Disturbing the Solar System: Impacts, close encounters and coming attractions by Alan E. Rubin, Princeton University Press, £19.95/$29.95, ISBN 0691074747
THERE is a new kind of science book emerging, stuck between popular and technical texts. A writer begins work fondly believing that a bestseller is just around the corner, but the writing doesn’t quite make it.
Alan Rubin’s Disturbing the Solar System, splendid though it is, is this type of book. The phrase “macroscopic objects” in the very first paragraph must have been a giveaway that it’s not likely to sell as well as a book by Michael Crichton or Dava Sobel.…
