Darwin's Watch: The Science of Discworld III

Registered by futurecat of Christchurch, Canterbury New Zealand on 6/13/2005
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by futurecat from Christchurch, Canterbury New Zealand on Monday, June 13, 2005
MrPloppy brought this back from the UK for me - a totally excellent present, except that I was in the middle of reading Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker when he came back, and reading two books on evolution at the same time was going to be way too confusing, so I couldn't dive into it straight away, so instead I waited until I'd finished The Blind Watchmaker, and then read a couple of Harry Potters to clear the palate (so to speak)... and now finally, two weeks later, I can read (and properly appreciate!) this book. This has got to be a record for me, waiting two whole weeks to read a new Terry Pratchett!!!

Oh, and this will be going in the permanent collection ;-)

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Journal Entry 2 by futurecat from Christchurch, Canterbury New Zealand on Friday, June 17, 2005
What? A Terry Pratchett book that doesn't get a 10? Yes, it is possible, unfortunately. That's not to say this isn't a great book - it is. It's just that it's not as great as it could have been.

Like the first two Science of Discworld books, this one combines a short Discworld story with some fascinating "Roundworld" science. The focus of the book (as is probably obvious from the title) is Darwin's theory of natural selection - not just the theory itself and more recent developments, but also about the long line(s) of causality that led to its discovery, asking the big question: what if one of the many things that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and Darwin never wrote The Origin of Species? But of course it's not *just* about that - in the grand tradition of Science of Discworld, it ranges over the vast breadth of science, everything from the physics of black holes to the mathematics of infinity (and beyond) to the philosophy of science (and the idea of steam engine time) to the phase spaces of multiverses (via string theory and loopy branes). Plenty to get your teeth into there :-)

So why the 9? Well it's all in the execution. The Discworld chapters are funny, the science chapters are fascinating, but they're just not as well integrated as they were in the first two books. Instead of feeling like a colaboration between three people who'd worked closely together on a project they were all excited about, it felt more like a publisher somewhere had sent them off individually with a list of topics to write about and then glued the resulting chapters together in roughly the right order. Add to that some poor editing, and the result is a book that feels like it was put together in a hurry.

Minor quibbles, and probably if it was written by anyone else I'd think it was a fantastic book, and the quibbles wouldn't even have occurred to me. But because I know Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen are capable of so much more, there's just that faint air of disappointment.

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