With every year bringing record-breaking flooding, cyclones, hurricanes and heatwaves, one might think that Homo sapiens needs an escape hatch from an overheating Earth. Some futurists believe we should be making giant leaps towards colonising the red planet – even if the prospect of Emperor Elon is enough to put anyone off a trip to Mars.
Not so fast, caution Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, a husband-and-wife team of researcher-writers, in the deadpan A City on Mars (Penguin): “Leaving a 2C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy bedroom so you can live in a toxic waste dump.”
The Weinersmiths refer to themselves as “space bastards” because of their willingness to pick holes in the bafflingly upbeat space-settlement narrative. Such as, how will women actually give birth up there? What laws apply? It is unusual for a book with cartoons to win the £25,000 Royal Society Trivedi science book prize, the most prestigious in the genre, but the space bastardry on display here is a rare and welcome corrective to some seriously insane techno-optimism. My only gripe is that they missed the obvious title: Don’t Even Go There.
Also in the running for the top gong was Everything Is Predictable (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by science writer and statistics aficionado Tom Chivers. In clear and entertaining prose, he pays homage to Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and hobbyist mathematician who revolutionised the understanding of probability and chance. Bayes’ theorem now underpins modelling and forecasting – and seems to reflect the way humans think, not just at the gambling tables. “I predict, therefore I am,” Chivers writes, suggesting that the way we rationalise uncertainty and probability has something of the philosophical about it.
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In the mid-19th century, the luck of the great auk finally ran out. As Icelandic anthropologist Gísli Pálsson recounts in The Last of Its Kind (Princeton University Press), the flightless bird was hunted to extinction in 1844 by his countrymen. Its disappearance showed that, contrary to the complacent beliefs of the time, a species could indeed vanish thanks to human activity. Pálsson, in an atmospheric blend of history, travelogue and science, tells this Victorian extinction story primarily through the eyes of two British ornithologists who set sail for Iceland to chase down the rare birds (and bring one back for London zoo), but arrived too late.
The threat of extinction also preoccupies curator, historian and nature writer Daniel Lewis in the lyrical and lovely Twelve Trees (Simon & Schuster), a mix of personal encounter and plea for conservation. The dozen species that fall under his gaze include the giant redwood, sequoia, bristlecone pine and ebony. Lewis notes how much of the arboreal has taken root in everyday life, from addresses (Oak Street, Maple Avenue) to common metaphors (branching out, leafing through, knocking on wood). Trees, he eulogises, “are the nomenclatural currency of our lives … [they] are also our custodians, forecasters and predictors in an era of changing climates”. Seriously, who doesn’t love a tree, especially at Christmas?
Prediction of another kind comes under the investigative nose of New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill. In 2019, a source tipped her off to the existence of Clearview AI, a secretive startup scraping so many photos off public websites and social media that it could identify anyone from a mugshot. So starts the utterly chilling Your Face Belongs to Us (Simon & Schuster). Hill shows how the facial-recognition app has been shared with law enforcement agencies and governments around the world. Even though we balk at this kind of invasive technology, our willingness to use our faces as passwords shows our complicity in the loss of privacy it is currently monetising. Can we put the genie back in the bottle?
Very little remains private in The Impossible Man (Atlantic), a moving biography of Roger Penrose, the 93-year-old British-born Nobel prize-winning physicist and geometry whiz lauded by some as cleverer than colleague Stephen Hawking. Patchen Barss, a science journalist based in Toronto, contrasts Penrose’s almost superhuman talent for visualising patterns in the universe with his disordered personal life, featuring distant parents, an unhappy first marriage and difficult relationships with his older children. Barss, who interviewed Penrose’s colleagues and family and had access to his archive, including love letters, raises the provocative question: to what extent are emotional shortcomings a necessary cost of genius?
An answer of sorts can be found in The Elements of Marie Curie (4th Estate), an absorbing biography of a pioneer who achieved something that Penrose might have managed in a different universe: won Nobel prizes in two different scientific disciplines (physics and chemistry). As science historian Dava Sobel shows, the modest Curie avoided the screwed-up genius trope: she was a dutiful daughter and sister, devoted wife, loving mother and – the focus of this account – champion of other talented female scientists, whom she nurtured at her Paris laboratory. She was a giant among men at a time when female researchers were expected to resign their positions upon marriage.
Yet there was tragedy: her beloved scientist husband, Pierre, was fatally run over by a wagon when their two daughters were young (one, Irene, went on to win another Nobel). Curie, who never remarried, became a ruthless fundraiser, coaxing donations from wealthy patrons to further her radioactivity research and develop radiotherapy for cancer treatment. She died in 1934 and became the first woman interred in her own right in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum reserved for France’s greatest intellects.
Marie Curie is synonymous with cancer care but there are thousands of ordinary, mostly nameless, individuals who make their own immeasurable contributions to health each year. They include Keira Ball, a vivacious nine-year-old from Devon who was involved in a catastrophic car accident in 2017. After she was declared brain dead, Keira’s family gave permission for her organs to be donated. Her heart was transplanted into a boy called Max.
The palliative care doctor and health writer Rachel Clarke captures this act of generosity in The Story of a Heart (Little, Brown). By weaving the story of Kiera and Max’s families with the history of emergency medicine and transplantation, Clarke has written an unputdownable testament to life and all that we hold dear, through “the wonder and anguish, the science and soul, of a single heart in transit”. This mesmerising and beautiful book, shortlisted for the Baillie-Gifford prize for nonfiction, speaks for itself – if only to tell us that some gifts are so profound as to be beyond value.