I can thoroughly recommend this small but extremely valuable book. There is a mass of literature and expertise for all the equipment, chemicals and materials students will encounter during the course of their research but there is nothing equivalent for the most important piece of equipment, the mind!

This book attempts to provide that by persuading the reader to take a step back from the humdrum or obvious and look at their projects from beginning to end, even before it is begun!

There are real-life examples (I had great fun trying out the puzzles) that encourage the ability to ask the right questions and highlight the pitfalls so often encountered in scientific investigation. You'll be amazed at what you learn and how easily you can avoid unnecessary work. By the time you have read this book you should have a great understanding of the reality of experimental investigation: from design of experiments, through analysis and interpretation of data to presentation of results.

Buy this book, adopt this book, recommend this book!

How could a game with such simple rules, such as evolution by natural selection, produce such complexity? Well, chess has simple rules and we still don't know a sure-fire way to play and win every game. The idea that simple rules may interact to produce wonderful complexity-"simplexity"-is only one of the brain-bending ideas authors Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart gush forth with in this rich and entertaining popular science book. The flip side of "simplexity" is "complicity"-a game where the very act of playing the game changes the rules. Hmm...this looks like evolution again! It's a wonderful exploration of the science behind evolution cast into many different allegories and scenarios, including comical heated discussions among the eight-sexed Zarathustrans, an invention of the authors that does beautifully at reflecting our own egocentric assumptions about the nature of reality -- and the figments of reality.

--Richard Brodie, author, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme

How could a game with such simple rules, such as evolution by natural selection, produce such complexity? Well, chess has simple rules and we still don't know a sure-fire way to play and win every game. The idea that simple rules may interact to produce wonderful complexity-"simplexity"-is only one of the brain-bending ideas authors Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart gush forth with in this rich and entertaining popular science book. The flip side of "simplexity" is "complicity"-a game where the very act of playing the game changes the rules. Hmm...this looks like evolution again! It's a wonderful exploration of the science behind evolution cast into many different allegories and scenarios, including comical heated discussions among the eight-sexed Zarathustrans, an invention of the authors that does beautifully at reflecting our own egocentric assumptions about the nature of reality -- and the figments of reality.

--Richard Brodie, author, VIRUS OF THE MIND: The New Science of the Mem

Okay, okay, I admit it; I should never argue with Steven Haines about a book. I had first discovered the title Figments of Reality while reading another author. When I finally got the book, though, I discovered that I really couldn't get into it, but Steven Haines' review was so enthusiastic that it suggested that the book might be worth the extra effort, so I tried again. I'm glad I did; it's a wonderful book. It is however, very dense with information, and like D. C. Dennett's books, requires a lot of active participation in the learning process.

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen are a biologist and a mathematician team who have worked together to write a book on evolution; and not just biological evolution either. They discuss the origin of life, intelligence, consciousness, concepts of reality, social order, cities, and global civilization all within a 299 page volume.

Each chapter is opened with a charming quote, usually drawn from the lore of the behavioral sciences, that illustrates in capsule the content of the chapter. My favorites were the woman scientist and her chimpanzee subject, the viper with its "dead snake" pose, and the parrot whose protest over going through a boring word list made his intelligence far more apparent than reciting the list ever could.

Addressed in these chapters were some pretty heavy duty concepts. It's not that I hadn't come across them before in my reading, but that the authors' approach was novel, at least to me. Their treatment of the statistics of evolution and especially their analysis of the "Mitochondrial Eve" hypothesis were particularly enlightening. Until they likened it to the opening and ending moves of a chess game, with it's myriads of potential moves between beginning and end, I had not given much thought to how misleading are the cladal diagrams of evolutionary trees. They point out that the reductionist view, that looks for a core and a root to everything, is misleading because it neglects the total picture of what is going on in the environment and the emergent aspects of the interactive parts.

In the instance of the mitochondrial studies, they point out that a breeding population would probably have been at least 100,000 individuals, and the theory of 1 Eve and 99999 Adams, doesn't make much sense. As they note, it's much more likely that there were 50,000 of each gender, some of whom carried a particular stretch of DNA. Pointing out that there is a difference between the descent of a molecular sequence and the descent of a species they write, "Possibly there did exist a Mitochondrial Eve, but she is not the Mother of Us All: she represents a particular molecular sequence for mitochondrial DNA, embodied in a population of women possessing the molecule, from whom all modern mitochondrial DNA molecules descend (p. 88)."

More intriguing still was their discussion of complicity, which is a synergy among constituent parts that gives rise to unexpected results, sort of the old saw "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts." They feel that this type of unpredictable interaction among complex variables is what has given rise to human consciousness and even to the group think that occurs in crowd behavior. As they write, "One of the universal features of complicity is the emergence of new patterns, new rules, new structures, new processes that were not present, even in rudimentary form, in the separate components (p. 245)." They note that a complicity between language and intelligence might have worked synergistically, in a lock step fashion, enhancing both characteristics and in combination with what they term "extelligence," the variously stored knowledge of generations of humans, may possibly have lead to consciousness and civilization.

In their comparison of cellular evolution and village/town evolution, they again appeal to a complicity among parts, in this case individuals-or more correctly among professions-that created towns from villages. As unspecialized bacteria specialized and commingled to form nucleated cells, the members of villages began to specialize and create a larger more resilient town and as that grew, cities.

The most unique concept they presented-at least not one I'd heard before-was the possible explanation for the god phenomenon. They suggest that someone, Abraham for instance, might have been impressed by the extelligence of the environment, that "something outside himself" that knew more than he did. As they write, "It is a very small step from 'There is Something out there' to 'There is a Being out there (P. 264).'"

Steven was right again. This is a wonderful book. It definitely gets one thinking along new channels.

I love Pratchett and it's intriguing to think of a science book written by him but I'm not made of money.

We are watching the wizards of Unseen University watching an Earth-like planet be created. Sounds complicated? Not really...
A brief, yet in-depth (I don't know how that can work, but it does) explanation on how it is currently believed out world works is nothing short of miraculous, especially due to the clarity in which it is explained. Interlaced with a story about the wizards' experiments with their new toy planet, this book is completely riveting and highly informative.

What can I say? If you love Prachett, the wizards and have an open mind this one's for you! The science part of this book is written with humour and wit so it never sounds like one of your old college text books. The Discworld story that accompanies and introduces the science chapters is wonderful in and of itself. Putting them together in this book makes it one great educational read.

Not terribly impressive. The first two thirds of the book offer no new ideas, the authors just rehash material you'll find elsewhere. This part of the book spends *far* too much time on the subject of evolution and DNA in my opinion, perhaps because one of the co-authors is a biologist. How about cosmology or neurology, for example - both important fields in which low-level interactions give rise to high-level emergent behaviour ?

The final third of the book also fall a little flat, IMHO. The authors' grand insights seem trivial and unoriginal. One idea in particular seems to be 'borrowed' without acknowledgement from Douglas Hofstadter's amazing "Godel, Escher, Bach" : that a message and its context are inseparable (remember the dialogues with records and record players ?) I came away feeling distinctly un-enlightened.

One aspect that really annoyed me is the use of the awful hybrid words "simplexity" and "complicity", used to describe two quite different concepts. Every time they're used, the reader is left struggling to remember which word is which. I wish the authors had aimed for clarity, rather than playing silly word-games.

And finally, I have to mention the appalling design of the UK edition of this book. The type is far too small, and the cover (white text on bright yellow) is unreadable. There's a quote on the cover from Terry Pratchett, and his name is so prominent it honestly looks as though HE wrote the book. It is possibly the worst jacket design I've ever seen.

I really admired Ian Stewart's earlier books, but my advice is to avoid this one.

This is a witty and at times brilliant book. The authors argue that the reductionist approach to science, which has flourished over the last 300 years, for a more holistic or contrextual approach. In the reductionist approach, scientists have choped problems into manageable bits - lab experiments or discreet mathematical problems - that eventually they assume will be fit together into a coherent whole. Nature in this view functions as a vast machine they can reduce and separate into its component parts.

TO prove their point, the authors embark on a dazzling tour of biology, chemistry and physics. But something is missing say the authors. What we know, they claim, are tiny islands in a sea of ignorance; it is self limiting as the larger questions get neglected. It is the causes of simplicity, they say - the order that suddenly emerges - that researchers should explore.

So, they conclude, it is time for a new set of questions. Unfortunately, just when we expect something new, it is here that the book gets a bit vague, with the authors falling back on anecdotes and speculation. They try to coin a new vocabulary ("simplexity" for the old and "complicity" for theirs); offer some diagrams of what they want, including an odd picture of mixing smoke with a unicorn head; and they harp on strange and abrupt conclusions, such as the importance of squid fat to the evolution of the human brain. But they do not offer a coherent new paradigm.

An uneven effort, but fun and very funny at times.

I loved this book. I have never seen such a huge compilation of ideas from so many different topics compiled into one place. Not only that, but all the topics interlink to show the obvious as well as subtle connections. I especially like the fact that throughout the book, the authors manage to show numerous points of view, but without trying to force the reader to fall into any specific belief. I'll admit that not all the ideas are original in this book, but that fact is even stated within the book. For a second-year chemical engineering major such as myself, this was a real inspiration for thinking "out of the box", and really made me think about some of the "knowns" tought in science. A deffinite must. I have several friends in line to borrow this book already!

Setting aside that the authors take an unfair swipe at the Waldahudin from my Hugo Award-nominated STARPLEX as being too like Earthly fauna (getting their facts wrong while doing so, and not discussing the very alien Darmats [dark-matter aliens] and Ibs [gestalt organisms] from that novel), this is still a pretty good book, although the dogmatic tone gets tiresome awfully fast. In a way, Stewart and Cohen should be praised for using so many examples from science fiction, but, at the same time, they give very short shrift to the notion that some SF writers might be using aliens for literary/metaphoric purposes, rather than just as high-school-biology-class exercises in designing lifeforms. Stanley Schmidt's ALIENS AND ALIEN SOCIETIES is a better book (even if Stewart and Cohen's acknowledgement of its existence seems mostly limited to a petty critique of its cover art, incidentally -- although they don't mention this -- by Hugo Award-winner Bob Eggleton).

Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart are interesting thinkers and writers in the guise of Jack&Ian, and What Does A Martian Look Like? is a very good, thought provoking read. This book takes an optomistic view of the possibilities of life and intelligence elsewhere in the universe and proposes a broad xenoscience as an antidote to what Jack&Ian see as the narrow view of astrobiology. Rare Earth by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee comes in for the most criticism [not for the writing, but for the opinions], being one of the most popular books on astrobiology in the last few years. Stewart and Cohen do their best when they discuss their ideas in the context of science fiction stories and hit bottom when their criticisms of mainstream astrobiology begin to sound petty. Fans of mainstream SF should be prepared for the dressing down of their favorite aliens. If it'll hurt your feelings to find out that aliens probably won't look humanoid, do not read this book. Although not a perfect book, What Does A Martin Look Like? [especially if paired with the book Rare Earth] will take the reader's thinking to the far corners of the universe.

Apart from being mis-titled for North American readers, this is a mind-expanding view of "what's out there" - or might be. Released as "Evolving the Alien" in the UK, this book examines numerous and too often poorly considered suggestions about how life might evolve in other places.

Note "places," since Cohen and Stewart don't limit their conjectures to planets alone. Noting the impact of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" as a starting point for how we think about life elsewhere, Cohen and Stewart divide the book between evidence from hard science and the conjectures of "SF" [speculative fiction] authors. Including themselves. In their view, both exobiologists and novelists have been remiss in considering how alien life might evolve. They do a comprehensive job, presented with the kind of wit expected of collaborators of Terry Pratchett of Discworld fame.

Recognizing they are entering a relatively unexplored area, they abandon old terms like "astrobiology" or "extraterrestrial life" to suggest a new, all encompassing term - xenobiology. They condemn outright the narrow views expressed by some scientists, notably Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee in "Rare Earth." Cohen and Stewart argue that limiting life to DNA-based forms is far too restrictive. Different environments are capable of producing life in ways "we can't even imagine." Magnetic fields in suns or neutron stars, silicon-based chemistry, unusual energy uses are all part of the panorama nature has in its recipes in making life start. Our localized experience is too limited, they argue, and we should look further with more open minds.

Those who have attempted a more open view have traditionally been limited to writers of speculative fiction. Cohen and Stewart sprinkle the text with examples of this genre, accompanied by an analysis of what is right or wrong with the ET life presented. "Science fiction" might just as easily be labelled "fictional science" in the eyes of these authors. Too little attention has been given to environmental complexity by the legions of writers seeking to entertain readers with simple plots and much action. Among that phalanx, however, there are some writers who strive to bring reality to the fictional worlds they create. Jack Cohen has been called into the story-building process as a consultant by several authors. The result, once the dust had settled, was SF with a reality check. The authors give accounts of some of
these efforts and the resulting books should be sought out and compared to those less favoured by the authors of this book.

Jack&Ian [as they style themselves] have provided a rich trove of ideas for nearly everyone. Scientists can gain fresh areas of research to consider, while fiction readers may find a whole new list of interesting readings. The book isn't footnoted, but there is a divided bibliography of "Popular Xenoscience Reading" and "Technical Xenoscience Reading" at the end. If you fail to find new concepts to consider here, you haven't tried.

Wheelers is a collaborative novel by two writers better known for their non-fiction. Ian Stewart is a Professor of Mathematics who writes columns for Scientific American and who has published many popular science books. Jack Cohen is a biologist who has also had a long and eminent career as an academic. He's blotted his copy book a lot though - he is a long time SF fan and has been a popular speaker at many a British SF convention. He has been the power behind the SF throne of many a novel, in that he can't resist providing the hard scientific advice that has raised a lot of SF books head and shoulders above the competition. He devised much of the clever biological speculation that made Harry Harrison's Eden novels so memorable, for instance.

Now, with Wheelers these two non-fiction giants have turned their hand to story telling with, it must be admitted, mixed success.

It is the twenty third century. The world is recovering from a technology meltdown caused by a generation of "smart" computers that proved to be too smart for their own good. The world is now quite under populated and the Moon and the asteroids are largely the province of a curious Zen Buddhist offshoot cult who make a very rich living mining them.

Prudence Odingo is an ex-archaeologist and something of a recluse. Her early career was ruined partly by her own headstrong behaviour and partly by the wheelings and dealings of her post-graduate supervisor. She has spent many of the years since then in space. She returns to Earth from an expedition to Callisto where she has excavated wheeled artefacts that seem to be more than 100,000 years old.

In a dramatic courtroom scene, the wheelers come abruptly to life and provide evidence of their extraterrestrial origins by gliding smoothly from the courtroom on anti-gravity beams. It takes the world by storm.

But a new crisis arises. A comet from the Oort cloud is heading towards the inner solar system. It seems likely that it will collide with Jupiter. To the consternation of observers on Earth, the four inner moons of Jupiter suddenly change their orbits and their altered gravitational influence diverts the comet. Now it is heading directly for Earth.

It seems obvious that some alien intelligence (probably connected with the Wheelers, given that they were discovered on one of Jupiter's moons) is manipulating the comets. Perhaps it is a declaration of war. Prudence and the Zen Buddhists and the academic who once destroyed her career are all charged with making contact with the aliens and attempting to persuade them to modify the Jupiter moon orbits again in order to prevent the comet hitting the Earth. It turns into a nail biting race against time...

It's a great plot, with great characters and the tension is admirably maintained right through to the end (will the comet hit the Earth or won't it?). Certainly the book has a lot going for it. Unfortunately the authors inexperience with fiction shows - they fall so much in love with the ideas the novel dramatises that they can't resist the urge to explain in far too much detail and consequently the book fills up with great big wodges of infodumps that slow the story down to nothing flat. However I can't condemn it out of hand - both authors are superb writers of non-fiction; brilliant explainers of often complex ideas and the infodumps are quite fascinating in themselves and beautifully written to boot. They just don't belong in a slam-bang novel like this one.

For those of us of a certain age, our first SF reads brought a sense of wonder -- "yes, yes it *really* could be like that!" we'd say to ourselves. And then, for most of us, the world caught up with the sense of wonder. We were on the moon. We were cloning. We had the Internet. This book, this literally marvelous book, re-awakens that sense of wonder. Cohen and Stewart's aliens are really *alien.* The science of 200 years from now is not only plausible but seems inevitable. The plot is great; you care about the characters (who actually grow by book's end -- something rare in SF), but it's the science that raises the hairs on your arms. Read a chapter by Cohen -- I presume it's Cohen as he's a reproductive biologist -- on how the aliens reproduce and it's the biological equivalent of listening to Bach knock out a clever etude. And if all this doesn't light you up, the book also has a fey English wit. You won't be disappointed -- it's one of those books that's fun to read again and again.

Anyone who appreciates real science will appreciate this book. Like science, the most exciting thing about Wheelers for me was delving into ideas that are new. As you read along totally involved in the story line, all of a sudden the authors poke you gently in the side ribbing you a bit to make sure you're still paying attention. Such play on words is also one of the trademarks of their science books. Excellent character development without over doing it, leaving room not only for the great imagination of the authors, but for the imagination of the reader. I felt as if I was a participant in the building of the possibilities that are explored.