Milan M. Cirkovic

There’s a huge mystery out there waiting to be solved: the question of why a publisher would even think of putting a book on the market in a condition such as this.
   Its subject is the Fermi Paradox, which can be summarised as follows. How come we’ve never picked up so much as a single stray radio transmission from another civilisation elsewhere in space? If the laws of nature work in the same way everywhere, then there should be planets, whole systems of them, everywhere; atmospheres, landscapes and oceans everywhere; plants and animals everywhere; stone tools, agriculture, books…radio technology… As the Nobel-winning physicist Enrico Fermi remarked, ‘Where is everybody?’
   This isn’t just ‘odd’. Any way you look at it, it’s telling us something profound about either the Universe itself or ourselves as part of it, and is arguably the greatest of all scientific mysteries. Yet it’s routinely dismissed with a collective shrug, not only by scientists, but also philosophers, the media, the general public. So there certainly is, as Milan Ćirković says, the need for a book to clearly spell all that out—and The Great Silence should have been that book.
   It isn’t. In places it’s almost unreadable, due to the lack of editing. For example, the determiners ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, and ‘this’ are left out—repeatedly, endlessly—throughout, which makes it difficult to concentrate on what the author is actually saying; at its worst, the effect produced is like that mangled half-strangulated English you sometimes get using Google Translate—and I even found myself wondering whether someone (author? agent? publisher?) had used it to translate the manuscript. (Surely not. Unthinkable. Or is it?) It could also do with a copy edit to prune back some of the digressions and rambling.
   The book itself has a laudable aim, but if I gave a higher rating that would be saying ‘Editing doesn’t matter’, when what I really think is that proofreaders and editors are as much a part of the team which produces a book as its author. I know this sort of slapdash stuff is becoming almost routine with e-books, but this was a hardback from the Oxford University Press.
   Or is it just me? Maybe I’m old-fashioned and this is part of a new trend: inspired by the tidal wave of completely unedited self-published crap which has swamped the market in the last two decades, the publishing industry has decided that this is the way forward, the future of books. If it is, I’ll give up reading.… (plus d'informations)

GCR (Global Catastrophic Risks) is a real page-turner. I literally couldn't put it down. Sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night with the book open on my chest, and the lights on, and I'd begin reading again from where I'd dozed off hours earlier, and I'd keep reading till I just had to go to sleep.

I had read a review of GCR in the scientific journal "Nature" in which the reviewer complained that the authors had given the global warming issue short shrift. I considered this a plus.

If, like me, you get very annoyed by "typos," be forewarned. There are enough typos in GCR to start a collection. At first I was a bit annoyed by them, but some were quite amusing... almost as if they were done on purpose.

Most of the typos were straight typing errors, or errors of fact. For example, on page 292 the author says that the 1918 flu pandemic killed "only 23%" of those infected. Only 23%? That seems a rather high percentage to be preceeded by the qualifier "only". Of course, although 50 million people died in the pandemic, this represented "only" 2% to 3% of those infected... not 23%. On p 295 we read "the rats and their s in ships" and it might take us a moment to determine that it should have read, "the rats and their fleas in ships."

But many of the typos were either fun, or a bit more tricky to figure out: on p. 254 we find "canal so" which you can probably predict should have been "can also." Much trickier, on p. 255 we find, "A large meteoric impact was invoked (...) in order to explain their idium anomaly." Their idium anomaly?? Nah. Better would have been..."the iridium anomaly!" (That's one of my favorites.) Elsewhere, we find twice on the same page "an arrow" instead of "a narrow"... and so it goes..."mortality greater than $1 million." on p. 168 (why the $ sign?) etc. etc.

But the overall impact of the book is tremendous. We learn all sorts of arcane and troubling data, e.g. form p.301 "A totally unforseen complication of the successful restoration of immunologic function by the treatment of AIDS with antiviral drugs has been the activation of dormant leprosy..." I can hear the phone call now...."Darling, I have some wonderful news, and some terrible news...hold on a second dearest, my nose just fell off..."

So even if you're usually turned off by typos, don't let that stop you from buying this book. I expected more from the Oxford University Press, but I guess they've sacked the proofreader and they're using Spell-Check these days. But then, how did "their idium anomaly" get past Spell-Check?… (plus d'informations)