Skip to main content

Timeswitch (SF) - John Gribbin *****

This is one of the best science fiction books I've read in ages - it could have been written for me, combining as it does hard science, an element of historical fiction and some mind-boggling twists. It even nearly achieves something that had seemed impossible.

John Gribbin is one of the UK's top writers of popular science books, but he proves here that he can put his hand to fiction writing with masterful ease. In Timeswitch, a device is discovered under Stonehenge that provides a wormhole style portal into the past. But it can only achieve jumps in units of 300 years, and the further back you go, the less time you have in the place you visit before you are dragged back to the present. The book's present is an alternative world, where scientific discoveries were made much earlier than in our reality (Galileo comes up with special relativity, for instance), as a result of which we were hit by global warming much earlier and the present is almost uninhabitable. The scientists working on the portal try to use it to change the past and save the environment with fascinating consequences.

There were so many things I liked here. It was well written and kept me pushing on to discover more. The way Gribbin handles the possibility that changing the past might result in different futures and hence different versions of the time travellers is brilliant - reminiscent of the multi-layered delights of one of my favourite films, Inception (this would make a great movie or TV series). The historical periods are well conceived and I was impressed with way the author plays with the different people in the past to construct a new history of science.

That's where the 'nearly achieves something that had seemed impossible' comes in. I have always thought that it should be possible to write a good piece of fiction that also gets across some real science in an effective way. This is by far the best book I've ever seen for doing this - with the only problem that the terminology used is not the ones we use, and the historical context, so important in popular science, is here all fictional.

However, this doesn't stop the book being a superb piece of science fiction (with historical fiction touches). And even when you think you can see what's coming, there's a clever twist that changes things entirely. If I have any complaint it's only that I suspect in a real alternative history like this far fewer of the familiar names would crop up in science, because modern physics has got so mathematical that most of great physicists in history simply couldn't handle it. I'm thinking particularly of Cavendish, who is given an important place in developing advanced physics, but as far as I'm aware had no mathematical ability. It's a minor niggle that wouldn't bother anyone who wasn't a popular science or history of science nerd.


Paperback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Philip Ball - How Life Works Interview

Philip Ball is one of the most versatile science writers operating today, covering topics from colour and music to modern myths and the new biology. He is also a broadcaster, and was an editor at Nature for more than twenty years. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media and has written many books on the interactions of the sciences, the arts, and wider culture, including Bright Earth: The Invention of Colour, The Music Instinct, and Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. His book Critical Mass won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. Ball is also a presenter of Science Stories, the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science. He trained as a chemist at the University of Oxford and as a physicist at the University of Bristol. He is also the author of The Modern Myths. He lives in London. His latest title is How Life Works . Your book is about the ’new biology’ - how new is ’new’? Great question – because there might be some dispute about that! Many

Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work - Roger Highfield ****

It is easy to suspect that a biographical book from highly-illustrated publisher Dorling Kindersley would be mostly high level fluff, so I was pleasantly surprised at the depth Roger Highfield has worked into this large-format title. Yes, we get some of the ephemera so beloved of such books, such as a whole page dedicated to Hawking's coxing blazer - but there is plenty on Hawking's scientific life and particularly on his many scientific ideas. I've read a couple of biographies of Hawking, but I still came across aspects of his lesser fields here that I didn't remember, as well as the inevitable topics, ranging from Hawking radiation to his attempts to quell the out-of-control nature of the possible string theory universes. We also get plenty of coverage of what could be classified as Hawking the celebrity, whether it be a photograph with the Obamas in the White House, his appearances on Star Trek TNG and The Big Bang Theory or representations of him in the Simpsons. Ha

The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson ****

This is a curate's egg - sections are gripping, others rather dull. Overall the writing could be better... but the central message is fascinating and the book gets four stars despite everything because of this. That central message is that, as the subtitle says, science can't ignore human experience. This is not a cry for 'my truth'. The concept comes from scientists and philosophers of science. Instead it refers to the way that it is very easy to make a handful of mistakes about what we are doing with science, as a result of which most people (including many scientists) totally misunderstand the process and the implications. At the heart of this is confusing mathematical models with reality. It's all too easy when a mathematical model matches observation well to think of that model and its related concepts as factual. What the authors describe as 'the blind spot' is a combination of a number of such errors. These include what the authors call 'the bifur