Published by: The History Press, 2015

Nigel Watson is one of British UFOlogy's old hands, and I've been reading articles of his in the Fortean Times for decades. In this book he looks at sightings of odd things in the sky long before Kenneth Arnold's sighting in 1947 started the modern fascination with flying saucers. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, weird things seen flying about were most often interpreted as being "phantom airships" but as the strap line on the cover says, there were plenty of tales of balloons, aircraft, and other mysterious aerial phenomena being told as well. I've already blogged about one report from 1913 which took place just up the road from me in Wotton-Under-Edge that I think was probably a sighting of a very large meteor; Watson explains that many of the other sightings turned out to be people seeing Jupiter or Venus or bright stars and the older I get and the more I read about UAPs, the more I realise that most witnesses are people who are really bad at understanding the environment which they live in. Many reports arise because folks can't recognise mundane things in the sky such as the Moon and I wish the report in that link was a joke, but it isn't. Nor is it an exception in cases like that; people seeing bright meteors will often report making out rows of portholes along the sides of the object and even imagine that they can see passengers looking back out at them.

The book chronicles several outbreaks of what is now called mass psychogenic illness which were fuelled by excited (and wildly inaccurate) newspaper reports. In the same way that the Scots gamekeeper and hoaxer Alex Campbell spent years planting stories of a monster in Loch Ness in the local newspapers and then sat back and waited for people to see something mundane in the water and jump to the conclusion that it was the monster they'd read about, the World's press enthusiastically fuelled the phantom airship and mystery aeroplane/secret base mania until it got out of hand, at which point they started campaigning for people to see sense—a game plan that many newspapers are still sticking to, more than a century later. Many people will still see just what they've been primed to see, no matter how ludicrous it is. However, I'll readily admit that the most famous of these outbreaks, the religious visions which allegedly took place at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 and which Watson covers briefly without comment, include several aspects which I still find difficult to explain and weirdly intriguing.

In the closing chapters, Watson also demolishes manufactured legends such as the Angel of Mons (which originated from a short story by Arthur Machen) and the disappearance of the Fifth Territorial Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment (who didn't "disappear into a cloud" as the legend tells it at all, but in reality had been overwhelmed by Turkish troops at Gallipoli and the 180 or so survivors all summarily executed by being shot in the head and their bodies dumped in a mass grave at a nearby farm; not a very pleasant fate, but one which explains why the "mystery" proved a much easier tale to tell than the truth).

And surely that's the lesson to be learned from this detailed and very thoroughly researched book.

Published by: Penguin Books, 2021

I've got to the point in reading work by Autistic authors that I've been ordering books which keep cropping up in the bibliography sections at the back of books I've already read. And that's how I came across this gem, which is ostensibly aimed at Autistic girls aged between eight and twelve but when has not being part of the target demographic ever put me off doing anything, eh?

In writing about her own experience near the end of the book, Ms Balfe wonders whether Autistic people "are so strongly tapped into the collective consciousness and lacking the same level of separation that those around us seem to experience. And as a result, we feel all the more separate. The irony!" and I think that's the most beautiful thing that I've read about the condition, ever.

Plus, there are cats. If that doesn't make you want to immediately rush out and buy this book (you should), then I don't think we can be friends.

Published by: Ebury, 2017

I bought this shortly after it was published, picking it up as reading material for a business trip to Munich as I passed through Heathrow airport. And yet I put the book aside after a couple of chapters and I didn't touch it again until this year. Why?

Because it scared me. Because back then, I still thought of myself as neurotypical. Because even after one chapter, I had recognised far too much of Chris's tale as being common to mine, and subconsciously I was clearly avoiding having to deal with the implications of that. I wasn't ready to compare Chris's grim and brutal account of growing up as an Autistic kid in the south of England in the 1970s with my experiences doing very much the same thing in the Midlands. So much of it is there: the struggle to cope with school and teachers who had no idea what neurodivergence even was, let alone have to tools to interact with a child who was on the spectrum; the bullying; being cast as an outsider for being the weird kid who wore painfully unhip clothes and had little to no social skills—even now, as I come to terms with my own condition, this was not an easy book for me to read. Chris doesn't pull any punches when he writes about who he was as a kid and what his school days were like and that triggered a lot of unpleasant memories. But his obsession back then was nature and biology, and the intensity of his fascination for the subject shows whenever he writes about it; the pages fairly glow with the joy he took (and takes to this day) in encountering and interacting with wildlife.

The book feels raw and authentic, and while the editorial touch (which is lightweight to the point of not existing at all) often allows Chris to indulge in extremely florid prose which adds to the vivid portrayal of what it means to be Chris Packham, the switching of the narrative between first and third person as well as occasional shifts to someone else's point of view entirely ended up making me feel like the author was deliberately keeping me at a distance. For all the brief moments where things become more confessional (Chris's sessions with his therapist are particularly harrowing) I never felt like I'd gained an understanding of how he's matured and developed into the person he is today.

For example, knowing how Chris loves dropping the names of punk singles into his pieces to camera during Springwatch, I was looking forward to reading about his discovery of bands like The Clash and The Damned and his reaction to the New Wave scene; was he a part of it? What were his first gigs? Was he part of the local punk community? But there's little more than a paragraph about it, written in the final pages of the book as his childhood draws to a close.

This book tells the story of a small child slowly being traumatised because he couldn't fit in, and there's precious little in the book beyond that. I wanted to know how Chris discovered his Autistic self, or what he's learned in processing that knowledge to become one of UK television's leading and most popular wildlife presenters. What drives him to campaign for animal rights as strongly as he does?

Perhaps he will eventually write a follow-up to this book that explains what happened next. If he does, I'd very much like to read it.

Published by: Sceptre, 2021

When it comes to books about the Autistic experience, I suspect that this one is almost as well known by allistic people as Temple Grandin's classic autobiography, Thinking In Pictures. I can remember it causing quite a stir when it was first published in English back in 2013 when Naoki was still a teenager; he'd written it when he was just thirteen years old. It is an extraordinary account of a mind that is very neurodivergent, but at the same time the feelings Naoki describes are immediately relatable and the insight he shows would be staggering in someone three times his age.

Naoki's autism means that he is non-verbal. Perhaps the biggest shock that the book has in store for normal people is the realisation that non-verbal does not mean uncommunicative. Naoki writes eloquently and thoughtfully about how his condition affects him and the people close to him. He shows intense awareness of how his behaviours arise from the engine of a mind and body that is always teetering on the brink of overloading and even though I'm nowhere near as profoundly affected as he is, I recognised a lot of the things he describes as things which I know first hand, particularly when I was little. Like him, I used to love the feeling you got after spinning around and around for so long that you fell over from being dizzy. Like him, I loved following paths through the countryside because of the way that they never stopped leading me somewhere. I thought that these were just things that all kids did!

Naoki's ideas about his likely future are considerably less bleak than Fern Brady's, and that got me wondering whether this was the result of cultural attitudes to Autism in Japan rather than just what happens when you get a somewhat less messed-up childhood and a much earlier diagnosis. I think I'm closer to Fern's point of view, but I'm happy to see how optimistic he is about how his life is going to turn out. We could all do with some uplifting positivity in our lives, no matter how our brains are wired. This book provides that.

The book was made into a film directed by Jerry Rothwell and it won a fistful of awards. I have just tracked down a copy of the DVD, and when I watch it, it will be with rather more curiosity than I normally have when I watch a documentary on TV.

Published by: Octopus, 2024

I am still obsessively tracking down every first-person account of the Autistic experience that I can find, and the latest book on the subject I've finished reading has turned out to be one of the best—not just one of the best books I've read about Autism so far, but one of the best books I've read this year. It's brilliantly written.

It's often a harrowing read. I thought my experiences as an Autistic child were bad (and to be honest, they genuinely were) but they pale into insignificance when compared to what Fern went through. I've never ended up homeless, for a start. Fern's flavour of neurospicy results in destructive meltdowns rather than the shutdowns and near-catatonia that were my escape mechanism, and I found myself wincing at each of her brutally frank descriptions of what they involve. Maybe I had the urge to break things beaten out of me as a kid (I honestly can't remember if I did or not, nor do I want to) but my experience of Autism has involved a lot less property damage. I'm thankful for that, but at the same time I feel guilty for being relieved about not having to go through that particular aspect of the condition. Everyone's experience is different (it's known as Autism Spectrum disorder for a very good reason, after all) but Fern's story illustrates vividly just how much worse things are for Autistic women trying to fit in to an allistic world than they are for blokes like me. There's a lot of shared experience here too though; her accounts of missing social cues at work and elsewhere, the resulting feelings of exclusion; the exhaustion that comes from having to mask who you really are each and every day are painfully familiar. I thought I'd had it bad when I was bullied, but the way she was treated by others is often shocking; neurotypical people can be utter bastards to neurodivergent people and not realise that they're doing anything even slightly wrong. And Fern's grief as she writes about wondering what her life might have been like if someone had figured out what was happening earlier is something that resonates with me incredibly strongly.

Fern was diagnosed relatively recently and I sighed when I realised that her "late diagnosis" happened at the point when she was about half the age I was when I finally put two and two together. She demonstrates rare insight in her response to the diagnosis, and the scientific way she sets about compiling data and analysing her struggles in order to live the best life she can is inspiring. However, as she comments in the final chapter, there's not very much in the way of an uplifting conclusion. Her assessment of her future is brutally bleak; as I reach retirement age, this quote particularly hits home:

"After that I'll likely have to deal with being a neurodivergent person in an old folks' home that's been designed exclusively with neurotypical folks in mind and the exclusion and social problems will mean it'll be like school all over again."

At this point I found myself thinking that maybe I ought to pick something a little lighter for my next read. Nevertheless, this is a book which every Autistic woman should read and the world would be a better place if everyone else read it as well. It might help them to realise how incredibly difficult it can be just navigating a world that has been built from the ground up to prioritise the needs of "normal" people.

Published by: Michael Wiese Productions, 2001

The strapline for this book is The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a guide for anyone working on sound in the field of film and video, whether it be composing the score for a movie or adding Foley to a documentary. If you're looking for a book that explains the jargon you're likely to encounter on the job, then this is it. It's geared heavily towards practice with plenty of contributions from people who know exactly what they're talking about. Sonnenschein talked to many of the great and the good in the industry and there are all sorts of amusing insights into how the sausage gets made; for example, did you know that the sound of the giant stone ball that chases Indy through the cave at the beginning of Raiders Of The Lost Ark was a recording made by Ben Burtt of a Honda Civic rolling down a gravel slope with its engine turned off?

Perhaps I should have expected it of an account of how things are done in Hollywood, but the more esoteric aspects of the creative process that are discussed often veer dangerously close to being woo, and there were several times in the closing chapters of the book where I found myself muttering to myself, "Well, that's not right." And this wasn't just when physics is being discussed—at one point Sonnenschein suggests that the etymology of the word "bell" stems from the Latin word bellus, meaning war (which, he points out correctly, is where we get the word bellicose, or warlike). But the word bell comes from the Old English and Norse word belle which describes the act of making a loud noise. The Old English word bylgan means the same thing; no Latin was involved.

But the book amply illustrates how powerful sound can be in creating the magic of the modern cinema experience. Its role has arguably become even more important since the book was written now that 5.1 surround sound has been superseded (for big productions, at least) by technologies like Dolby Atmos and 7.1.4 immersive audio. If you know me, you know exactly how much I love listening to it!

Published by:

I heard about Dr Pang from my pal Robin, who took part in a panel discussion about neurodiversity with her and Professor Gina Rippon at the Latitude festival last year. She was diagnosed with Autism at the age of eight and works actively both in science outreach and as an advocate of Autism awareness. As it's Autism Acceptance Month this month, I wanted to read more about other people's experiences of the condition, and Growing Up Autistic And Happy is where I started.

I must admit that I felt profoundly wistful reading about her childhood. While it was by no means idyllic and she had to struggle with many other prejudices besides those against neurodivergent people, she not only survived relatively unscathed, she was clearly able to thrive. She was diagnosed early and her parents and teachers were very understanding and supportive, giving her the help she needed in order for her to flourish. That's... not exactly what happened to me. I found myself wondering how my life might have turned out if I'd been diagnosed in childhood and given the help I needed. When Dr Pang describes the way she challenged her teachers, who had decided that she wasn't cut out to be a scientist and actually managed to change their minds, I felt a stab of jealousy; my own teachers had decided that I was going to get into either Oxford or Cambridge, so I was made to do Latin instead of taking the subject I loved—art—and for me, no further discussion was allowed. My teachers professed to know what was better for me than I did because they were my teachers, and that was the end of the matter. Back then I had to accept it, but looking back now I just think what bastards they were.

This is a book aimed at children, and it's written in a tone that's warm and reassuring without being patronising. There are a lot of things in it I wish I'd known when I was eight years old (I wish I'd known them at twenty-eight years old and even forty-eight years old, too) and there's plenty of advice on how to navigate though a world that simply isn't designed to accommodate Autistic people of any age. If you know a child or young person who is on the spectrum, this is likely to be a very useful and important book for them.

Published by: Faber & Faber, 2017

This book collects Alan Bennett's diary entries from 2005–2015 together with a selection of his other writing from the same period in the form of speeches, sermons, prefaces, and introductions. It gives an insight into his working methods, particularly the way that he selects material for his plays (such as The History Boys)—or perhaps more accurately, how the subject matter selects him.

Aside from mentions of life where AB lives (he divides his time between a small town north of Leeds and north London), I was surprised how many other locations cropped up that have also been stomping grounds of mine: Aldeburgh and Southwold in Suffolk, Holt (where my parents lived for many years), Salthouse, Felbrigg Hall and Blickling Hall in Norfolk, Ely, and Bath. There are plenty of references to his colleagues and contemporaries, several of which surprised me—I didn't know about his connection with Oliver Sacks and the diary entry where AB and his partner are watching television and spot the playwright John Osbourne in the background action of (of all things) Mike Hodges's gloriously camp science fiction extravaganza Flash Gordon (1980) really made my inner movie nerd very happy. AB had no idea that the original "angry young man" was in the film; neither had I, and I've watched it a lot.

At the time the book was published, AB was eighty-one years old and he notes several times that he doesn't expect to be around for very much longer. It's most gratifying to note therefore that he was wrong there; he is still with us and still keeping a diary. I look forward to reading it.

Published by: Coronet, 1974

I bought Lyall Watson's classic book on the supernatural when it first came out in paperback in 1974, and I remember it making a considerable impression on me at the time. Since then, I've read most of Watson's other published work but it's been many years since I read Supernature from cover to cover so revisiting it this week seemed like it would be an entertaining way to spend a few hours and get a hit of nostalgia into the bargain.

Let's get the elephants in the room out of the way first: the myth of the book's first back cover blurb, which breathlessly claims that a razor blade kept overnight in a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Khufu will regain its sharpness has since been thoroughly debunked. Back cover claim number two, that the Chicago "thoughtographer" Ted Serios could project images onto photographic film just with the power of his mind subsequently fell apart when it was discovered that he had used palmed fragments of 35 mm slides to get his results (which would explain the motivation behind his alleged habit, as Watson mentions, of physically assaulting the camera that was being used). And back cover claim number three, that ex-CIA lie detector expert Cleve Backster had used a polygraph to prove telepathy in plants foundered after his research couldn't be replicated.

Lyall Watson was a botanist by trade, so he had enough of a scientific background to convince fourteen-year-old me that he knew what he was talking about. Indeed, I'm sure that the world would be a much more interesting place right now if some of the tales which he relates in Supernature had turned out to be true, but I'm afraid I have to report that not much of the rest of the book's content has stood the test of time—or my subsequent education—either. Throughout the text, Dr Watson discusses what he terms the "life field" which he uses to explain everything from embryonic development (genetics and genomics have come a long way since the 70s) to Kirlian photography (which is actually a way of photographing the coronal discharge that is generated by a strong electrical field) by way of a sponge's ability to regrow its structure after being puréed (which is made possible by both the sponge's extremely simple body structure and the remarkable totipotency of its cells). It's never clear exactly what Watson means by the term "life field"; I suspect that he would have enthusiastically adopted Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance wholesale but Sheldrake wouldn't publish his unfalsifiable and equally vague work on the subject until 1981, some eight years after Supernature hit the shelves. Watson also indulges in extensive discussions of subjects that nowadays are regarded as unmitigated woo such as astrology and homeopathy, and the many reports which he relates of mysterious psychic phenomena being recorded by experimenters working behind the Iron Curtain are more likely these days to be interpreted as propaganda reinforcing communist ideology or cynical disinformation campaigns by the Soviets, aimed at getting the CIA to waste money on conducting similar research.

The fact that a lot of the alleged phenomena Watson discusses such as ghosts, telepathy, or precognition go against such basic scientific tenets as the laws of thermodynamics is conveniently glossed over (I thought it was telling that the three laws are mentioned a couple of times in the first five pages of the book, and not once after that). Then again, Watson's grasp of physics appears to be tenuous at best and much of the terminology that he uses when he attempts to come up with a theoretical explanation of how something like dowsing appears to work makes little or no sense at all (not that this ever stopped the CIA, of course). But it was when I read Watson enthusiastically writing about the theories of Erich von Daniken, Carlos Castaneda, and Ivan T Sanderson without the slightest hint of scepticism that I realised that the game was up for good. I'm going to file this one under pseudoscience and quietly leave it there, gathering dust. Sometimes, you can't go back.

Published by: Penguin, 2018

This slim little book collects two essays written by George Orwell during the closing stages of World War II and one written shortly afterwards: Antisemitism in Britain was first published in April 1945, Notes on Nationalism was written in May 1945, and The Sporting Spirit was first published in December 1945. Reading all three essays, it's pretty clear that Orwell was already thinking about the themes that would become central to his best-known work Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was first published in 1948.

And reading Notes on Nationalism today it's also obvious that rather than people becoming more enlightened and things changing for the better, they've only got worse. These days, there's a pretty penny to be made from stoking the fires of nationalism, and I'm sure you can think of examples of people in power in your country who are doing that right now, regardless of where you live.

In The Sporting Spirit Orwell is scathing about soccer (back in 1945, the Russian team Moscow Dynamo had recently played a series of exhibition matches in the UK and had been told by NKVD boss Lavrentiy Beria beforehand that losing against the capitalists would not be tolerated) and he shows that both the "beautiful game" and the Olympics should be viewed as a sort of politely formalised version of war; were he still around, I suspect he would also have quite a lot to say about how the Eurovision Song Contest is conducted these days. When nations get involved in such enterprises, any considerations of giftedness, talent, or merit are bulldozed out of the way by politics in order to serve national pride and (in my opinion) the whole affair becomes pointless for anyone other than the most rabid of flag-shaggers. And this is one reason why we can't have nice things.

So, yeah; this was yet another bleakly depressing book. But it's also a thought-provoking one.

Published by: Pocket Books, 1997

The cringe continues. This week I got round to reading another book in my UFO collection and hoo boy, this one's a real stinker. Philip Corso was at some point an intelligence officer in the US Army stationed in the Pentagon, where (if you believe the story he tells here, at least) he was partly responsible for averting the Cuban missile crisis as well as leveraging recovered technology from a crashed flying saucer (the Roswell of the title) into the development of lasers, fibre-optics, integrated circuits, and the introduction of the CORONA reconnaissance satellite. William Birnes, on the other hand, has had a successful career as a ghostwriter; the other work of his that I have in my library is The Star Trek Cookbook that he wrote with the actor Ethan Phillips. Birnes has also written a lot of books about UFOs and crops up on the Ancient Aliens TV show from time to time, so I think we can safely scratch "journalistic credibility" off his CV. I mean, no disrespect to Mr Phillips intended, but writing a book with fucking Neelix? C'mon! Maybe Birnes was overdoing the raktajinos, but he doesn't seem to have wasted any time on fact-checking here.

There are serious inaccuracies in the text. For example: Corso must have been very good at his job, given that the CORONA satellite first flew two years before he was even posted to the Pentagon. Then again, time travel seems to figure quite regularly in his exploits, as he also tells a story about angrily visiting the CIA's headquarters in Langley, VA (before the building had even been commissioned) in order to threaten the Director of Covert Operations, Frank Wiesner (whose name he gets wrong; in reality Wiesner was out of the country at the time, working in London) for having him tailed as he went about his work. Birnes's earnestly hokey, z-movie spy thriller style of writing is amateurish at best and his dialogue painfully bad. His prose is so inept that I'd seriously considered abandoning the book before I'd got to the end of the first chapter but I pressed on, asking myself how much worse it could possibly get. That turned out to be a lot. Folks, this book is bad. Embarrassingly so.

It's not just the substandard technobabble that is used to describe how the UFO and the Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (EBEs) that piloted it got from place to place, although it rapidly becomes very clear that neither of the authors benefited from anything remotely resembling a science education, and the attempts that they make to sound convincing when discussing purported UFO propulsion systems (or even physics in general) are utterly cringe-inducing. There are also loads of inconsistencies; was the Roswell UFO disc-shaped, or a crescent? Did it have four tail-fins, or two? Or perhaps none at all? One minute the aliens are described as having four fingers, the next they've got six. But things really get embarrassing when Corso starts talking with a straight face about the mysterious "working party" that he became involved with, which was allegedly convened in order to analyse the bits and pieces recovered from the Roswell crash site. If you know me at all well you'll be familiar with my interests so you've probably already guessed that this is Corso and Birnes helping themselves to the mythos of the Majestic 12 papers which, back when this book was written, were still being regarded as faintly plausible by the more credulous members of the UFO community. These days, they're known as a notorious hoax (we even know exactly which document President Truman's signature on them was cut and pasted from) and we're back with William Moore, Richard Doty and the Mirage Men and whatever credibility Corso may have thought he was leveraging here evaporates completely. The whole book is bullshit, plain and simple.

I actually felt like I ought to wash my hands after reading this one.

Published by: Asimov's Science Fiction, 2021

The great Raymond Chandler took a very dim view of science fiction. In a letter to the literary agent Harold Norling Swanson in 1953 he wrote,

"Did you ever read what they call science fiction? It’s a scream. It’s written like this: 'I checked out with K19 on Adabaran III, and stepped out through the crummaliote hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timeprojector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Bryllis ran swiftly on five legs, using the other two to send out crylon vibrations. The pressure was almost unbearable, but I caught the range on my wrist computer through the transparent cysicites. I pressed the trigger. The thin violet glow was ice-cold against the rust-colored mountains. The Bryllis shrank to half an inch long and I worked fast stepping on them with the poltex. But it wasn’t enough. The sudden brightness swung me round and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough.'"

(Yes, Chandler invented Google. Deal with it.)

I have to confess that reading Rudy and Bruce in full flow reminded me painfully strongly of Chandler's pastiche. They clobber you around the head with neologisms and invented technology so heavily that you'll find yourself wondering if they were intentionally channelling the creator of Philip Marlowe for laughs, or just out of spite.

You've probably already guessed that the story was written to celebrate the life of the Italian mathematician; Drs Rucker and Sterling were to present it at a conference in Pisa (Fibonacci's birthplace) but thanks to the pandemic, the gathering was cancelled. The story they concocted is set in a post-apocalyptic Texas and involves shenanigans in which the protagonists end up with a representation of Fibonacci helping them to earn a living in something that sounds these days like an overheated version of ChatGPT. There's a lot of discussion about maths as well as Fibonacci's theory of humors and in the story, the latter becomes a super-powered version of the Myers-Briggs personality type inventory that actually works (this is science fiction, after all). Fibonacci's MBTI allows the protagonists to figure out what's going to happen to them and save the day, although given how predictable the plot is, this isn't much of a challenge. There's even a pair of Chekhov's Guns in the shape of the villain's two hippo-sized, carnivorous, bio-engineered pets. But everything works out swimmingly in the end; of course it does.

If a story makes you cringe not just once, but repeatedly, that's a bad thing, right?

Published by: Basic Books, 2003

Maybe it's the zeitgeist, but I seem to be reading a series of rather bleak and pessimistic books at the moment. The strap line for this one is "Will the human race survive the twenty-first century?" and while the book's title strongly implies that the short answer is "no, we won't," the former Astronomer Royal is rather more cautious about his conclusions in the actual text. But even if he doesn't commit to a decisive yes or a no, the sheer number of possible scenarios for us not doing so which he sets out in this book will most likely lead you to conclude that we won't.

The book was written in 2002 (yes, this was another charity shop find) and since it was published one of the scenarios which Professor Rees discussed has actually played out. The COVID pandemic is still with us (even though most governments are pretending that it's over) and is currently estimated to have resulted in more than seven million deaths making it the largest worldwide calamity to have occurred so far this century. But the rest of us are, thankfully, still here.

Some of the threats considered here are more existential than others; the accidental creation of a stable, negatively-charged strangelet in a nuclear accelerator collision could turn the entire Earth into strange matter, whereas false vacuum decay might render the entire Universe uninhabitable by making it impossible for atoms to form. The possibility of either of those scenarios is uncertain. Others, such as the Earth eventually being engulfed by the sun, will undoubtedly happen but they lie billions of years in the future. When I was a kid, I used to be terrified by that prospect but at the age of 65, I'm more sanguine about things. Perhaps that's the point of books such as this, and Jared Diamond's Collapse: the more you know about all the varied ways in which the world could come to an end, the more inured you become to existential angst and the less you end up worrying about it. Life goes on, until it doesn't.

Published by: Omnibus Press, 2001

From one diamond to another (did you see what I did, there?) I picked up this biography of Pink Floyd's founder (and the person responsible for giving the band their name) in an Otley charity shop and after finishing the book, I can see why its previous owner hadn't bothered to hang on to it. It's a puerile effort that starts off in clichés, flirts briefly with being painfully overwritten, and then settles down to occasional bursts of snark aimed primarily at Roger Waters, but also taking potshots at other PF fans or archivists (it feels very much like scores were being settled).

It's really not very good. The authors clearly enjoyed pointing out the factual inaccuracies and other shortcomings of previous accounts of the band's history, but they manage to get the name of Pink Floyd's legendary designer and conceptual artist Storm Thorgerson wrong not just once, but every single time that he's mentioned throughout the book, and he's mentioned a lot. In fact, the authors even interviewed him as part of their research, so you'd think they'd have checked the spelling (and the edition I picked up is the third, which means that anyone even remotely on the ball would have had ample time to correct the error).

To give another example of the lack of care and attention devoted to the book: the authors discuss the backwards-masked "Congratulations! You have discovered the secret message..." Easter egg on the track Empty Spaces on The Wall, although they can't even be bothered to tell you which track it appears on. The message urges the listener to get in touch with Old Pink (the album's thinly-disguised version of Syd) by writing to "The Funny Farm, Chalfont." But Watkinson and Anderson dismiss this as having no significance, saying that it was "more than likely that the message was added by some mischievous studio engineer or record pressing plant employee".

Um, no.

Leaving aside the fact that you can't change the audio of an LP after the master has been cut for pressing, the authors failed to recognise either that it's Roger Waters who is speaking, or that the rest of the message, when he is interrupted by someone calling out "Roger, Carolyne's on the phone" is thus referring to Waters's then wife Carolyne Christie (they divorced in 1992, but the whole point of the hidden message is that it distances Waters from the persona of Pink, who has just phoned his wife only to hear a male voice answer the phone). The authors seem to be oblivious to the fact that Roger has always really liked putting hidden messages in his work; from the sped-up, Goon Show-esque "Well, that was VERY avant-garde, wasn't it?" during Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave and Grooving With a Pict on Ummagumma to the gloriously splenetic backwards tirade against Stanley Kubrick at the beginning of Perfect Sense Part 1 on Roger's solo album Amused To Death (the rant came about because Kubrick refused to let him use lines spoken by the HAL9000 computer (voiced by the Canadian actor Douglas Rain) in 2001: A Space Odyssey for the track. After Kubrick died, Waters lost no time in using the appropriate audio in his live performances; I was at the Birmingham NEC on one occasion when he did just that, and it greatly improved the track because Roger knew what he was doing).

And sure, I get that the authors were on to a loser trying to write anything insightful about someone who not only refused to give any interviews but who clearly had great difficulty communicating his thought processes to others (to the extent that once the band became well known he appears to have very quickly given up trying). Even his bandmates couldn't understand what he was getting at, most of the time. If you're attempting to interpret the work of anyone with a genius quite as opaque as Syd's, you're going to run out of steam very rapidly, but here there's no sign at all of any real effort being made. Syd had been creatively dormant for the best part of three decades when this book first came out and that continued to be the case until he passed away, aged just 60, on July 7th, 2006. The fact that, by 1993, Syd had long since stopped producing any kind of output meant for public consumption scuppers any consideration of his artistic development, and his body of work was produced over such a short period of time that it's hardly sufficient for anyone to draw out persistent themes or obsessions.

Little effort is devoted to spotting Syd's musical influences beyond a trite "He liked the Beatles". And no attempt is made to unpack what happened to him in any way which acknowledges mental illness at anything other than the level of the most banal, tabloid journalism. For someone who is neurodivergent like me, much of Syd's described behaviour makes for painfully familiar reading: the overwhelm and the resulting shutting down and retreating into his own world; the hyperfocus; the hints of ADHD in the way lyrical lines don't always adhere to a strict 4/4 pattern and (to me) frequent suggestions of echolalia in his vocal delivery—just listen to Astronomy Domine to hear what I mean; a lack of social skills; and occasional, worryingly violent outbursts. I wonder what might have happened to him if he'd been diagnosed or been given access to medical professionals who could have helped him and provided the support he obviously needed. But this was the late 1960s and early 1970s so instead, he was subject to the whims of the ghastly hangers-on who allegedly spiked his food with LSD on a daily basis because they thought it was fun. It's a tragic story, and Syd deserves to be better served than he was by this garbage. You'd be much better off watching Roddy Bogawa and Storm Thorgerson's documentary Have You Got It Yet?

Published by: Penguin Books, 2006

If ever something was going to convince you of the potential for evil that is inherent in late-stage capitalism, you are likely to find it in this book. The descriptions of how mining companies in particular have plundered global resources made me so angry that I was imagining restitution schemes that involved guillotines rather than prison sentences. Diamond claims at the end of the book that there are reasons for hope that things will change. Twenty years on, things have become worse, not better.

This was one of the most brutal and bleakly depressing books that I can remember reading. It paints such a grim picture of human nature that I struggled to finish it. And the book was first published more than twenty years ago, before the excesses of billionaires like Musk and Bezos showed us that even when humanity has the wherewithal to fix its most pressing problems, the self-interest of the powerful will always prioritise the acquisition of more wealth over things that the rest of us consider to be important, like, oh, I don't know; trivial things like preserving the environment or the continued survival of humanity as a species. Throughout history, the lesson seems to be that if you give people power over others which enables them to prioritise their own interests and influence, they can be relied upon to use that power to be complete assholes.

However, Collapse was criticised strongly by archaeologists and cultural anthropologists as being a superficial and not entirely accurate take on things to the extent that a book, Questioning Collapse, was published to refute much of Diamond's ideas. After he gave the book a negative review in the science journal Nature without once declaring that he was the originator of the ideas being criticised, Diamond was publicly called out by his publisher for a lack of objectivity. It would appear that you don't have to be a ridiculously wealthy oligarch to be an asshole.

Published by: Prime, 2015

This is an anthology of previously published short stories by the American author and they're all good; one or two are exceptional. My personal favourite was Evil Robot Monkey which, for me at least, reminded me of the work of Daniel Keyes.

There are also nods to Heinlein and Zelazny, and Red Rockets is a deft homage to Bradbury which is, of course, set on Mars. Waiting for Rain is a delight for oenophiles like me, and First Flight will appeal to any aviation nerd.

Good fun.

Published by: Dark Chaos, 2019 (e-book)

I've been working my way through this collection of more than 120 works of Algernon Blackwood's short fiction for a while now. Blackwood's work is sadly neglected these days, but H. P Lovecraft cited him as one of his greatest influences, and he's also been lauded by writers such as Jeff Vandermeer, who included the Blackwood story The Willows in the bumper compilation of weird fiction that he edited together with his wife Ann, The Weird (which is where I first read any of his work). The Willows is probably the strongest story in this collection, a deeply unsettling tale of adventurers encountering an otherworldly something that takes an unhealthy interest in them but which is never explicitly described (and, as is the case in many of Blackwood's stories, never directly confronted). In Blackwood's imagination, it is the forces of nature which provide the most reliable source of fear; after you've read a hundred or so of his stories, descriptions of the hero's unease as he listens to the wind roaring threateningly through the trees becomes rather tiring.

The stories are presented in the order that they were written and it's interesting to see how particular fascinations (the Jura mountains, the Canadian backwoods, and Ancient Egypt) wax and wane as thematic choices. The quality varies quite a bit, too; some of the later works feel like he was rather phoning it in—the "vague gentleman" tales are probably the most obvious example of this. But his creation of John Silence, who is a sort of spiritual version of Sherlock Holmes and who features in several stories from the middle part of Blackwood's career, was one of his greatest literary achievements.

As always seems to be the case with e-books, this edition is riddled with typos as a result of the publisher's OCR software not understanding the typefaces which must have been used as the source material. The rate at which I encountered such errors picks up noticeably in the last third of the book. I suspect that the copy editor simply gave up; with nearly two thousand pages of heavily gothic writing to get through, I can understand how they felt. But picking up a slab of engaging and atmospheric spooky fiction for less than a quid was a bargain nevertheless.

Published by: Orbit, 2026

This is the fourteenth Laundry novel and is, allegedly, the last in the series, which makes me sad. Over the years (twenty-five of them, as Charlie observes in his afterword, and has it really been a quarter of a century?) I've really enjoyed reading the adventures of Bob Howard and his colleagues who work for a rather unusual division of the Special Operations Division. What started out as a fun mash-up of Len Deighton and H. P. Lovecraft became very much its own thing and the mounting sense of doom which Charlie has created as the stars come right and the horrors of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN begin not just knocking on the door of Bob's universe but winning a general election and assuming control of the UK is a masterclass in existential dread.

This time around, it's 2017 and Bob is trying to protect none other than HRH Queen Elizabeth from the machinations of the British Prime Minister Fabian Everyman (who as I just mentioned also happens to be the Earthly manifestation of the malevolent elder god Nyar Lat-Hotep, also known as the Black Pharaoh). The PM has Plans (with a capital P) and things do not bode well for Brenda—or, indeed, for the rest of humanity. Can anyone in SOE (Q) Division stop CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN coming to its terrifying conclusion and save the day?

The plot unfolds with some wonderful movie references which I won't spoil (let's just say that nobody plunders popular culture quite as gleefully as Charlie) and there are some delicious bits of snark aimed at government bureaucracy, public/private partnerships, other members of the Royal Family, and more than a few prominent political figures, all of it (in my opinion) thoroughly deserved. The gags and the set pieces come fast and furious, and so does the mayhem. It's a fitting conclusion to the series, but there are enough loose ends left unresolved to allow further tales in the series to be told, should Mr Stross be inclined to do so.

I rather hope he does. A series of books that is this consistently good doesn't come along very often and I'd hate for this to be all there is.

Published by: Hodder & Stoughton, 2021

Dr Gage is a psychologist and epidemiologist at the University of Liverpool. This book came about as the result of her appearance as a guest on Scroobius Pip's Distraction Pieces podcast and the Say Why To Drugs podcast that it spawned; Mr Pip wrote the foreword here.

Say Why To Drugs is a scientific examination of the most popular recreational drugs (i.e. those which are used primarily for entertainment, and not for therapeutic reasons—although as Dr Gage points out, interest in the efficacy of psychedelic drugs including LSD and psilocybin as treatments in psychiatry is growing again after being shut down for half a century after Timothy Leary went all evangelical about them and spoiled things for everyone else).

I've only used two of the drugs which are discussed here, and you probably have too: they're alcohol and caffeine. After reading this book, I was surprised to realise that I'm quite happy that I never bothered with any of the rest. Aside from the extreme risk that if you do obtain a substance illicitly, there's no guarantee that it's actually what you were told it was and it might turn out to be something that will kill you if you don't take that into account, many of the side effects and withdrawal symptoms of using many of the drugs listed in the book aren't exactly what you'd call attractive. The same can be said of alcohol and caffeine, of course; until I read this book I hadn't realised that the delicious "lift" that my morning coffee gives me every day is more likely to be the withdrawal symptoms being mitigated by another hit of the stuff. That's scary.

And that's kind of the point of the book. If you have teenagers, this is a good book to have around as a way of starting discussions about social pressure, risk-taking, and all the other delights of growing up these days. Recommended.

Published by: Orbit, 2025

I've returned to filling in the outstanding gaps in my collection of Charlie's Laundry stories before The Regicide Report, which is the final novel in the series, comes out next week (my copy is already on order).

Given that I still have both my very battered Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual from 1980 as well as the v3.5 reboot from 2003, it should come as no surprise to hear that I really got this particular volume of the sequence. The titular novella, A Conventional Boy, is the tale of Derek Reilly, an inmate of the Laundry's internment camp, Camp Sunshine. Derek was incarcerated there in the early 80s for being inadvisably good at organising games of D&D—because in the Laundry universe, moral panics over such things were even more extreme and the consequences more damaging than the ones in ours were, because over there it turns out that you really could summon eldritch horrors from beyond while playing D&D—and as Derek has both Asperger's (did I say I can relate?) and a genuine talent for dice-based magic but no experience of the outside world after the age of 14, he has become institutionalised. Right up until the point, that is, when he finds out that a gaming convention is going to take place in the nearby town of Scarfolk (yes, that Scarfolk) at which point he breaks out of confinement in order to attend. Things, needless to say, rapidly go South to a horrifyingly gory degree.

A Conventional Boy is unusual for the series in that it skips back in time to 2011 or so to do what Charlie described in his blog as some "filling in" and while it features Iris Carpenter from The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry #3) and includes several references to characters from the later New Management novels (and if you've read Quantum of Nightmares, the plot of Derek's home-crafted TTRPG will seem very familiar indeed) the action here takes place well before that of The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry #4). However, the usual Laundry regulars are otherwise absent.

I was pleased to find out that Bob Howard and his original boss James "Eater Of Souls" Angleton do crop up in the two short stories Overtime and Down On The Farm which constitute the rest of this book. Both stories date back to the early oughts and have been published before, so there were no surprises or dramatic switches in store but it's nice to have them in a handy hardback edition to add to my burgeoning Laundry shelf.

This is a fine addition to the canon, and it's whetted my appetite for the next book nicely.

Published by: Simon and Schuster, 2025

I picked up a copy of this gem back in November last year when I was visiting Ruth and Alex in York. It was a no-brainer, because apart from being a huge fan of the band (I was there when they played their Royal Albert Hall gig back in the 1990s) I'd spotted that the book had been signed by Rob Reiner. But fast forward a couple of months, and that last fact lands rather differently and it's taken me until now to get to the point where I could face up to reading it.

But the book is a delight. It's Rob Reiner's account of how the movie (and its new sequel) got to be made against almost insurmountable odds. He's aided and abetted by the three main members of the Tap, as well as many of the other people involved. It's the tale of something which was originally deemed to be a dismal failure going on to find its audience and become a cult classic that is loved to this day by its many fans, including me. It's also a celebration of a creative partnership and a set of friendships which lasted for half a century. The book is crammed full of lovely anecdotes and enough bits of trivia to satisfy the most ardent Tap-head. I didn't know that Chris Guest and Jeff Beck actually became friends as a result of the movie, for example. There are also contributions from many rock and roll luminaries including Slash, Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and Don Henley. There's even the sheet music for Nigel's most famous instrumental composition, Lick My Love Pump.

And if you flip the book upside down, it becomes Smell The Book: The Oral History of Spinal Tap, by Marty DiBergi with Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins and Derek Smalls. This version of the book presents the story of the band as told by the band in character as themselves.

So much fun.

Published by: Guardian Faber, 2018

Dean's follow-up to The Idiot Brain is a fascinating examination of the neuroscience and psychology of happiness. Given the state I'm in these days, the title alone made it a must-read book for me, and it proved to be informative and helpful.

The book is as funny as its predecessor. The opening quote, which Dean tells us was uttered by a "wise philosopher" is actually taken from the lyrics to the chorus of a Ken Dodd song. Dean remains upbeat and positive, even when he's discussing addiction, or the darker side of happiness (and things get pretty dark, because some people are not nice people).

What makes someone happy varies from person to person (and what a boring place the world would be if that was not the case, after all) but Dean explains some of the fundamental processes that are happening inside our heads when we find ourselves feeling happy. He does so deftly and in his trademark engaging manner. There's a lot of jargon to get used to, though. We're soon learning about the importance of dopamine and the mesolimbic reward pathway in maintaining our levels of happiness and motivation, and I was soon wishing that the book had a map of the brain to show me where all the different bits of it that are being discussed are. Not everyone knows that when the name of a part of your brain includes the word "anterior" that means it's located at the front of your skull, or that a "posterior" something or other means that it will be located at the back, for example (what was I just saying about having a classics education?) and it would have been helpful for these terms to be explained. Then again, not explaining terminology seems to be a cultural trait for psychologists in general...

But the editing of this book isn't going to do anything to alleviate the publisher's long-standing reputation as a hotbed of typos and spelling mistakes. Perhaps things were rushed through to meet a deadline (Dean has mentioned before that he has to switch his WiFi off in order to get articles written on time) because the text of the later chapters is all over the place compared with the earlier ones. There are so many comma splices. Far too many sentences lack a subject entirely, and Dean has a habit. Of splitting one sentence into two in nonsensical ways. When you're doing standup (which Dean does very well) that trick is a great way of bringing the audience along with you, but when it's done in print, it just doesn't land at all and his editor really should have done something about it. I found it absolutely infuriating after the first half a dozen times it happens. Oh, and as I checked a couple of points in writing this review, I also noticed that the index gets the spelling of "mesolimbic" wrong. I must emphasise that this sort of stuff isn't Dean's fault; it's his publisher who has dropped the ball, but my inner proofreader was going into spasms all the way though. Being Autistic clearly isn't going to make life easier for me in this regard but when you're reading something and your strongest reaction is to find yourself wishing that you could edit the text and polish it up a bit, it does rather detract from the reading experience.

Published by: Mantle, 2025

I had to translate Ovid at school for my Latin O-level. I hadn't wanted to take Latin as a subject; I wanted to do art instead, but the staff of the grammar school I went to were obsessed with getting as many of their pupils into Oxford or Cambridge as possible and back when I was a kid that meant you needed to have studied classics, and who cares what the pupils actually wanted to do with their lives? Clearly, the school's reputation was far more important (its reputation for sexism, bullying, and a pathological fondness for corporal punishment, perhaps not so much—the school only began to admit girls when I reached the sixth form). As a result, I took no further interest in the classics for the next thirty years.

Natalie Haynes has been single-handedly responsible for changing that. Her books have cropped up here before; I'm a big fan and I very much enjoy her radio show as well.

While previous (male) versions of the myth of the Argo and the legendary Golden Fleece present Medea either as the daughter of King Aietes of Colchis or as Jason's bride, in No Friend To This House, Medea gets to tell her own story, assisted by a supporting cast of characters both human and divine, but all female. The result is a stark contrast to the heroics you might be familiar with from the Ray Harryhausen epic and quite frankly none of the men in the tale come out of this version deserving any sort of merit or praise whatsoever. It's brilliantly, scathingly written.

Natalie leavens the bleakness with accomplished humour, because she is also very funny indeed; there's a gag involving the unsuitability of King Ixion as a prospective Argonaut that had me roaring with laughter and one chapter near the end of the book reads like a lost sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. I can only imagine the reaction that this book would have provoked from my testosterone-addled teachers back in the 1970s. Watching them turn purple with apoplexy might even have offered some compensation for them completely derailing my dreams of an artistic career.

Published by: Guardian Books,2026

I've seen Dr Burnett speak many times at events which Robin Ince has organised over the years and he always presents news from the fields of neuroscience or psychology while making it easy to understand, very entertaining, and incredibly funny. That's a rare talent. The last time I saw him do this was at Kings Place at Christmas, where I was fortunate enough to pick up signed copies of a couple of his books.

This is an updated version of Dr Burnett's first book, which I bought for my Kindle when it first came out and which was therefore not as easy to get signed. As Dean says in the afterword to this new edition, most of the research and examples which he wrote about back in 2016 are still valid (and in many cases, even more relevant than they were when the book was first published). As he observes in his inimitable fashion, even the research concerning the brain's inability to detect "soup-based deception" which was carried out at Bristol University by Jeffrey Brunstrom and his team still holds up.

"Soup-based deception" is typical of the turn of phrase you're going to encounter in this book, which will take you on a witty, whistle-stop tour of the many ways in which our brains (spectacularly complex though they are) manage to completely get things wrong. And the brain can—and does—do that in all sorts of inconvenient, embarrassing, and even occasionally dangerous situations. Given what I've been going through over the past year or so, I read about them all with renewed fascination.

Dean concludes the final chapter with the observation that "It's amazing how humans get anything done, really." And after you've read the book, you'll probably agree with him. Once you've stopped chuckling, that is.

Published by: Allen & Unwin, 2022

If last year was a year of discovery and re-evaluation triggered by the experience of reading Robin Ince's Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal when I finally recognised that I have ADHD and Autism, then reading Stephanie Foo's memoir about her diagnosis of, and recovery from complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (c-PTSD) was the other shoe dropping. c-PTSD is a relatively new concept (while it's recognised by the UK's NHS, it has yet to make it into the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM) and most people will be unfamiliar with what sufferers experience. Here, Ms. Foo sets it all out clearly with brutal frankness. I didn't have a childhood that was quite as full of systemic abuse as hers was, but it wasn't radically different, either. My early life was not normal, and it wasn't pleasant. It was filled with trauma. Ms. Foo's experiences and the patterns of thought which resulted from them are painfully familiar. I connected with her story, and I connected hard.

And Professor Jacob Ham sounds like just the best medical professional you could ever hope to deal with; this conversation between the two of them demonstrates this admirably. The point they make both in the book and in that video chat is that healing from c-PTSD has to be relational, in that it has to do with the way you interact with other people. It's not something that you can fix by reading books about it; it requires you to live your life differently. For someone like me, that's terrifying. But now I have some ideas about how I should start to do exactly that.

I was crying by the time I got to the final chapters. And not just tears and quiet sniffles, either, but huge, wracking sobs. Nothing I've read has affected me like that in decades. This is not an ordinary book.