Over a hundred years from now, after a series of devastating biological wars, North America is struggling to hang on to even third-world status.

A young mathematical prodigy called Menelaus Montrose grows up in what used to be Texas. He works at a [...]]]>

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Over a hundred years from now, after a series of devastating biological wars, North America is struggling to hang on to even third-world status.

A young mathematical prodigy called Menelaus Montrose grows up in what used to be Texas. He works at a variety of menial and sometimes dangerous jobs. While acting as a paid duellist for a firm of lawyers, he is recruited by a man who might just save the world. A spaceship is being built to cross the 50 light years to another star, to harvest the antimatter discovered there and to read the runes on an ancient, orbiting monument left by a Galaxy-spanning super-race.

But Montrose is as reckless and foolish as he is mathematically gifted, and he is barely out of Earth’s orbit before he injects himself with an untested concoction that will amplify his intelligence well beyond human levels. The next thing he knows, he is back on Earth, 150 years later, and everything has changed.

Count to a Trillion is essentially a utopian sci-fi novel about a future society created by adventurer-scientists who brought stability and order to a world fractured and failing after almost destroying itself. Yet like most utopias, this version of global peace and world government is held together by duct tape and wishful thinking, as Montrose slowly discovers.

One of the great pleasures of reading utopian sci-fi is that one sees the author play with wild and exciting possibilities, to present futures we might one day have to live, and to juxtapose a vision of a future society with our own less-than-perfect present. That is one of the reasons why Count to a Trillion was so disappointing.

Beyond a description of how the new world order was forced upon the Earth, and some tidbits about the politics and social stratification of this future society, we learn very little about how this world works. With strong echoes of H. G. Wells’ classic, The Sleeper Awakes, Montrose wakes to discover he is in a society distorted and stultified by the power of the ruling elite – of which he is now a member. But it is not the economic systems of the new Earth that cause Montrose to reject this world, nor its educational, medical, or child welfare programs. Bizarrely, what bothers our Texan hero—disgusts him, even—is the fact that ordinary people are not allowed to roam the streets armed.

And that is symptomatic of one of the most jarring aspects of the book. It’s true that the hero comes from an impoverished, post-apocalyptic Texan home, but when he reaches maturity and he is an established mathematical genius, educated, an elite member of an interstellar space mission, and has his IQ boosted off the scale to become the first transhuman, it is peculiar that he still talks like a caricature of John Wayne in a low-budget Western.

This makes the hero seem a little comical, like Yoda, who can master the Force, but who can’t master English sentence construction. In fact, Menelaus Montrose is a bit of a fool, with almost no endearing qualities. To cap it all, when he falls for the heroine, he behaves like a sexist throwback, with endless cracks about “wearing the trousers” and spanking his “girl,” and all sympathy for him is lost.

Which is a shame. This is a book that had the potential to be so much more. It is solid, hard science fiction, brimming over with great ideas. Yet it falls into the trap of being overburdened with exposition (much of which is pure techno-babble); and the first part of the novel in particular feels slow and tedious as various characters fill the hero in on what he missed while he was asleep.

Much of the writing is very reminiscent of Golden Age sci-fi writer A. E. van Vogt, not only in its style but also in the use of supposed semantic and mathematical frameworks (mostly derived from alien writings) to understand human and alien behavior.

And then the story stops, quite abruptly, in the middle of an action scene. You may enjoy books that end on a cliffhanger with nothing resolved and every important character on the very edge of triumph or defeat—in which case, you’ll love Count to a Trillion.

But for many people, reaching the end of a novel to find you are left hanging is extremely frustrating. The intent may be to persuade the reader to buy the next book in the series (although none is promised) but in this case, the fate of this particular hero might be a matter of indifference to most readers.

When a book opens with our heroes running from a planet, having just been shot at while trying to smuggle a war criminal off world because they’re hard up and need the money, you know you are squarely in space opera land. And [...]]]>

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

When a book opens with our heroes running from a planet, having just been shot at while trying to smuggle a war criminal off world because they’re hard up and need the money, you know you are squarely in space opera land. And there you stay as Captain Jarek Reen and his two companions—one of them a female Sidhe, the other her human lover, and both of them flying assassins with various deadly abilities—steers us between the galaxies to find Aleph, home of the last Sidhe males, to bring back a shiftspace beacon so that the backward planet Serenein can join the rest of humanity.

If it sounds like a good old-fashioned space adventure story, that’s because it is. Jaine Fenn is arguably part of the British “new space opera” movement (along with writers such as Peter F. Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds), a group that has led a massive revival of the genre in the past twenty years or so.

A part of Ms. Fenn’s Hidden Empire series, this intergalactic saga includes many old favorite tropes—even to the extent of the mysterious and powerful Sidhe females having extensive psychic powers.

The Sidhe (named after the Irish magical creatures who lived underground in fairy mounds) are evil females who once had the human race enslaved, and oddly pedantic and squabbling males (we discover in this volume) who once helped humanity gain its freedom but now hide out in a separate galaxy and practice a kind of feudalism. None of this is really clear until you are well into the book.

Similarly, Jarek and his two assassin friends have complex and relevant histories that might take the reader some time to come to grips with. And then there is the planet Serenein, backward and primitive, cut off from the rest of humanity, run by a theocracy under the thrall of the Sidhe females, existing as a breeding ground for humans with special magic abilities that the Sidhe need.

And Captain Reen happens to be married to the ruler of this world after meeting her in an earlier book—one of the reasons why he is risking a visit to the Sidhe males to help them integrate with the rest of the galaxy.

It is a lot of history and a lot of backstory to convey within the current plot. Ms Fenn makes a good job of it, but it does slow down the pace and she does not entirely succeed. Gollancz tells us that Bringer of Light can be read as a standalone novel, but it is the fourth in the series and it does help to have read the others.

But don’t worry that the backstory is a little convoluted or that some of the plot devices seem a bit strained (our heroes just happen to be on good terms with a male Sidhe who can negotiate with his fellows to get them the shiftspace beacon they desperately need). The story still romps along at a good pace, and it is helped enormously by Jaine Fenn’s writing.

Her characters are nicely drawn and the whole delivery is in a punchy, casual style that suits the story. The “voice” of the book is reminiscent of the comic space operas of Harry Harrison (particularly the Death World series), and that is no bad thing. The contrast between the action in space and that on the almost medieval planet, Serenein, prevents either from growing stale, and the different sets of characters in each setting are sympathetic and convincing.

If you like rollicking space adventures, this book will not disappoint. If you like a bit of preindustrial fantasy blended in, you will definitely love Bringer of Light. But you should seriously consider reading all four books in the series rather than just this one.

Belief comes first, rationalizations follow behind. That is the basic theme of this new book on belief by professional sceptic, Michael Shermer. Belief comes first because we’re wired that way, Dr. Shermer says. We see patterns in everything (sometimes even when they aren’t [...]]]>

(This review first appeared in the New York Review of Books.)

Belief comes first, rationalizations follow behind. That is the basic theme of this new book on belief by professional sceptic, Michael Shermer. Belief comes first because we’re wired that way, Dr. Shermer says. We see patterns in everything (sometimes even when they aren’t there) and we are disposed to see an active agent behind every pattern (even the false ones, and even when there is no one there.) According to Dr. Shermer, finding patterns in the world and ascribing agency to their creation is the foundation for beliefs of all kinds, from political opinions, through conspiracy theories, to alien abductions, gods and demons.

As evidence that we are avid pattern-finders, Dr. Shermer presents psychological results going back to the operant conditioning of “superstitious” behaviour in animals by B.F. Skinner and the other Behaviourists, the work of ethologists like Konrad Lorenz on “imprinting”, and from other areas such as face recognition, and pattern finding under uncertainty. It is a solid and well-established case, backed up by more recent work by Susan Blackmore on how people who are believers in the supernatural are more likely to see patterns in noisy images than non-believers. He also believes there are good evolutionary reasons for us being this way.

For our tendency to ascribe agency, he cites the work of psychologist Bruce Hood, looks at out of body experiences, tells of his own experiences with Michael Persinger’s “God Helmet” (which induces neuron firing in the temporal lobes using strong magnetic fields, during which some subjects have reported intense religious experiences.) He also discusses magicians and skilled illusionists and the work of Randi and others in debunking them. Here Dr. Shermer’s case is weaker, relying heavily on personal anecdotes rather than on scientific studies.

To convince us that belief always precedes reasoned argument, Dr. Shermer takes us on an extended tour of beliefs of various kinds – political, religious, conspiracy theories, alien abductions, and so on. If you’ve read other books by Dr. Shermer – particularly Why People Believe Weird Things and The Mind of the Market – you’ll already be familiar with most of the material here.

While fascinating in places and challenging in others, it is, in the end, disappointing. The mass of anecdote, sprinkled with odd bits of science, is not convincing and often seems to ramble away from the central argument. There is a curious section in which Dr. Shermer attempts to mount a scientific defence of free market economics, which will no doubt be as irritating to a liberal reader as it is unconvincing to a scientist. In fact, it illustrates Dr. Shermer’s theme perfectly – albeit unintentionally – by showing how scientific findings can be cherry-picked to build arguments around a belief that is already entrenched in the author’s mind.

Having presented the case that we form beliefs on the basis of unconscious, often irrational processes, and that all our argumentation in support of these beliefs is then added post hoc and subject to a wide range of cognitive biases which he lists and explains, Dr. Shermer leaves us in a near-hopeless state. The human condition, according to this perspective, is one of deep-rooted, biased subjectivity and perpetual, unresolvable conflict between believers with different sets of beliefs.

To save us from this conclusion, he attempts, at the end of the book, to present the scientific method as a way out of the morass. By basing judgements of truth on what is repeatedly observable by anyone making those observations in the same circumstances, and by insisting that explanations of observations are themselves to be subject to tests whose outcomes must also be observable by anyone who performs them in the same way, science might cut through the fog of individual bias, superstition and prejudice, to yield something like a true understanding of the world. “The God question” he says, is only immune to scientific examination as long as you only make claims about gods that can not, even in principle, be examined with the scientific method. Since many claims about gods can quite easily be examined scientifically – like the healing power of prayer – even this area of belief is not wholly immune.

Yet the value he places on objectivity rather than subjectivity, of external rather than internal reality, simply reveal more of his own personal beliefs. Yes, science could cut the Gordian knot of superstition, but only for those whose beliefs match Dr. Shermer’s. By his own logic, for those who believe that objective reality is unimportant or even non-existent, arguments which stem from other sets of beliefs will be never be persuasive. In fact, the more convincing we find Dr. Shermer’s thesis, the less likely it seems that scientific and superstitious world-views could ever be resolved.

It would be easy to say that you should read this book and make up your own mind, but, if Dr. Shermer is right, you have already made up your mind and this book will either reinforce your beliefs or spur you to challenge the author’s. Nevertheless, this reviewer’s belief is that a good dose of scepticism is always healthy, having your beliefs challenged is always good for you, and these things are exactly what you can count on from this book.

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Fuzzy Nation is a “reboot”, a re-imagining of the 1962 novel Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. As Mr. Scalzi says, “I took the original plot and characters of Little Fuzzy and wrote an [...]]]>

Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Fuzzy Nation is a “reboot”, a re-imagining of the 1962 novel Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper. As Mr. Scalzi says, “I took the original plot and characters of Little Fuzzy and wrote an entirely new story from and with them. The novel doesn’t follow on from the events of Little Fuzzy; it’s a new interpretation of that first story and a break from the continuity that H. Beam Piper established in Little Fuzzy and its sequels.”

Fuzzy Nation is the story of a prospector, Jack Holloway, who, while searching for minerals on the planet Zarathustra hits the jackpot with a seam of “sun stones” worth a fortune. Holloway is the type of man who is always at odds with authority and this find brings him and the powerful Zarathustra Corporation nose to nose. However, even as Holloway struggles to retain control of his interest in the find, his future – and everyone else’s on the planet – is thrown into uncertainty by his next find: a small furry animal he calls a “fuzzy”, which seems unusually clever, and whose family comes to live in his home. The problem is that, by Colonial Law, if the fuzzies are not just clever but actually “sapient”, then all mining must stop on Zarathustra, Holloway won’t get rich, and the Corporation and its tens of thousands of employees will be booted off-world. The plot is absolutely predictable from very early in the book, but if you still don’t want spoilers, don’t read Little Fuzzy first.

Mr. Scalzi delivers this simple, no frills, no surprises story with a rather ponderous, old-fashioned style and humour that fans of Harry Harrison will probably enjoy enormously. Indeed, Mr. Scalzi’s books all have a somewhat old, slow, quaint delivery that really does take the reader back to the Golden Age of sci-fi (or, at least, the Silver Age). The style of his “Old Man’s War” series has been compared to that of Heinlein – which is not a comparison anyone should be ashamed of – and it may well be this steady, exposition-heavy delivery that has made him so very popular. Many modern sci-fi readers hanker for a time forty, fifty, or more years ago when future technology was understandable and writers weren’t manically whirling readers around cyberspace, baffling them with genetics, and shoving them through the Singularity. These readers are Mr. Scalzi’s natural audience and, given that, perhaps it is no surprise that we find him retelling a fifty-year-old story, or that the language, the technologies, and the ideas in the book have hardly changed at all from the original. As Mr. Scalzi says, he is offering readers the equivalent of “a cover of a song they like”.

While H. Beam Piper fans are already bristling with indignation that anyone should think Little Fuzzy needs retelling, the bigger questions might be; why retell an old story in an old idiom – wouldn’t the re-imagining of Little Fuzzy have been more interesting if it had been done by Charlie Stross, or William Gibson? – and why do it at all for a sci-fi book? If science fiction is “the literature of ideas” as many fans believe, why reboot sci-fi stories at all if you are not going to add something wholly new and original? Little Fuzzy was the Avatar of its generation: a tale of a big bad mining company exploiting a planet at the expense of its indigenous sapients. As such, it had points to make about the rights of indigenous peoples, the exploitation of non-renewable resources, and about the nature of sapience. It was a solid contribution to “the literature of ideas” in the best traditions of science fiction. It is very hard to see what Mr. Scalzi has added by updating the story.

If you only read a few sci-fi books a year, it is probably not worth making room for Fuzzy Nation. There are many more interesting books being published. If you are an H. Beam Piper fan, you will either be dismayed or excited by this reboot. Mr. Scalzi is a good writer and tells a good tale. He may well be going to take the “Fuzzy Universe” in fun new directions – like the recent reboot of the Star Trek films, which added nothing significant but gave fans the possibility of more of their favourite “world” yet to come. If you are already a John Scalzi fan, you will almost certainly enjoy it.

Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Roger Penrose is one of the world’s leading mathematicians and a man who has also made significant contributions to theoretical physics. His work with Stephen Hawking on black holes is almost as famous [...]]]>

Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

Roger Penrose is one of the world’s leading mathematicians and a man who has also made significant contributions to theoretical physics. His work with Stephen Hawking on black holes is almost as famous as his purely mathematical contributions in the field of tiling, yet his contributions to science go well beyond these highlights. So, when he writes a book subtitled “An Extraordinary New View of the Universe” it should be of interest to anyone who is interested in the world, how it works, and how it got here.

And he really does present a quite extraordinary hypothesis. The universe, he says, is cycling repeatedly from one big bang to another. It bursts into existence in a very special state of uniformity and extremely low entropy, expands in ways consistent with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which means entropy is constantly increasing – mostly through the production of black holes), and this expansion accelerates to infinity, over a period of at least 10^100 years, as the black holes evaporate away and even the rest mass of electrons and positrons fades to nothing. And then, by a geometrical sleight of hand, the new, uniform, low-entropy, ‘spacelike surface’ of the end of the old universe becomes the uniform, low-entropy, ‘spacelike surface’ of the big bang for a new universe.

To get from big bang to big bang, Prof. Penrose takes us on a journey that starts with the peculiar imperative of increasing entropy and the Second Law, passes through the special nature of the big bang. And ends with what he calls “conformal cyclic cosmology” (“conformal” because, he conjectures, sometime in the future, all particles are effectively massless and their “world lines” are therefore constrained to the outer surface of a “null cone” in a Minkovskian 4-space.) And if you’re having trouble following this, then Cycles of Time might not be the book for you.

Usually, popular science books, written for the layman, introduce us to established science, or summarise a new field. They avoid maths as much as possible, and they take their time over the more difficult ideas, often repeating the same material in slightly different ways, to help the non-specialist fumble their way through the arguments.

Cycles of Time is not that kind of book. It describes the author’s own ground-breaking and controversial research in cosmology. It is a difficult read and tackles extremely deep and complicated matters. Repetition is almost completely avoided, replaced with references back to where the material was first introduced or discussed. Although the reader is spared the worst of the mathematics (which is, nevertheless, presented in a set of appendices) there is enough maths in the text to make most non-specialists work hard to follow it, and the physical concepts presented are not for the faint-hearted.

Yet it is worth the work. Prof. Penrose is a clear and articulate writer. Even his academic papers are a marvel of lucidity. If these ideas seem hard, it is probably because they are, and even one of the world’s best science writers cannot make them any simpler than this. There are many references in Cycles of Time to Prof. Penrose’s earlier, 1,000-page work, The Road to Reality, and it is probably fair to say that this earlier book should be kept handy as a companion work when reading Cycles of Time. And degrees in maths and physics would probably help too.

Why is it worth the work? Well, there are great insights to be had here into the nature of entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and their relationship to the big bang and to black holes. Even though Prof. Penrose makes some assumptions which, even to a layman, seem suspect (for example, that the mass of the electron and positron will fade away given enough time, and that information loss in black holes can be re-stated as a loss of degrees of freedom as the singularity consumes particles) he also makes predictions, at least one of which (concentric anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to gravity waves from pre-big bang black hole interactions) has been tested and found to exist in the data.

Many physicists argue that these circles in the CMB are statistical artefacts, or that they are the result of colliding universes in a very different kind of multiverse. Yet the fact remains that they support Prof. Penrose’s “extraordinary view”. And, in the end, the data is what really matters in science. Probably the best thing to do is to take a deep breath, grab a copy of this fascinating book, and plunge right in.

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books)

Over the past few days, a computer called Watson, built and programmed by IBM researchers, has played the game of Jeopardy! against two of the contest’s best players. And it won.

To many who watched the match [...]]]>

What next for Big Blue?

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books)

Over the past few days, a computer called Watson, built and programmed by IBM researchers, has played the game of Jeopardy! against two of the contest’s best players. And it won.

To many who watched the match on TV, this may seem like a simple piece of entertainment, or another “so what?” moment in the history of computing. Yet it is an achievement that many computer scientists will see as even more significant than when another IBM machine, Deep Blue, beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997.

In Final Jeopardy, Baker presents the story of the creation of this remarkable machine. After the widely trumpeted success of the Kasparov defeat, IBM was looking for another publicity coup of a similar kind. The idea for fielding a computerszed contestant on Jeopardy! came up in late 2004 but it wasn’t until 2007 and some tentative internal studies, that IBM executives agreed this was the challenge they wanted and set a team on a three-year path to achieving it. It is also when they began their initial approaches to Sony, which owns the Jeopardy! franchise.

Baker follows the relationship between the two companies as it developed over those years. Each came at the project with different hopes and expectations and the negotiations were sometimes a little fraught. Throughout, Sony had the upper hand. Without the Jeopardy! TV show, IBM had nothing. So when, for example, quite late in the day, Sony insisted that Watson needed a hand so that it could press an actual button like all the  other contestants, IBM had little choice but to build its computer a hand. Yet Baker makes it clear that both parties were keen to see the match succeed. His background on IBM, Sony, the Jeopardy! show and its creators are some of the more interesting parts of the book and are slotted into the unfolding story of Watson’s laborious preparation and endless testing in a way that keeps the book light and readable.

Readers interested in the technology will be disappointed that there is almost no reference to the actual hardware or software Watson employs. There are hints here and there. The language processing algorithms are described as “statistical” (suggesting several possibilities) and, when Mr. Baker describes the training of the betting strategy module, he could be describing the training of a genetic algorithm or even a neural network. But we are never taken to the level of naming even the class of solutions employed. This is a book for the technologically incurious. It is about the process of achievement and the struggle against failure. It is not about the technology of a question-answering machine. In fact, the notes refer us to a Scientific American article if we want to know how Watson works.

It is clear that Mr. Baker has a good grasp of the technology himself, and of the challenges inherent in answering general knowledge questions in natural language. So it is a shame that he frequently seems to use a kind of journalistic, dumbed-down vocabulary. Jeopardy! contestants are referred to as “know-it-alls” while Watson is repeatedly called “bionic” (which it is not). Yet Baker excels when it comes to showing how a Jeopardy! clue looks from Watson’s perspective, how the machine analyzes and answers it, and how little knowledge of anything Watson brings to bear. (Watson’s entire knowledge base is hand-crafted by its programmers.)

The story is about the people who built Watson and set up the Jeopardy! showdown. Yet, even at this level, the book is quite superficial. The unfolding story of how a team built a complex piece of software, with severe time restraints, and extremely ambitious goals, is all there, from inception to final victory. Yet the human story that the book could have told is absent. We hear almost nothing about the personal struggles of the main characters. Despite IBM’s team having been under pressure for three years to make Watson a winner, there is very little about the personal relationships of its members. Even when it comes to David Ferrucci, the IBM manager who ran the team and is the closest we have to a main character, we see only the surface. And even then, the brooding, somewhat bad-tempered, and driven man we might infer from the book, is at odds with the “open, articulate, and intelligent” person described in the Acknowledgments.

One thing that Mr. Baker does well in the book is to set the techniques and technology of Watson in the wider context of modern artificial intelligence (AI) research. As usual, he steers clear of the technicalities (as well as the philosophical and theological issues) but he gives the reader a whole chapter of background on the broad directions AI is taking. It is a necessarily incomplete and sketchy review but does a decent job of positioning Watson among its software peers. Now that the Jeopardy! game has been played and won, this background will help readers understand some of the rather dismissive remarks already appearing in the press from leading AI researchers.

Arguments about AI aside, it is an interesting question as to how intelligent a machine can appear if you just make it fast enough at crunching data. If a computer can be an unbeatable chess player, or a top-class Jeopardy! contestant, perhaps blinding speed and some clever algorithms are all we really need. Whatever the practical or theoretical issues, IBM seems to have been staking out this territory for itself. Not only do projects like Watson showcase the company’s super-fast hardware and its truckloads of researchers, they say to the world that, in our present state of understanding, brute force solutions can achieve what no amount of AI research has yet been able to.

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

If you like your science explained rather than asserted, if you like your science writers articulate and intelligible, if you like popular science to make sense, even as it probes the heart of difficult [...]]]>

The Hidden Reality: A Peek Behind the Curtain

(This review first appeared in the New York Journal of Books.)

If you like your science explained rather than asserted, if you like your science writers articulate and intelligible, if you like popular science to make sense, even as it probes the heart of difficult theory, you are going to love The Hidden Reality and its author, Brian Greene.

This book takes us on a tour of nine popular theories of parallel universes. Yes, nine.

As Greene says, one of the most surprising things about recent developments in theoretical physics, of all flavors, is that the possibility of parallel or multiple universes emerges naturally. From the plain old “quilted” multiverse that general relativity permits, to the 500-dimensional landscape of universes that emerges from string theory, from the foaming bubble universes that inflationary cosmology suggests, to the mathematical Wonderland of the Ultimate Multiverse,  Greene guides us with a firm hand and a sure step.

Most of the ideas in the book are mind-boggling and, inevitably, difficult. So, as we go through, Greene introduces all the other ideas we will need to grasp in order to understand them. We get a lesson on quantum mechanics and Schrödinger’s equation just in time to understand the “many worlds” hypothesis. We get an excellent side-tour of string theory and M-theory, just before we plunge into the “braneworld” multiverse. And it is all good stuff.

Greene has done a superb job of anticipating all those “But what about . . . ?” questions that form in the reader’s mind during such an excursion. Almost as soon as the questions occur, he dives off into a description of the anthropic principle, or a discussion of the nature of infinity, or a quick review of the arguments about whether string theory is actually scientific or not. And all the while he remains humble and honest in the face of the many controversies and uncertainties in the various theories he describes. (Why does string theory require 10 dimensions? Because it makes the math work. He shrugs, and moves on.)

It is rare to encounter a book of such scope and depth that avoids mathematics almost completely (except in a few endnotes, where the “mathematically inclined reader” is thrown a few crumbs) and yet makes so much sense. It is in Greene’s clever use of analogies and similes that the strength of his text rests. It is also where so many other popular science writers fall down.

Yet even Greene is not infallible. When he explains why probabilistic reasoning in a “many worlds” context is problematic, he makes use of a “cloning” analogy which is itself contentious and inappropriate. We get what he’s saying, despite this, but it is a shame to see even this little flaw in such an excellent book.

Some readers may balk at the fact that the text has copious endnotes as well as occasional footnotes. It would have been better if Greene had made the effort to integrate the information in these notes into the body of the text, or to have used footnotes exclusively. Almost all of the material in the notes is useful and interesting and definitely belongs in the book somewhere, but reading with two bookmarks is a nuisance, and it is going to make any ebook edition even less manageable.

In the end, though, such minor quibbles are irrelevant. The Hidden Reality is a first-class piece of popular science writing. It is clearly written, thoughtful and discursive, and covers material that in itself should be of great interest to any thinking person these days. Greene is always aware of how bizarre most of the ideas he describes will sound, and takes all reasonable pains to ensure that the historical context and scientific arguments are presented to ensure the reader understands just how these ideas arose and what problems in physics they address.

It is a book that deserves huge success.

When you consider that the entire historical record for Jeanne Baret comprises little more than a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate, and a handful of mentions in other people’s journals, Glynis Ridley’s achievement in producing an entire biography of the [...]]]>

(This review first appeared in the New York Review of Books.)

When you consider that the entire historical record for Jeanne Baret comprises little more than a birth certificate, a marriage certificate, a death certificate, and a handful of mentions in other people’s journals, Glynis Ridley’s achievement in producing an entire biography of the woman is quite something. Not just that, but Ridley’s skills as a researcher give us such a strong impression of the times Baret lived in, the people who surrounded and influenced her, and the geography through which she traveled, that, for most of the book, we hardly notice, or care.

Jeanne Baret was born in the Loire valley in France in 1740, the daughter of peasants. She died in Saint-Aulaye, also in France, in 1807, the wife of the local blacksmith. For most of her life, she lived in quiet rural obscurity, but a chance meeting with a well-connected botanist, Philibert Commerson, possibly as early as 1760, changed her life entirely and set her off on the path to wild adventure and to becoming the first woman ever to circumnavigate the globe.

Ridley speculates that Baret was an “herb woman,” with a folk knowledge of the medicinal properties of local plants and that she helped Commerson with his collecting and by describing the properties of the plants she knew. Their relationship was close. In 1764 she became his housekeeper and became pregnant—almost certainly with his child—in the same year. The couple moved to Paris—with Baret still in the role of his housekeeper—and the child was given into the care of the Paris foundling hospital for fostering in 1765.

Between them, they cooked up the plan of passing Baret off as a boy so she could continue as Commerson’s assistant when he signed on as botanist on a round-the-world expedition for the French government in 1766. But in the close confines of a wooden sailing ship, living and working among a hundred sailors for months at sea, Baret’s insistence that she was a man—even when, under questioning by the expedition commander, she claimed to be a eunuch—could not keep her gender a secret. She took to carrying Commerson’s pistols with her whenever she had to sleep among the crew, and on the various trips she and Commerson took to collect specimens from the shores of South America and the Pacific islands.

After 18 months of this, her secret was exposed—either when she called for help, under threat of rape by Tahitian men, as the official log claims, or when she was actually raped by members of the crew on the shores of New Ireland in the Solomons, as Ridley claims. Baret’s possible rape and subsequent pregnancy neatly explain why she and Commerson left the expedition at the French island of Mauritius and stayed there for several more years.

Commerson died there, leaving Baret to shift for herself, alone, homeless, penniless and unable to pay her way back to France. She worked as a barmaid for at least some of the following year and, in the end, married a French army sergeant who took her back to France and a quiet life in 1774 or 1775.

Ridley has done some impressive detective work in this book, questioning what looks like the lazy acceptance of official accounts by earlier biographers, and coming up with some very plausible alternatives. Yet the story of Jeanne Baret’s life is based on very little real evidence.

For the character of Baret herself, we have nothing at all to help us. She kept no journal, the people around her never seemed to mention what she thought or felt about anything. Even Commerson, her mentor, employer, and lover, seems completely indifferent to her in his writings.

In Ridley’s account, Baret’s feelings about what is happening to her and around her are sometimes guessed at, but Ridley is cautious and conservative, as she should be.

Yet it leaves a hole at heart of this book.

Baret was a woman who left her peasant family to live with her lover and then to tour the world with him in disguise. She practiced botany under one of France’s leading scientists, and collected and preserved thousands of specimens, often under great physical duress. She lived in Mauritius as a woman, alone and unaided, and survived. There she found and married the man who would bring her home, and then went on to live in France through all the years of the French Revolution and the terrors that followed. She was intelligent, resourceful, courageous, knowledgeable, skillful, and physically strong.

Ridley’s biography tells us what she did and where she went, and it throws some welcome light on the true story of her adventures, but it reveals almost nothing about who Jeanne Baret really was.

The Discovery of Jeanne Baret is a fine and fascinating tale, but it leaves us wanting truly to discover the woman behind the story.