what's this? another Bogus Science review?

[realthog]

The blogger skullsinthestars has given an overall very favourable review to Bogus Science -- I say "overall" because s/he spends a lot of time talking about how s/he wishes I'd taken on the anti-vaccination crew and the Creationists/IDiots. (Answer: I decided to leave the former for a future volume and I treated the latter in both Discarded Science and Corrupted Science.) Whatever . . . here are the bits you're aching to read:

The book is very good; as a first statement I can highly recommend it. [. . .] filled with wonderful wry and biting humor [. . .] exhaustively researched, and contains many stories and anecdotes that even a long-time observer of woo such as myself has not heard of [. . .] Grant’s Bogus Science is a wonderfully entertaining and informative book about the insane beliefs of fringe groups. [. . .]

I am also, I discover, a bad-assed writer . . . which I'm taking as a compliment.

I'd not heard of Skulls in the Stars ("Physics, pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and a bit of politics") before my Google Alert picked up the review. It's a pretty good blog, and I've added it to my RSS list. I also found, dating from January 2008, a truly excellent review it had run of Corrupted Science which had somehow slipped through Google's net. I won't extract quotes here because really it's ALL GOOD.

Google Alerts picked up another blog reference to Bogus Science (and generated another addition to my RSS list) -- this time not a review but a mention in Richard Elen's engaging account of his visit to Oxford, with friends, to see the exhibition of Steampunk art at the Museum of the History of Science. The essay ends thus:

Mid-afternoon we ended up at Blackwells’ where we all seemed to acquire a set of John Grant’s series of science books, Discarded, Corrupted and Bogus Science.

What excellent people!

Comments

Re: My Bogus Science wishlist

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Hi, Quentin

Many thanks for all the kind words. I'm glad you enjoyed the book.

Spontaneous combustion is one of the odder bogus phenomena -- you're quite right. After some umming and hawing I decided to leave it for the book I'm working on at the moment (although it has yet to be signed up by a publisher, my current publisher having decided to wind operations down, dammit), called something like Psi High.

am much more frustrated than you seem to have been by these problems

You underestimate my frustration levels here! I am equally frustrated by the phenomenon you mention whereby people tend to think that, if it's in the newspaper (or on a self-proclaimed new tv channel), it must be true. The converse is, of course, almost worse: the trait of birthers, teabaggers et al to assume that anything told to them by conscientious sources is, because of its source, by definition false: they regard Glenn Beck as a reliable information source over, say, the ICCC because the latter is a properly accredited body of people who know what they're talking about.

Anyway, again many thanks for your kind words.