Tag: my books

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Out now – The Antigravity Enigma

The Antigravity Enigma

This is my sixth contribution to Springer’s “Science and Fiction” series – and, like the previous one (How Space Physics Really Works), it deals with a personally favourite topic of mine. In this case, it’s the widely varied treatment of the topic of antigravity in science fiction, real-world physics and (perhaps its most active home at the moment) the weird world of ufology and conspiracy theories. Here’s the publisher’s blurb:

From magic carpets to hoverboards and space drives, the human imagination has always seen antigravity as the ultimate aspirational symbol of power over nature. It featured prominently in the technologically optimistic science fiction of the mid-20th century, and remains popular with amateur theorists hoping to make a world-shaking breakthrough, and those seeking to explain UFO sightings in terms of alien technology. Yet the whole concept of antigravity is often derided by professional scientists. Is this a valid view, or are they missing something? This entertaining and thought-provoking book provides a wide-ranging survey of the whole field of antigravity, from science-fictional treatments by the likes of H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, through speculative research by NASA, universities and the aerospace industry, to the totally different mindset of ufologists, fringe researchers and conspiracy theorists. In a world where our understanding of physics is known to be incomplete, and which has been shaken by numerous paradigm shifts in the past, can we be certain that the discovery of antigravity isn’t just around the corner?

Brian Clegg has already posted a four-star review of the book on his Popular Science site, calling it “a rational look at the possibilities of antigravity and its place (fictional and otherwise) in our culture”. If you’d like a copy, you can get it in paperback or ebook format from Amazon.com, Amazon UK or any similar retailer.

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Mars, the New Earth – Polish book and newspaper interview

Andrew May Mars book in Polish

Last year, as I wrote in a blog post at the time, I was pleased to have an article published jointly in the Observer newspaper and on the Guardian website. To match that, I’ve now had an interview in the print and online versions of Gazeta Wyborcza, a Polish newspaper which (as far as I’ve been able to ascertain) has a similar reputation and readership to the Guardian and Observer in the UK. This is in connection with the publication of a Polish translation of my book Destination Mars, originally published 8 years ago. The Polish version, pictured above, is called Mars, Nowa Ziemia: Historia eksploracji i plany podboju Czerwonej Planety, which according to Google means “Mars, the New Earth: A History of Exploration and Plans to Conquer the Red Planet” (despite having Polish family connections, I can’t read or speak the language, unfortunately).

The interview on the Gazeta Wyborcza site is behind a paywall, but you can read the beginning here. And here’s a screenshot of what is, as far as I know, my first appearance in the non-English-language media –

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Phallic Obsession – new ebook out now!

Phallic Obsession

This is my first foray into fiction for several years. Actually the stories aren’t new, just “cleaned-up” versions of earlier stories that saw print elsewhere. Here’s what I say about them in the book’s introduction:

For over 30 years I’ve been fascinated by various weird mystical beliefs – alternative religions, occult practices, New Age fads and so on. I always find it amusing how often sex – which you might naively think is completely out of place in such seemingly spiritual subjects – rears its head. In particular, many of these traditions have what can only be described as a distinctly phallic obsession, and it’s this observation that inspired the three short stories collected here.

The title story was my attempt at a Lovecraftian-style tale of “cosmic horror”, set in a typically Lovecraftian musty old museum – in this case, one devoted to the phallus as a religious icon. The second story, “The Cult of Zagoth”, reflects the real-world tendency of the phallus to crop up in occult and esoteric rituals – often, I suspect, because the people who devised these rituals had something of a phallic obsession themselves. The final story – the shortest of the three – takes its title from the “Masculine Cross” theory of Hargrave Jennings, who saw phallic worship as the primordial religion from which all the others developed.

“The Masculine Cross” was originally published under the title of “The Mystic Fayre Affair” in an earlier story collection by me, The Museum of the Future. I’ve only made slight editorial changes to that one for this book, but the other two differ considerably from the versions which first saw print. They were both originally published by JMS Books, an erotic fiction imprint, as short standalone ebooks. For the present collection, however, I’ve removed all the explicit sex scenes and other salacious elements, mainly to comply with Amazon Kindle guidelines, but also because I’m not convinced they add anything!

… and here’s the book’s blurb:

The title story deals with the bizarre case of a disgraced professor of anthropology, Merrigan Blake, and her museum of sacred phallic iconography collected from all over the world. But there’s another, more sinister side to Dr Blake’s obsession – one that involves a vast conspiracy by an evil race of reptilian humanoids. It’s all in her mind, of course, but that makes it no less dangerous – as naive student David Gracewell discovers when he’s drawn into her world of crazy paranoia. The collection also contains two other stories on related themes, “The Cult of Zagoth” and “The Masculine Cross”. All three stories deal, at least in part, with the academic study of phallic symbolism, particularly in an occult or pseudo-religious context. But THIS IS NOT EROTIC FICTION.

Available as a Kindle ebook from Amazon.com, Amazon UK and all other Amazon stores.

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Space Telescopes – book and Guardian article

Space telescopes book

I’m very pleased that yesterday’s Observer newspaper featured an article by me about space telescopes, which is now free to read – under the title Cosmic Time Machines – on the Guardian website. That’s one of the most prestigious mainstream news sites here in the UK, so hopefully I’ll reach a wider-than-usual audience with it.

The article ties in with my latest book, Eyes in the Sky, which was published last month by Icon Books. As with my previous books for them, it’s part of their “Hot Science” series – actually my 6th contribution to it. Here’s their blurb from the back cover of Eyes in the Sky:

Over 50 years ago, astronomers launched the world’s first orbiting telescope. This allowed them to gaze further into outer space and examine anything that appears in the sky above our heads, from comets and planets to galaxy clusters and stars. Since then, almost 100 space telescopes have been launched from Earth and are orbiting our planet, with 26 still active and relaying information back to us.

As a result of these space-based instruments, such as NASA’s iconic Hubble Space Telescope, we know much more about the universe than we did half a century ago. But why is Hubble, orbiting just 540 kilometres above the Earth, so much more effective than a ground-based telescope? How can a glorified camera tell us not only what distant objects look like, but their detailed chemical composition and three-dimensional structure as well?

In Eyes in the Sky, science writer Andrew May takes us on a journey into space to answer these questions and more. Looking at the development of revolutionary instruments, such as Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, May explores how such technology has helped us understand the evolution of the Universe.

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Zen Dynamics – book and website

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was very interested in both Zen meditation and Zen Shiatsu, being particularly impressed by how practical and results-focused they both are – quite different from the fluffy mysticism often associated with such subjects. To get some of those ideas across, I set up a website called zendynamics.com in 2001 which was centred around a Javascript/PHP personality test that I’m still quite proud of.

The idea of producing a Zen Dynamics book has been on my to-do list for ages – in fact I produced a short outline for one 22 years ago when I first created the website, and then a second outline in 2012. One reason the book took so long to see the light of day is that I wanted it to focus on practicalities, but I couldn’t see how to dive straight into them without spending a lot of time on “Buddhist theory” (or my understanding of it) first. But all that theoretical side was covered in my book Is Buddhism Scientific? (2019), so now I’ve finally got round to writing my Zen Dynamics book – and polished up the website (hopefully making it a bit more usable on mobile devices) into the bargain.

The book’s full title is Zen Dynamics: Putting Buddhist Theory into Practice, and it’s available as either a paperback or a Kindle ebook from Amazon.com, Amazon UK and all other Amazon sites. Here is the blurb from the back cover:

Buddhism can sometimes come across as abstract and philosophical, but it has a strongly practical side too – and that’s what this book is all about. It focuses on four areas in particular:
– The analysis of personality types, both in Buddhism and traditional Chinese medicine, showing how this can enhance self-awareness and personal development;
– How “karma”, or the law of cause-and-effect applied on a personal scale, functions in an entirely non-mystical, non-supernatural way within the flow of human thoughts and emotions;
– How meditation techniques are used in different schools of Buddhism to calm the mind and provide insight into its inner workings;
– A “demystification” of Zen Buddhism, showing how its seeming illogicality and iconoclasm actually serve a serious practical purpose in developing the human mind.

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New book: How Space Physics Really Works

How Space Physics Really Works

This is my fifth contribution to Springer’s “Science and Fiction” series, and in some ways my favourite so far, because it deals with a subgenre of SF that particularly appeals to me. The full title is How Space Physics Really Works: Lessons from Well-Constructed Science Fiction, and that really sums up what I’m talking about – SF stories that take the trouble to get their physics right. Here’s the blurb from the book’s back cover:

There is a huge gulf between the real physics of space travel and the way it is commonly portrayed in movies and TV shows. That’s not because space physics is difficult or obscure – most of the details were understood by the end of the 18th century – but because it can often be bafflingly counter-intuitive for a general audience. The purpose of this book isn’t to criticize or debunk popular sci-fi depictions, which can be very entertaining, but to focus on how space physics really works. This is done with the aid of numerous practical illustrations taken from the works of serious science fiction authors – from Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke to Larry Niven and Andy Weir – who have taken positive pleasure in getting their scientific facts right.

The book has just been published and is available from all good bookshops, as well as online retailers such as Amazon.com and Amazon UK (paperback: ISBN 978-3-031-33949-3, ebook: 978-3-031-33950-9).

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New book out now – The Science of Music

The Science of Music

My 5th and latest contribution to the “Hot Science” series from Icon Books has just been published, The Science of Music: How Technology has Shaped the Evolution of an Artform. This is a book I’ve written about a couple of times previously (here and here) – but not to be confused with The Science of Sci-Fi Music, which is a completely different book that I wrote a few years ago!

Here is the publisher’s blurb for the new book:

How can music – an artform – have anything to do with science? Yet there are myriad ways in which the two are intertwined, from the basics of music theory and the design of instruments to hi-fi systems and how the brain processes music. Science writer Andrew May traces the surprising connections between science and music, from the theory of sound waves to the way musicians use mathematical algorithms to create music. The most obvious impact of science on music can be seen in the way electronic technology has revolutionised how we create, record and listen to music. Technology has also provided new insights into the effects that different music has on the brain, to the extent that some algorithms can now predict our reactions with uncanny accuracy, which raises a worrying question: how long will it be before AI can create music on a par with humans?

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Astrobiology Illustrated Edition

Astrobiology book editions

Icon Books have just brought out a new edition of my Astrobiology book, originally published in their series of ‘Hot Science’ paperbacks. This is a double first for me – the first time any of my books has made it to a genuine ‘second edition’ (for the same market as the original, as opposed to translations for other markets) and my first ever hardback book. It looks really great – packed with informative graphics and colourful photographs. I had very little to do with this, which was all done by the book-packaging professionals at UniPress. My only input was to update the text in a few places and offer suggestions for some of the image captions.

The book shown in the above photo is the ‘British and Commonwealth’ edition published by Icon Books, which is out now – details here. I believe UniPress are also doing a separate North American edition, which should be out in May 2023.

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Science of Music playlist

Science of Music videos

My new book The Science of Music will be published by Icon Books on 16 March 2023. I’ve already alluded to some of the musical works used as examples in the book (in this post from last year) and there’s a fuller “playlist” in the back of the book – running in chronological order from Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet and Beethoven’s Battle Symphony to Miss Anthropocene by Grimes and Djesse vol. 3 by Jacob Collier.

On a more self-indulgent note, I’ve created another short playlist on YouTube of compositions I wrote myself while trying to get my head round some of the techniques discussed in the book – particularly algorithmic (i.e. computer-assisted) composition and electronic music production using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). Here is a link to it:

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Out now: The Space Business

The Space Business

This is my fourth contribution to the Hot Science series from Icon Books, and the first since Astrobiology just over two years ago. The full title is The Space Business: From Hotels in Orbit to Mining the Moon, How Private Enterprise is Transforming Space. That’s quite a mouthful, but at least it’s descriptive of the book’s contents.

My original idea was just to cover space tourism, but when I started writing the book a year ago this was quite a thin subject, so the scope was expanded to cover other commercial uses of space as well. But with the first crewed flight of Blue Origin’s suborbital rocket and the first all-tourist flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon both happening earlier this year, space tourism now looks like its time has finally come. Just in time for the publication of my book!

Needless to say, it’s available from all the usual book retailers and online sellers (ISBN 9781785787454, RRP £8.99). Here’s the publisher’s blurb from the back cover:

Twentieth-century space exploration may have belonged to state-funded giants such as NASA, but the future is shaping up a little differently. Now the biggest dreams and most ambitious schemes belong to private companies and individuals. Dreams like suborbital rocket flights for paying customers, holidays in an inflatable hotel in Earth orbit, or, eventually, passenger trips to Mars. Schemes like fulfilling all Earth’s energy needs through solar power harvested in space, or nuclear fusion using helium-3 mined on the Moon. It sounds like science fiction, but with entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos transforming the economics of space through their profit-oriented outlook and technology like reusable rockets, some or all of these endeavours could well become reality.

Science writer Andrew May takes an entertaining look at the biggest, brightest and in some cases the most hare-brained ideas emerging from the private space sector, assessing which stand a chance of making it off the launch pad and explaining how we can all benefit.