to change, with schools that actually educated young women opening up, rather than one of the kind harshly depicted in Jane Eyre which was little more than a place to dispose of inconvenient children. Myself, I went to a school founded in 1871 for girls. And the fact that it was called Camden School for Girls (still a very good school) is indicative of its market: tradesmen’s children, as opposed to its sister school also founded by Frances Mary Buss, North London Collegiate School for Ladies. Interestingly, whereas the former has left its name unchanged since its foundation, the last word in the name of the latter has disappeared from public view. The school founded by Buss’s school contemporary Dorothea Beale* retains that same word in its name: Cheltenham Ladies College. To some, these distinctions matter, now as then.

In my book I identified a few women who had – for instance through virtue of family connections (Caroline Herschel) or place in society (Emilie du Châtelet) – been able to make inroads into the world of science. If you want a wider diet, I would point you towards books like Patricia Fara’s Pandora’s Breeches. In this book she refers to Bathsua Makin, a woman who taught the Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Charles I. She was ardent in her calls for educational reform for women. She noted that being a housewife required many skills that might be deemed ‘scientific’. As Fara quotes from Makin:

‘To buy Wooll and Flax, to die Scarlet and Purple, requires skill in Natural Philosophy. To consider a Field, the quantity and quality, requires knowledge in Geometry, To plant a Vineyard requires understanding in Husbandry. She could not Merchandise without Knowledge in Arithmetick…’

In many ways those statements are as true in the modern world as when Makin wrote them in the seventeenth century. You’re not going to get very far in any field without ‘Arithmetick’, hence Rishi Sunak’s desire for everyone to study maths till 18. Perhaps less obviously, but relevant to getting on in today’s job market, if you are stuck at home with domestic ties such as small children, you are undoubtedly going to get better at multitasking, creativity (think Blue Peter and one hundred things you can do with a loo roll and some string) and (small) people management. These things may be hard for a woman to put in a job application, even allowing for a so-called Narrative CV, but they are nevertheless invaluable skills you may be harder pushed to pick up in a lab setting. Being a good scientist is not all about expertise gained at the bench.

*Celebrated in the anonymous poem I well remember from my school days:

Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts do not feel.
How different from us
Miss Beale and Miss Buss.