Between the lines

Exoplanet sci-fi

The Kepler spacecraft was launched in 2009 with the aim of finding Earth-like planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. Before an equipment failure cramped its style in April this year, it racked up thousands of new candidate planets – including many in the so-called “habitable zone”, where water could exist in liquid form. Future missions may tell us whether these habitable planets are actually inhabited, but for the moment these questions remain the stuff of science fiction. That’s where the authors of A Kepler’s Dozen come in. In this intriguing book, 13 science-fiction writers – including Kepler project scientist Steve Howell and a few other “moonlighting” astronomers – have applied their imaginations to the facts that Kepler has given us, producing stories based on “distant worlds that really exist”. Each story is inspired by a specific Keplerian planet and prefaced with a short description of what we know about it, including its mass, surface temperature and distance from its parent star. In some stories, such as Anna Paradox’s excellent “Tracking the glints”, the setting is more or less incidental but others stick fairly closely to their Keplerian inspirations. In “Turtle soup”, for example, the difference between the force of gravity on Earth and on Kepler-36b is an important element of the plot. In other tales, the action takes place on undiscovered-but-plausible moons that may be more conducive to life than the Keplerian planets they orbit. Indeed, one story, “The gloom of Tartarus”, features a moon of Kepler-34b that is arguably too habitable; in the imagination of author Gene Mederos it is populated by a rampant and vicious ecosystem of microscopic life that could literally eat an unprotected human being for breakfast. As in any collection, the quality of the writing varies, and the book’s mix of young-adult fiction and stories with more mature themes (including one, “Exposure at 35b”, about an erotic alien-human love affair) may raise a few eyebrows. But overall, A Kepler’s Dozen gets a lot of mileage out of its central conceit, and most sci-fi fans will find something to enjoy.

• 2013 Hadrosaur Productions $12.95pb 202pp

A bug lover’s life

A book of advice written by an ant researcher may seem like an odd addition to a column of reviews in a physics magazine. However, in Letters to a Young Scientist, the eminent biologist Edward O Wilson has produced a rare thing: a scientific memoir that will interest not only his family and colleagues but also people from all disciplines who have never met the author and do not share his abiding intellectual passions. Wilson’s book is packed with stories from his own life, including tales of his boyhood in southern Alabama during the Second World War and research trips to far-flung parts of the tropical rainforest and the Australian outback. But these are no mere idle reminiscences. A disciplined writer with several previous bestsellers under his belt, Wilson has chosen his examples carefully by drawing out lessons from each and showing how they can be applied to the widest possible readership. For example, the rural Alabama backwater where Wilson came of age was abundantly supplied with bugs and insects but not with mathematics teachers. As a result, he did not take algebra until his first year at university and did not get around to calculus until he was 32 and a tenured professor at Harvard University. This experience taught him some humility but it also led him to realize that having a low degree of mathematical competence is not a barrier to success in many scientific fields. Particle physics and astrophysics are, he acknowledges, exceptions to this rule but even for such highly mathematical fields, “a strong mathematical background does not – repeat, does not – guarantee success in science”. In a later chapter, Wilson presses this point further, arguing that “the ideal scientist is smart only to an intermediate degree: bright enough to see what can be done but not so bright as to become bored doing it”. The world’s certified high-IQ geniuses are, he believes, more often found working as auditors or tax consultants than as scientists. Wilson’s advice on a scientist’s ideal work-life balance is similarly pithy. Academic researchers should expect to work 60-hour weeks, he writes, and should “take weekends off for rest and diversion, but no vacations. Real scientists do not take vacations.” You might not agree but scientists young and old will finish this book with plenty of things to ponder about their own scientific careers.

• 2013 W W Norton £14.99/$21.95hb 256pp