This has to be the strangest August ever, with climate-changed weather making itself felt all over the place. It is also strange because new books are in short supply. That said, the shelves are by no means bare. We have books to recommend to you on everything from octopus ethics and designing the universe to endometriosis and talking to computers. So, whatever you end up doing to refresh and recharge, we’ve got the book for you.

by Daniel Lieberman 

Meaty palaeo? Going veggie or vegan? Eating Mediterranean? Fasting, intermittently or otherwise? Low or high carbs? Enough – before we all lose the plot! Enter Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard University who, says his publisher, “tackles this confusion head on with his trademark blend of lively storytelling and myth-busting science”.

As you would expect, Lieberman draws on evolutionary biology, anthropology and physiology to figure out how we are going so wrong. He travels all the way back, moving from what humans evolved to eat through to how fire, farming and industrialisation transformed our diets, and right up to today as we learn how to combine all that history with rigorous medical science. It will be fascinating to see what former New Scientist staffer Chris Simms makes of it in our review, to be published shortly.

by Jonathan Loh

To know where we are headed, it can help to have a reasonable grasp of where we have been. So, will some big-picture thinking from an independent scholar help? Jonathan Loh’s publishers call his book Life Story a “panoramic history of life, revealing the forces that have shaped our world – and could shape it again”. We move through the rise of Homo sapiens, from foragers to farmers, from the Bronze Age to the industrial revolution, through “hidden patterns linking genetics and language, organisms and states, ecosystems and economies, mass extinctions and civilisational collapse”.

Humans may dominate the planet, but, as machine intelligence gathers pace, is that supremacy only a phase? Loh is a biologist who has worked as a consultant to organisations such the United Nations Environment Programme and WWF on the conservation of biological and cultural diversity, so he should be well placed to build a deep chronicle of the past and lay out his big idea: culture as a form of life. What would that mean in terms of an AI future? We shall see…  

by Xiaochang Li

The idea of talking to machines has been an enduring human fantasy. Divination Engines is a bit of a wild card: author Xiaochang Li, an assistant professor in the department of communication at Stanford University in California, shows her readers how that dream “both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI”. Sneak peaks reveal a book that is no easy read (brace for technical details), but one in which Li manages to explain the origins of what we call natural language processing, as well as the 20^th-century debates between computer scientists, linguists and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology.

She sets out to show how computer speech recognition advanced technology by de-emphasising linguistic meaning in favour of statistical prediction – that is, how researchers gradually abandoned systems that tried to understand human language in favour of workarounds that just predicted patterns in speech and text data. The rest is, as they say, history… and that’s before we even mention search engines, spam filters, content managers and the like. All this comes at the cost of needing more and more new data – forever! This will be a tough read for many of us, but one that’s worth the effort. Oh, and Kate Crawford, author of Atlas of AI, calls the book “a landmark in the critical history of artificial intelligence”.

by Catherine Heymans

No small ambition in this next book, either. Astrophysicist Catherine Heymans’s latest is, according to its subtitle, no less than a look at the “science of real and virtual worlds”. At its heart is that wonderful, death-defying question: could we be living in a computer simulation, and how would we even know? It all sounds fascinating, as Heymans, the astronomer royal for Scotland, takes us “on a humorous and mind-bending journey through the science of reality itself”.

From subatomic particles and the cosmic mysteries of dark matter to the secrets of the human senses, we are promised an exploration of “whether humanity could ever create a virtual universe as rich and diverse as our own – and what that means for our sense of self, free will and consciousness”. Not much going on here, then.

by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

This is one for all of us who love silvery-grey snow leopards, those fabulous and elusive beasts, which live in the rugged mountains of central Asia, camouflaged against the rocks and cliffs. For the past 20 years, scientist, conservationist and mountaineer Kulbhushansingh (Kullu) Suryawanshi has studied them in the wild, exploring every aspect of their lives from habitat to prey to population – sometimes living for months in the world’s toughest, most remote environments. Suryawanshi, we are promised, has “pioneered new research that shines fresh light on these charismatic and vulnerable animals, showing how their fate is entangled with the local people and how their survival is central to preserving an austere, delicate ecosystem”.

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by Lani Watson

There is something wonderful about books with a single letter as their main title. Q (and here’s the subtitle so we know what we’re talking about: The hidden power of questions in a world that wants answers) is all about the art and science of asking questions, as the only creature on Earth that does so in any formal sense. But we’re trained to look for answers, not how to ask questions – so much so, says author Lani Watson, that we live in an answer-rich, question-poor world.

Yet, as the publishers remind us,” from doctors’ surgeries to courtrooms to dating, the ability to ask questions determines our experiences. In a world obsessed by answers, asking better questions is powerful.”

That sounds very wise, and we should be in good hands: Watson is a philosopher and honorary fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK, as well as a former research fellow at the University of Oxford. Plug into what her publishers call a “captivating narrative from the death of Socrates to the age of AI”, and you will soon learn how to think about the questions you ask and the ones you don’t.

by Richard Schweid

With octopus blooms suddenly appearing in many places, journalist Richard Schweid and publisher University of North Carolina Press could hardly have hit on a more provocative subject. Billed as a “gripping, on-the-ground investigation into the global race to farm octopus and the ethical firestorm it has ignited”, there is clearly a lot to chew on as we explore the “ethics and future of growing the world’s most intelligent invertebrate”.

Among the issues is the fact that, in 2021, the London School of Economics recognised invertebrates such as cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) and decapods (crayfish, crabs, lobsters) as capable of experiencing pain, distress and happiness, finding that high-welfare farming of them would therefore be impossible. But the enormous international demand for octopus meat continues to grow, even as wild octopus populations decline. Fishers in the UK’s south-west are already experiencing problems as the vast number of octopuses eat their typical high-value catch: adult lobsters, brown edible crabs, scallops and the like. What to do instead? Eat the octopuses? Apparently, recipes are proliferating… a dilemma indeed.

by Evelyn Scott

This is no less than an exposé of medical misogyny, says the publisher of what looks like a forthright book about endometriosis, A Bloody Scandal: How medicine fails women in pain. There should be a huge market for it, given the sheer number who experience it (it is often said that 1 in 10 women do, but the real figure is probably higher), often in silence and for decades.

Author Evelyn Scott weaves in her own experience of the condition: she was just a teenager when she first had the symptoms of endometriosis. She shares 15 years during which she endured constant, agonising pain – and hopeless ineptitude when seeking support, ranging from dismissals on the grounds of hysteria to misdiagnoses. She felt completely isolated, until she discovered all the other women experiencing the same condition. Powerful stuff and, many will argue, long overdue.

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August is traditionally a quiet month in publishing, and this one is no different. But there are still science-fiction gems to look forward to, including a fascist empire, courtesy of Richard Swan, and some scary Korean sea monsters from Kim Bo-young. I can also recommend M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, published earlier this year but just longlisted for the Booker prize. It’s rare for sci-fi to make this prestigious literary longlist so that is a tribute to Harrison’s writing – as our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson highlighted last month. And do join us at the New Scientist Book Club, where we’re reading Peter Heller’s post-apocalyptic novel The Dog Stars, set after a superflu has wiped out most of humanity (and written well before covid-19). A Ridley Scott-directed film adaptation of it is about to be released, so we’re ahead of the crowd.

by Richard Swan

I hear good things about this one from Emily H. Wilson, who has a review forthcoming. It’s set in a fascist and galaxy-spanning empire, where Katherine Fuller’s husband has died, leaving her an immensely wealthy woman. Katherine is given the chance to buy a world, and create a better society – but will the empire let her make a democracy? It’s pitched by its publisher as Nineteen Eighty-Four meets The Man in the High Castle, which is enough to hook me.

by Kim Bo-young, translated by Sophie Bowman

I’m also really excited about this one, in which bodyguard Mu-young is heading to an isolated Korean seaside village with her niece when she learns that a huge earthquake has hit the region. She travels there regardless, but the earthquake unleashes an ancient plague, which turns those who catch it into “fishy monsters”. The village is locked down – and Mu-young is trapped. Perfect beach reading, perhaps?

by Tim Pratt

This space opera with a “touch of romance” follows graduate student Glenn and his girlfriend Vivy, a spy who has been tasked with stopping a rogue comet but finds herself also trying to find a stolen jewel that can destroy universes.

by C.A. Fletcher

I always love a post-apocalyptic story in which a few hardy souls are struggling to survive. As previously noted, we’re reading Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars in the New Scientist Book Club this month, and it’s a prime example of the genre. In Fletcher’s intriguing-sounding take, humans have stopped being able to have children (shades of P. D. James’s The Children of Men, perhaps?), and Mouse and Cat are our indomitable duo living in an almost-empty world, 200 years on.

by Andrea Hairston

I rather like this title – and the story sounds fun, too. It’s a murder mystery set in the multiverse, in which Oona (a St Berdoodle, which I’m assuming is a type of dog) and her owner Zsuzsu are investigating the death of a local celebrity. Oona, it turns out, can travel between dimensions, and she knows the identity of the killer. We are also promised “conundrums” and “alien tricksters” from the publisher.

by Nicole Brooks

A “once-in-a-lifetime flood” hits Raven’s family home, and she finds herself trapped on the roof with her children, her dog and her stepmother, struggling to survive. The novel is set over 6 hours and sounds very nail-biting – more thriller-y than sci-fi perhaps, but it’s an exploration of the power of a changing nature, so I’m keen to read it.

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by W.H. Chizmar

Described as a post-apocalyptic horror survival novel by its publisher, and therefore ticking all my favourite boxes, this follows the fallout when a government project to transport matter across the universe brings back something alive – and dangerous. When this “something” is being transported (in a lorry – come on, people!), its lorry overturns and “unleashes an otherworldly horror upon an unsuspecting New England countryside”. Three years on, a man is trying to stay alive on the US’s now-deadly East Coast.

by Jodi Taylor

This is the latest Smallhope and Pennyroyal time-travelling adventure, and sees Lady Amelia Smallhope attempting to relax after she nearly died in the last book. However, she and Pennyroyal are targeted by someone with knowledge of the latter’s “murky past”, and further adventures ensue.

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I keep the Beast running, I keep the 100 low lead on tap, I foresee attacks. I am young enough, I am old enough. I used to love to fish for trout more than almost anything.

My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I’m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn’t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. She’s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She’s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I’m figuring I’m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn’t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn’t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don’t call him that, though, what’s the point, there’s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That’s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It’s dangerous, it’s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it’s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that’s enough.

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Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren’t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That’s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It’s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I’ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn’t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

That’s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe she’d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can’t fly, I don’t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That’s how Bangley talks. Because it’s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day’s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don’t bother us. That’s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die – no If – it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it’ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We’re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it’s warm, but if it’s summer I mostly don’t. When I wear it, I feel like I’m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn’t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord .

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