Thursday, July 9, 2026

"Wizards, Aliens, and Starships" by Charles L. Adler

This book purports to be a serious look at the physics and math involved in various fantasy and sci-fi topics. It is... sort of that. The book is divided into four sections: "Potter Physics," "Space Travel," "Worlds and Aliens," and "Year Googol".

"Potter Physics" is the only one to really discuss fantasy, and it mostly points out that a lot of fantasy magic violates either the Law of Conservation of Mass or the most depressing law of thermodynamics (that being entropy). There's also discussion of how the law of conservation of momentum plus the earth's rotation would majorly mess with teleportation, and some decently interesting things about various mythical creatures like dragons and giants.

"Space Travel" is about, y'know, space travel. While it does take an approach I haven't seen before, in that it covers the absolute energy cost of space travel in physics instead of just "as we make better rockets, space travel will get easier", it also is composed of mostly "this is how we could make better rockets" as opposed to "this is how these specific fictional rockets could work".

"World and Aliens" is mostly about exoplanets and the search for life on them. It doesn't really have much of anything to do with any specific fiction.

And "Year Googol" is just depressing, because it's about how long a civilization could theoretically last before inevitably dying of entropy. And personally, as I said, I think inevitably dying of entropy is depressing.

So Wizards, Aliens, and Starships is less "the physics of this specific science fiction" and more "some general physics about vaguely science fiction topics". Which is still interesting, but not as interesting to me as the first option would have been. (Granted, there are probably legal problems inherent to writing a book entirely about other people's books. But even so.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+, generally. There's nothing untoward about it.

3 stars.

(Endnote: It's mostly starships. Not a lot of wizards or aliens.)

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