Recent science audio-books

Spectator, The, Dec 9, 2000 by Macfarlane, Robert

Audio-books are apparently hellish to record, involving days of confinement in sound-proof chambers and aching jaw-- muscles from too much enunciation. So gratitude is due to the scientists and their proxies, who have suffered to bring us Orion's new Talking Science series abridged audio versions of the major works of popular science from the 1990s.

The two best instalments of the series are Edward 0. Wilson's The Diversity of Life (1992) and Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers (1999). Wilson, the father of sociobiology and renowned ant-fancier, is one of the finest describers of the natural world: his impassioned, panoramic prose seems to whisk the listener from desert to mountain to ice-cap to deep ocean. This is the book that established the concept of 'biodiversity' in the common consciousness - the wide spread of species that is essential to nature's capacity for renewal - and which sounded a tocsin for the homogenisation of the globe by man. Stefan Buczacki, a gardening expert and experienced radio presenter, reads splendidly: he has a lovely voice, and a feel for rhythm which can make phrases like `the axial sheaths of the epiphytes' sound dramatic.

Astronomer Royal Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers are the half-dozen values which were imprinted into the cosmos at the time of the Big Bang - the cosmogonical Lottery Draw, as it were. Had any one of them been differently 'tuned', the universe would not exist as we know it. Using these crucial numbers, Rees discusses multiverse theories, the possible existence of other beings `intricate enough to ponder their own origins and purpose', and the remarkable interconnections which are presently being made between the micro-enquiries of physicists and the macro-enquiries of cosmologists. It's incessantly fascinating stuff - sublime, in the radical sense of the word, brilliantly composed and beautifully read. Rees's voice is as unruffled as a millpond, as smoothly attractive as his photograph.

In Why is Sex Fun? (1997) Jared Diamond answers the questions that keep me awake at night, such as `Why are our penises so unnecessarily large?' His central thesis is that humankind, in comparison with all other mammalian species, practises a very 'bizarre' form of sexuality, and that for various complex evolutionary reasons this idiosyncrasy of ours has given us the edge over the other beasts. Emilia Fox is the reader, apparently an audio-book veteran. She has a Radio 4 afternoon play sort of voice - slow, middle-class, RP, occasionally rising to pitches of emotion. Just the wrong sort of voice, somehow, to read a book about sex. The tapes are full of passages like this:

A female Barbary macaque monkey copulates with [voice modulates into slightly shocked surprise] every male in her troop and [voice modulates into faint disapproval] makes no effort to conceal each copulation from other males.

I prefer Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, which covers much of the same territory.

Richard Dawkins reads from his own book, River out of Eden (1995). He is patrician in tone, but that sits well with the book's implacable vision of Darwinism turning its relentless cycles of selectivity. `There is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference,' intones Dawkins. `DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is.' Yet throughout the book Dawkins also writes beautifully about the 'poetry' of science. He manages to induce in the listener a sympathetic sense of wonder at science's complex elegance: by the end of the tapes we are willing to admit, albeit temporarily, that `there is more poetry in mitochondrial Eve than in her mythological namesake'.

The Book of Man (1994), co-written by Robin McKie and Walter Bodmer, is a history of genetics - an oddly insipid attempt to disentangle nature from nurture that only really becomes interesting when it discusses the Human Genome project. Bodmer doesn't manipulate his metaphors as deftly as does Dawkins,. and there is also the issue of his buffed 'r' which can become a rather startling gurgle if the 'r' falls in the middle of a word. Stephen H. Schneider's Laboratory Earth (1996), if you can get past the ill-written introduction and if you aren't allergic to American accents, turns out to be a rather enthralling tour of the environmental history of Earth, from the `dawn of weather' through to our parlous meteorological future.

The Diversity of Life by Edward 0. Wilson, read by Stefan Buczacki, Orion, 19.99, 4 tapes, 3hr 15min.

Just Six Numbers, written and read by Martin Rees, Orion, 9.99, 4 tapes, 3hr. Why is Sex Fun? by Jared Diamond, read by Emilia Fox, Orion, 9.99, 4 tapes, 3hr 30 min.

River Out of Eden, written and read by Richard Dawkins, Orion, 9.99, 4 tapes, 3hr.

The Book of Man, written and read by Walter Bodmer, Orion, 19.99, 4 tapes, 3hr 25 min.

Laboratory Earth, written and read by Stephen H. Schneider, Orion, 9.99, 4 tapes, 3hr.