Hawking’s fact and fictionGeorge F. R. Ellis, with help from Ruby (10)Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time was a huge commercial success. Its achieve-ments in bringing difficult scientific ideas to a wide audience are not so clear. Now the distin-guished physicist has teamed up with his daugh-ter Lucy to produce a children’s book designed to communicate contemporary physics. Will it capture the attention of young minds and teach them some real science? Or will it be boring and over the heads of the prospective readers?

George’s Secret Key to the Universe is an adventure story complete with villains and hero and is illustrated with enjoyable line-drawings. It involves a lost pig, a humorously portrayed intelligent computer, school bullies and a trip through the Solar System. Didactic discussions on aspects of modern physics, such as super-nova explosions and black-hole physics are hung on this set-up. There are also fact boxes on physics and astronomy, and some photo-graphs of astronomical phenomena: planets, comets, galaxies and so on. Overall, the book is a serious effort to convey facts and ideas in present day astronomy and astrophysics, within a science-fiction adventure story.

The mixture is great. Chi ldren love facts and adventure stories. The combination will catch their interest and keep them occupied for hours. After ten minutes of leafing through the book, my granddaughter Ruby was deeply absorbed and I had to promise to bring it back for her to read after I had completed my review. Like any educational tool, it will succeed for some and not for others. I reckon there should be more of the former.

I have two small quibbles. First, there is a bit of a disjunction between the science and the science-fiction parts that could confuse: is the kind of space travel envisaged in the narrative compatible with the hard science in the sci-ence sections? I suspect not. Second, I find the cover garish. But my youthful consultant loved it; so who am I to query the taste of youth? ■

George F. R. Ellis is professor of Mathematics at University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, Cape Town, South Africa.

Stones, bones and stories Henry Gee, with help from Phoebe (9) and Rachel (7) The ‘life-as-grand-narrative’ school of chil-dren’s books, such as Spinar and Burian’s spec-tacular Life Before Man, first published in 1972, tell the history of life as ‘Manifest Destiny’, in which isolated fossil remains are seen as parts of a preordained jigsaw.

Books like that have an undeniable appeal — I loved them as a child. The determinedly old-fashioned Life Story, published in the late 1980s, is very much part of that tradition. “This book is captivating,” says Phoebe, aged nine, “with its beautiful illustrations and words. I loved it!”

Phoebe is a chip off the old block, to whom the grand-narrative theme is an easy sell. The knack is to entice into the contemplation of life’s splendid drama those children who might otherwise not have considered it — and, hope-fully, to keep them there, enthralling them suf-ficiently that they spurn opportunities later on to become more interested in cell signalling or real estate.

How can this be done? Rachel is far less interested in the idea of dinosaurs as living animals than is her sister, but has a fine eye for a fossil in the field. For her, shapes and colours are as important as concept, and she enjoyed Neal Layton’s calculatedly anarchic The Story of Everything, an elaborate pop-up book that looks like how Life Story would have turned

out, had it been written by a mildly scatological graffiti artist.

In other words, what you need is a gimmick. The Pebble In My Pocket tries this through the valid, somewhat earnest mechanism of follow-ing the career of a pebble from its origins as volcanic lava until it ends up being picked up by a little girl 480 million years later: the his-tory of life being told from the point of view of a pebble. The problem is that pebbles make unsympathetic narrators.

Ask Dr K Fisher About Dinosaurs is the other extreme — a scrapbook-like presentation of a collection of dinosaur problems solved by a prehistoric agony aunt. A juvenile T. rex, wor-ried that his teeth are falling out, is consoled to learn that this is normal, and his teeth will be replaced. The children enjoyed the presenta-tion, but it hardly lingered in the mind.

Fractionally more successful was Prehistoric Actual Size, in which parts of prehistoric ani-mals — a tooth or a claw — are represented at their actual size. This is a clever idea, one of the thrills I get when seeing a museum speci-men for the first time is realizing that the real thing is so much smaller (or larger) than I had imagined. But like many gimmicks, it’s a one-trick pony.

The gimmick that works for everyone is to tell the history of life as a human story, in which real people are measured up against geological

time, to give it scale. So the big hits chez Gee were The Fossil Girl and Stone Girl Bone Girl, two books about Mary Anning (1799–1847), the young woman who excavated many impor-tant specimens of early Jurassic marine life from the cliffs at Lyme Regis on the south coast of

Life StoryEric Maddern & Leo Duff (illus.)Frances Lincoln: £5.99The Story of Everythingby Neal LaytonHodder: £12.99The Pebble In My Pocketby Meredith Hooper & Chris Coady (illus.)Frances Lincoln: £5.99Ask Dr K Fisher about Dinosaursby Claire Llewellyn & Kate Sheppard (illus.)Kingfisher: £7.99Prehistoric Actual Sizeby Steve JenkinsFrances Lincoln: £11.99The Fossil Girlby Catherine BrightonFrances Lincoln: £5.99/$7.95Stone Girl Bone Girlby Laurence Anholt & Sheila Moxley (illus.)Frances Lincoln: £5.99/$7.95The Human Storyby Charles LockwoodNatural History Museum: £9.99

George’s Secret Key to the UniverseBy Lucy and Stephen HawkingDoubleday: £12.99Simon & Schuster: $17.99

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England. Both books are fictionalized and Mary Anning becomes every bit as mythical a charac-ter as Red Riding Hood. They found immedi-ate acceptance with Rachel, who gravitates more to princesses than plesiosaurs. Stone Girl Bone Girl looks and feels indistinguishable from any bedtime story. This tried-and-tested formula still had enough facts about prehistoric life to satisfy Phoebe.

The Fossil Girl goes one better and does the childhood of Mary Anning as a really sharp graphic novel. This got full marks from Gees

of all ages. Graphic novels could be the way to go: palaeoanthropology through the eyes of a six-packed Louis Leakey in the style of Judge Dredd? That has got to be better than The Human Story, the Natural History Muse-um’s latest authoritative, uncool communiqué, brim-full of facts and threadbare on fun. Rachel says she might like such things, if they didn’t have so many long words. ■

Henry Gee is a senior biological sciences editor at Nature and author of Jacob’s Ladder: The History of the Human Genome.

Star talesMark Brake “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Albert Einstein said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Stories are how we make sense of the world, they help shape what we see, do and dream. Children who have difficulties focusing in class will sit spellbound by a narrative.

There are a lot of studies on the power of stories; psychologists refer to information presented in story form as ‘psychologically privileged’. Our brains, it seems, are especially attentive and responsive to information con-veyed in a narrative. Stories greatly aid recall. They provide a meaningful structure — hooks upon which to hang new knowledge.

All this is a gift, you would have hoped, to communicators of science. Yet too many authors of children’s science books pick up on one of the key strands of storytelling without taking the creative step of bringing them all together. And what greater story than space and the origin of our planet?

Narrative structures make more sense when causal relationships are

clear, and causality is key in Eric Maddern’s Earth Story (8–13 years). This is a dramatic and nicely illustrated account of the origins of Earth. Maddern takes the reader on a journey from the enormous bang at the beginning of the universe through to the very first forms of life on our planet. But the book suffers from an otherwise limited and impersonal approach, with little suspense.

The use of complications and challenges in a narrative help to create a problem-solv-ing scenario that involves the reader. Stardust from Space by Monica Grady (8–12 years) attempts to tell the story of stardust, and how it made our Solar System. But it is so replete and unrelenting in its presentation of data, one can almost hear Thomas Gradgrind, Charles Dickens’s heartless utilitarian, screaming, “Fact, fact, fact!”

Strong, interesting characters are also essential to good stories. As F. Scott Fitzgerald went so far as to sug-gest, “action is

character”. Jacqueline Mitton understands this very well. Her books Zoo in the Sky: A Book of Animal Constellations and Kingdom of the Sun: A Book of The Planets (7–12 years) (pictured below), imbue the Sun, plants and constella-tions with character. Lavishly illustrated by Christina Balit, Mitton’s stories clearly exhibit an understanding of the power of character and narrative for newly confident readers. Mitton does even better with Galileo: Scientist and Star Gazer (9–16 years). Here is the excite-ment of the discovery and exploration of sci-ence as unfolding narrative. A wonderful way of stimulating aspirant cosmologists.

A book that manages to bring together many of the key components of successful storytell-ing is David Donohue’s Moon Man (8–14 years). This is a gripping and inventive account of young Walter Speazlebud’s quest to find the truth about the 1969 Moon landings: fact or fiction.

Walter uses his power of Noitanigami — ‘imagination’ to those who sadly lack the ability to spell, talk and travel backwards. He travels back in time to 1969 to prove that the Moon landing happened. Granted, the Moon’s sur-face does look a little like the Nevada desert. Granted too that Neil Armstrong botched his ‘lines’. Walter’s grandad said it happened, and even if he is getting confused in the head, he must be right. Walter proves this by mastering his gift of Noitanigami. His next task: to take his grandfather back in time, too, and rid him of his Alzheimer’s disease. Marvellous. ■

Mark Brake holds a chair in science communication at the University of Glamorgan, UK and is co-author of Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science.

Earth Story by Eric Maddern & Leo Duff (illus.)Frances Lincoln: £5.99Stardust from Spaceby Monica Grady & Lucia deLeiris (illus.)Frances Lincoln: £11.99Zoo in the Sky by Jacqueline Mitton & Christina Balit (illus.)National Geographic: $7.95Kingdom of the Sunby Jacqueline Mitton & Christina Balit (illus.)Frances Lincoln: £6.99National Geographic: $16.95Galileo: Scientist and Star Gazerby Jacqueline Mitton & Gerry Ball (illus.)Oxford University Press: £4.99Moon Man by David DonohueEgmont Books: £4.99

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