Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Science, Technology

Science Books of the Year 2025

LITERARY REVIEWS

2025 felt like the year that AI really arrived. We now have access to it on our phones and laptops; it is creeping into digital and corporate infrastructure; it is changing the way many people now learn, work, and create; and the global economy rests on the stratospheric valuations of the corporate monoliths vying to control it.

Yet, the unchecked rush to go faster and further could extinguish humanity, according to the surprisingly readable and chillingly plausible If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Written by computer scientists Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, the narrative argues against creating superintelligent AI able to cognitively outpace Homo sapiens in all departments. “Even an AI that cares about understanding the universe is likely to annihilate humans as a side-effect,” they write, “because humans are not the most efficient method for producing truths . . . out of all possible ways to arrange matter.” Not exactly cheery festive reading but, as the machines literally calculate our demise, the reader will finally grasp all that technical lingo about tokens, weights, and maximising preferences.

Human extinction is not a new idea, muses historian Sadiah Qureshi in Vanished: An Unnatural History of Extinction, shortlisted for this year’s Royal Society Trivedi science book prize. Colonial expansion and the persecution of Indigenous peoples implicitly relied on Darwinian theories about some species being fated to outcompete others. Extinction, she points out, is a concept entwined with politics and social justice, whether in the 19th-century elimination of the Beothuk people in Newfoundland or current plans to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths so they can roam the land once more. Whose land, she rightly asks.

The idea of the landscape, as well as people, having rights, is explored by Robert Macfarlane in the immersive and important Is a River Alive? By telling the stories of three rivers under threat in different parts of the world, he offers a thesis that is both ancient and radical: that rivers deserve recognition as fellow living beings, along with the legal protections and remedies that accompany it. The book shortlisted for the Wainwright prize for conservation writing, “was written with the rivers who flow through its pages”, he declares, using pronouns that cast away any doubt as to his passion for the cause.

That awe at the natural world is shared by biologist Neil Shubin, who has led expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctica and takes the reader to the Ends of the Earth (Oneworld), also shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize. “Ice has come and gone for billions of years . . . has sculpted our world and paved the way for the origin of our species,” Shubin says. But those geographical extremes are increasingly vulnerable, as climate change intensifies and treaties come under strain. Polar exploration it may be, but without the frostbite.

Just below the north pole, inside the Norwegian permafrost, lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, intended to help humanity revive after an apocalypse. It contains a consignment from the first ever seed bank, started in the 1920s by Russian plant scientist Nikolai Vavilov, who desired to see the ending of famine. In The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad (Sceptre), a highly rated contender for this year’s Orwell prize, historian Simon Parkin uncovers the moving story of Vavilov and his colleagues, who fought to protect their collection as the city came under siege in 1941. Vavilov fell out of scientific and political favour, and was imprisoned with terrible consequences.

Super Ages (Simon & Schuster), by Eric Topol – the cardiologist and medical professor who recently conducted a review into the digital future of the NHS – has been studying the “Wellderly” effect, those who seemingly defy the rigours of ageing, by offering evidence-based tips on longevity. Breakthroughs such as weight-loss drugs and AI will further change the game on chronic diseases, he promises. There’s hope that 80 really is the new 50.

Two elegant offerings this year from neurologists stand out, for using patient stories to tell us something about ourselves. In The Age of Diagnosis (Hodder), Suzanne O’Sullivan courageously questions medicine’s well-intentioned enthusiasm for attaching labels – such as ADHD, or anxiety – to aspects of the human condition. This is sensitive political territory, given the public conversation about the 2.8m people who are economically inactive due to long-term illness, but it deserves a hearing. And in Our Brains, Our Selves (Canongate), winner of the Royal Society prize, Masud Husain sensitively explores how our sense of identity can go awry when disease strikes. The story of the woman who thought she was having an affair with a man who was really her husband illustrates that “the way in which people behave can be radically altered [by brain disorders], sometimes shockingly so”.

Proto (William Collins) features in a geography-of-sorts publication. Science writer Laura Spinney’s fluid account of how Proto-Indo-European – a painstakingly reconstructed ancient tongue – became the precursor for so many languages, whose descendants gave us Dante’s Inferno, the Rig Veda (the oldest scripture in Hinduism), and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European,” Spinney writes, who sets out on a global scientific odyssey that uses evidence from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to piece together its history.

The biography Crick (Profile) by Matthew Cobb deserves a special mention, which gives us the definitive backstory of one of the towering figures of 20th-century science. Born in Northampton into a middle-class family, Francis Crick was an unexceptional young physicist who, with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, went on to codiscover the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, and win a Nobel prize. Cobb captures the intellectual restlessness of a man who chased problems (and women) rather than disciplines, and who mixed with artists and challenged poets. Crick, who died in 2004 in California, spent his later career trying to unravel the secrets of consciousness.

Anyone left intellectually unsated by Oppenheimer-mania will relish Destroyer of Worlds (Allen Lane), in which physicist Frank Close ventures beyond the Manhattan Project to tell the gripping and unnerving story of the nuclear age. Beginning with the 19th-century discovery of a smudge on a photographic plate, Close spins a history that, via Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and a lot of nimbly explained science, ends seven decades later with the Tsar Bomba, a Soviet weapon detonated in 1961.

It was second in explosive power only to the meteorite impact that wiped out Tyrannosaurus Rex and the dinosaurs. A big enough hydrogen bomb, Close writes, “would signal the end of history. Its mushroom cloud ascending towards outer space would be humanity’s final vision.”

Avoid telling superintelligent AI.

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Asia, Books, History

Book Review: Atlantic Furies

LITERARY REVIEW

WHEN Ruth Elder arrived back in New York in 1927 after attempting to cross the Atlantic in her monoplane American Girl, the crowds were in awe.

The female aviator dubbed the “Flying Flapper” looked like a chic society woman with her Parisian suit, fox-fur coat, and bobbed hair.

It didn’t matter that American Girl was downed into the sea several hundred miles north of the Azores. As far as the media and newspapers were concerned, “Miss” Elder was a new kind of femme fatale.

In this compulsive book – part Barbie movie and part Wacky Races – social historian Midge Gillies tells the story of six women who competed to cross the Atlantic in the late 1920s.

Charles Lindbergh had been the first pilot to succeed non-stop solo in 1927, but now the race was on for the first “girl” flyer to complete the 3,000-mile arduous journey.

In an age of female emancipation, women were flying high.

Gillies’ half-dozen heroines hail from a wide background. There is peer’s daughter Hon. Elsie Mackay, African-American Bessie Coleman whose mother had been born into slavery, and Amelia Earhart who became the first female pilot to cross the Atlantic solo and non-stop.  

As for Ruth, she turned out to be on the run from a scandalous romantic past.

It was not all fun, games, or easy times; there were difficult or serious aspects involved. Four of Gillies’ Atlantic Furies failed to return from their expeditions, the most famous being Earhart who set off in 1937 in a bid to be the first woman aviator to circle the Equator.

Following several crackly radio messages received on July 2, her bright silver Lockhead Electra disappeared from the skies over the Central Pacific. It has yet to be found.

Gillies is adept in giving us a bone-shaking sense of what it must have been like to sit high in the skies, munching on chocolate for energy and in trying to screen out the propeller noise.

Flying through freezing fog involved terrifyingly low visibility, yet straining to get a better view could prove fatal.

In 1926 Coleman unhooked her safety belt to peer over the fuselage just as her plane dipped, with the result that she somersaulted to earth in front of horrified bystanders.

Not everyone believed that a woman’s place was in the skies. One doctor specialising in aviation medicine reported that having a period put a woman pilot at risk of crashing her plane. And then we read the dark comments of Major Oliver Stewart who wrote in the Tatler: “(Women) will be persuaded to mend their ways only when they have learned the truth that the lipstick is mightier than the joystick”.

Gillies makes short work of this historical misogyny, arguing that the courageous women who vied to cross the Atlantic were never going to put up with a man telling them what to do. (It is surely no coincidence that her heroines had 15 marriages between them.)

By the end of this thrilling book, it is impossible not to cheer for these magnificent women in their flying machines.

– Atlantic Furies by Midge Gillies is published by Scribe, 416pp

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Arts, Books, Environment, Literature

Climate fiction is extolling the real threats the planet faces

LITERATURE

Intro: A newly created award recognises the power of storytelling to address the biggest issues of our time

PAUL MURRAY, author of the bestselling novel The Bee Sting, told a media audience recently that no novelist should ignore the climate emergency: “It is the unavoidable background for being alive in the 21st century.” In recognition of the essential and vital role of literature in responding to the Anthropocene moment, the inaugural shortlist has just been announced for the Climate Fiction prize.

The five novels include “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey, set during one day on the International Space Station (and the winner of last year’s Booker prize); time-travelling romcom “The Ministry of Time” from debut novelist Kaliane Bradley; eco-thriller “Briefly Very Beautiful” by Roz Dineen; “And So I Roar”, about a young girl in Nigeria, by Abi Daré; and a story of migrants in an abandoned city in Téa Obreht’s “The Morningside”. All the shortlisted authors are women.

Climate fiction is not new. Some of the landmark literary novels to have taken on the crisis include Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam dystopian trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour, and Richard Power’s Pulitzer-prize-winning The Overstory. Science fiction, inevitably, has become the genre of ecological catastrophe, with hits like Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future”, with all the inhabitants of a small Indian town perishing in a heatwave.

The late Ursula K le Guin wrote that the task of sci-fi was “to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire”. The purpose of the realist novel is to reflect the world in which we live. For a long time, the possibilities of environmental breakdown were largely considered too wild and extreme for the realism. As a consequence, climate fiction hasn’t been taken seriously enough. In “The Great Derangement” in 2016, Amitav Gosh argued that the failure of so many novelists, including himself, to address the most urgent issue of the age was part of a broader cultural failure at the heart of the climate crisis itself.

Freakish and abnormal weather events are no longer the essence of speculative fiction – “global weirding” is upon us. What was once dubbed “cli-fi” is simply contemporary fiction. Ecological anxiety is as much a part of the fictional worlds of a young generation of novelists like Sally Rooney as the internet and mobile phones.

The novels on the Climate Fiction prize shortlist do not conform to dystopian stereotypes. Some aren’t even explicitly about the crisis. Some are hopeful. Far from being a portrait of a world ravaged by disasters, Orbital, for example, is a hymn to the awe-inspiring beauty of our planet.

It could be argued that having a Booker prize winner on the shortlist suggests there is no need for a specific award, which might marginalise climate fiction as a niche genre. There is no shortage of literary gongs. “The Wainwright prize”, set up in 2014 to celebrate the best nature books, now includes an award for writing on global conservation.

Yet awards amplify the message and reach of books that might otherwise be overlooked. Scientists have been cautioning about global warming’s dire consequences for decades. Governments and industry haven’t listened. Now novelists are taking up the challenge. Stories can create an impact far greater than data alone. They can inspire change. In a world where reality has become stranger than fiction, this new accolade is necessary and important. There can be no bigger story.

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