Member Reviews
You ever want to do K and watch NTD? I sure do not. But if you do, read this book!
Cosmic Bullsh*t, as a sequel to Quantum Bullsh*t, surveys different psudo-, anit-, and unscientific thinking aiming to put it into scientific context. This includes creation myths, astrology, aliens and alien abductions, time travel, and doomsday scenarios. The parity of creation to destruction is good structural conceit. The other choices feel somewhat arbitrary. The theme is for universe-y stuff, but the forms, and the problems with the forms, are different in nature.
The author aims for the breezy irreverence of the sweary-self help book. It lands more at undiagnosed, undermedicated neurodivergent, who is savvy enough to realize that comedy is the key to social acceptance, but lacks either the self-regulation to know when enough is enough or the self-assurance to trust the pause before launching into another joke. I worry about this being too mean, but I am describing myself here. Or at least who I was a few years ago, to the point this book fuels a crisis of faith in my writing and self-actualization.
Anyway, there are a lot of jokes. Most of them are not funny, but there are so many that you will find some of them funny. The flaw is that they are jokes, not humour. Imagine the difference between reading Northanger Abbey, Jane Austin's comedic masterpiece, and an e-reader version of Fahrenheit 451 where at the end of each page a seven-second clip from a Dave Chappelle's corpus would play. There is someone, I suppose, for whom that would make Bradbury, or in this instance, science writing, tolerable.
Nothing is sourced or cited, but most of it is mainstream scientific thought. This problem, arguably, is much worse with the book's targets. This review is not a defense of astrology. It is wrong and moderately silly. But the book makes no attempt at an intellectual history there. It is wrong, but there is a lack of exploration on how we got to wrong, and so both hubris and of circumspect informativeness.
It is ugliest in the creation chapter. Outside of only treating myth as proto-science, the book swings from what reads as New Atheist and into a compliant about "scientism" that goes into radical centrism. Except that this is the only move like this in the whole book, leaving the scientism concept orphaned and unclear other than suggesting that rigid thinking can come from everywhere.
Overall, it is a fine brief read if you are in the mood for this sort of thing, but that last point is key. I do not know who that would be. It seems like the kind of book that well-meaning jerks buy for their relatives to try and shake them from preconceived notions (again, if too harsh, I am criticizing myself here) but that never makes it to first down.
My thanks to the author, Chris Ferrie, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Sourcebooks, for making the ARC available to me.