The thing about What a Wonderful World by Marcus Chown is that it is like a fruitcake – very rich, very dense, and full of tasty little nuggets. For instance, did you know that the invention of cookery was a milestone on a par with tool use? It allowed us to broaden our diets in prehistory. Any ecologist will tell you what access to good nutrition will do for any animal. Or that galaxies are organized, and indeed possibly even created, by the giant black holes at their centre?
What a Wonderful World is a digest, if you like, about the construction and function of practically everything. This includes the cells in your body, the Earth itself, international banking, quantum theory, sex, Deep Time. The list goes on.
It’s something that you dip into when you’re in the right mood. But when you are it’s consistently interesting and rewarding. It represents a considerable body of scholarship and research which has been dissected to the point where you can be gently guided through its more fascinating corners. The image of a “plate graveyard” at the centre of the Earth where tectonic plates drift down to die still lingers in the imagination, and as I am not particularly driven to seek out books on plate tectonics, its something that I might, in the normal course of things, never have learned anything about.
It’s also deeply topical in places (see the section on international banking, for one). There’s a great discussion on the eminently newsworthy topic of inflation in relation to the Big Bang. I only received this book last year, and inflation is described within, quite carefully, as a theory. As a writer interested in the idea of multiverses, there is a fantastic wealth of imaginative detail. Did you know that scientists have worked out how far you need to walk in order to meet your doppelganger in another universe? (Clue, it’s a long, long way, but you will meet them if you keep going.)
Sometimes I was a little lost, but that’s okay, because you feel in safe hands just following on.
I really enjoyed it – in the madness of house, job, and life move and the insane rush of mandatory reading that took up the earlier part of my year, this was a guilty pleasure I could dip into as Fate allowed. Though challenging in places, there is nothing a reasonably literate person couldn’t follow. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the universe than the usual surface tropes.
Marcus was talking about this book on the blog, so to get a flavor of what he does, you might want to try Marcus Chown and the Return of the Q&A, or the earlier post Would my Doomsday Device destroy the Universe or Just Islington? in which science fiction writers pitch their scenarios to Marcus for his opinion. You can also read my reviews for We Need to Talk About Kelvin and The Afterglow of Creation.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
View all my reviews on Goodreads.
