Starman: Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin
by Piers Bizony and Jamie Doran
Bloomsbury p256 £12.59

On April 12, 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first human in history to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and venture into space. This biography is based on material from sensitive KGB files and restricted documents from the Russian space authorities. It also includes a number of interviews with people who knew him. A fascinating and readable account of the early soviet space race. Recommended.

COSM
by Gregory Benford
Orbit books pp384 £10/$16.10

In this scientific thriller by Gregory Benford, a physicist at University of California at Irvine, something goes wrong with a young physicist’s ambitious experiment. Fortunately, it will soon be seen as a significant historical breakthrough, for the explosion has left something behind – a sphere made of nothing known to science.

The novel is set in the not too distant future at two locations: the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island (currently being constructed) and Benford’s own university campus. Many physicists reading the book will recognise the hardwork needed to get an experiment scheduled on an accelerator – and the infighting and politics involved. COSM explores how scientists work in a much more realistic manner than many current mainstream novels or movies. Surprisingly Benford says that the structure of the book was determined by the media’s reaction to Dolly, the cloned sheep. He wondered how people would react to a similar newsworthy event in physics. Recommended (especially to particle physicists).