Some time back, I was a little surprised to hear James Nicoll use Asimov as a touchstone for science popularizers. I only really knew his fiction, and can’t recall hearing his pop-science books cited by anybody who wasn’t also an SF fan.
So, when I ran across one of his science books while we were sorting through a bunch of old books left in the department after we cleared out Ralph Alpher’s old office and some other old book collections, I grabbed it figuring I should check out some of his science writing. The book in question is The Collapsing Universe: The Story of Black Holes. It has a copyright date of 1977, and a little callout on the front cover proclaiming it “The #1 Mystery of Time and Space” (it’s the March 1978 paperback edition pictured at fantasticfiction).
It’s sort of an interesting read, in that I suspect the book market has changed pretty dramatically since then. Our understanding of the science has definitely changed quite a bit in the intervening thirty years. As a result, the book is just this side of “historical curiosity,” and somewhat more interesting as a look at how mass-market science writing was approached in the past.
The most interesting aspect of it, to me, is the way he tries to be quantitative without being mathematical. There are equations in the book, about ten of them (at least, ten is the number of the last equation I see in a quick flip through), but nothing too threatening. There are numbers galore, though– table after table enumerating the density, surface gravity, escape velocity, temperature, and size of a huge variety of astronomical objects. Whenever a new class of thing is introduced, he revels in making numerical comparisons to things that have gone before– it’s a million times bigger than this, a hundred thousand times smaller than that, and so on. I’m not sure there’s a single page of the book without at least one numeral.
As far as the writing goes, there’s nothing flashy about it. This doesn’t come across as a book that’s trying to make science seem exciting to non-scientists. The approach is very logical and methodical, building up from a basic discussion of forces and density to planets, ordinary stars, white dwarfs, supernovae and neutron stars, and finally black holes. There’s no dazzling prose here– not that this would be surprising to anyone who has read his fiction. Asimov was not given to lofty flights of rhetoric.
Interestingly, it’s sort of indifferently fact-checked and copyedited. I’m not sure why that would be, but it’s got a slghtly slapdash feel in places.
The general subject of the book is astronomy, which I don’t know all that well, so it’s a little hard for me to say how good the explanations are. I think it’s pretty solid up through neutron stars, though there are some archaic bits of terminology– “cosmic egg” and “hyperon” jumped out at me as terms I’ve never heard in more modern treatments of the subject. It kind of goes off the rails when it gets to the last chapter, though, which goes on at some length talking about wild speculations: that Tunguska was a black hole hitting the Earth, that the entire universe could be a black hole, that quasars could be “white holes” or wormholes connecting the past and future.
The speculative bits are obviously things that a science fiction author would find irresistable, but they’re also pretty dated. This was before the idea of inflationary cosmology, and before string theory really caught on, so topics that you would expect to see in a modern treatment are entirely absent. In other areas, things that are presented as open questions have long since been resolved.
It was an interesting read in an academic sort of way. It’s really not very much like most of the popular science writing I’ve read in recent years– it’s very slow to develop, and short on hooks for people who aren’t already interested in the subject. I don’t think I’d recommend it, or try to emulate it, but it’s interesting to see how Asimov went about writing popular science.