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‘The Cartoon History of Time’ by Kate Charlesworth and John Gribbin
Cardinal/MacDonald, pp 64, Pounds sterling 4.99

I READ them all. All the books with ‘time’, or quantum’ or ‘cosmos’
somewhere in the title.

This time, I’m going to understand. This time I promise not to daydream.
This time I promise not to get lost around chapter three. This time I promise
not to say, ‘They’re making it up as they go along, I could get at least
five different answers to a simple quadratic equation when I was at school
and no one called me a physicist, where do people get these jobs?’

But I am haunted by the possibility that, somewhere out there, quiet
people in comfy armchairs are leafing through the very same pages and then
suddenly standing up and shouting: ‘Of course! I see it all now! At last
I understand!’

It never works like that for me. For a few minutes after the last page
everything seems to hang together, the whole glittering mass of it. Then
it collapses. Like a black hole, probably. And what is left is not knowledge,
but richly textured ignorance.

And now here come Kate Charlesworth and John Gribbin, to give a drink
of water to a drowning man.

Well, you know all about them already, because here between big floppy
covers are Junior Chicken as the cosmic Virgil and Alexis the Quantum Cat
in the role of inquiring thicko, that is, us, or anyway me. Alexis spends
a lot of time in a state of quantum panic. I know how she feels.

Let me say here and now that when it comes to drawing a cat going through
an anxiety attack, no one can beat Charlesworth. And Gribbin is a scientist
who not only reads science fiction but writes it too, so that’s all right.

They lull you into a false sense of security with practically ordinary
science on page one, and then, well before page 64, here they are running
a Blue Peter programme for cosmic engineers (‘How to Make a Time Machine
out of a Pair of Old Wormholes and an Everyday Asteroid’). If you don’t
go away and have a serious lie down every half a dozen pages, then the general
effect is of looking into a kaleidoscope while riding the Wall of Death.

The frenetic layout is sometimes too distracting. Several times I found
myself trying to follow the narrative as conflicting signals sent the focus
of attention skidding across the page.

And I was trying to follow the narrative. I admit that phrases such
as ‘An atom is 100 billion times bigger than the seed from which our entire
Universe has sprung’ create within me an irrational desire to set fire to
the nearest astrophysicist, but there were moments when I was actually aware
that I was understanding what was going on (the James Clerk Maxwell Wave
Particle Sheep will not be forgotten in a hurry). That is rare.

The Cartoon History of Time is witty and good-looking and informative
and for all I know may be accurate too, although lovely phrases such as
‘the froth on the never ending River of Time may extend indefinitely’ may
create an irrational desire on the part of some astrophysicists to set fire
to Gribbin.

With rather more authority I can tell you that the jokes are pretty
good. Oh, all right, very good. I laughed out loud several times. This is
a funny book. It almost can’t help it.

Hey, it says here ‘in far less than the blink of an eye, a region of
space 10-**17 the size of an atom was inflated into a region the size of
a grapefruit’. Oh, god.

Terry Prachett is the author of comic fantasy books based on Disc-world,
which is flat and rides through space on the back of a huge turtle