Recent content by Brian Clegg

Reading is a great way to deal with being stuck at home - I’ve made my first three Capel murder mysteries free on Kindle until Saturday - please feel free to grab copies and let anyone who likes a gentle murder mystery know! Download here.

Definitely would irritate me, rather than encourage me.

I’ve got a very different book out, called Conundrum. It's a fun, fiendish mind-expander, combining puzzles, ciphers, lateral thinking and general knowledge. There are 200 challenges in all in 20 different categories - and the whole thing builds to combined solution. It makes a great gift, or a...

Excellent choice (ahem) from Wordery of top 40 indie books* of 2017: Wordery's Top 40 Independent Books of 2017 *i.e. books from indie publishers, not self-published

I very rarely fail to finish, but one I gave up on as being laboured and pathetic was Catch 22.

What I find funny is when an endorsement actually puts me off - something emphasised here by one of the Popular Science reviewers: Number Freak – Derrick Niederman ***

Thanks! Were you thinking of the title under the three latest reviews on the home page, or on each individual review? If the latter, I have no control over the font, and it would mean editing over 1,000, which would take a while! If the home page I have total control, so could do it - I could...

Don't worry - I will play around with all suggestions... but then feel free to change it to something I prefer! It's not a website that gets a lot of user comment - I have over 1200 people on the mailing list, for example, but when I ask for input, very rarely get any. I think they're more...

Fair point - I'll restore the font size. But I don't think the focus is equal any more as the science fiction is in a box within the main section. I'll try making the images a little smaller, but I don't want them to be tiny!

I did have them the same size - I tried going smaller at Patricia's suggestion of not giving them equal weight. I take your point about the repetition from the title and will try options there. Apart from the scale of the problem of putting in publisher links (there are around 1,000 reviews)...

Not at all (in a disparaging way) - many scientists (particularly physics/astronomy etc) got their early enthusiasm for science from science fiction and many continue to read/write it. You have to accept that story takes precedence over scientific accuracy - so most are happy to suspend...

Thanks for your suggestions - I've tweaked the top of the page to reflect them as much as I can! Any more thoughts welcome - not necessarily on design, but also on the fit of science fiction with popular science.

Thanks - very helpful!

For over a decade I've run www.popularscience.co.uk - a review site for Popular Science books, which has built up to have around 30,000 unique visitors a month. I've also regular reviewed science fiction books on my (much less visited) blog. Recently I've decided to merge the SF into the popular...

Thanks for the pointer, James - I've asked them for a review copy. The biggest examples of this at the moment are in the Science and Science Fiction series from Springer. To my mind, if you try to hard to do the science, it can make for a poor story, but it will be interested to see how they do.