A sequel to Australian physicist and popular science author Chris Ferrie’s 2022 Quantum Bullsh*t, Cosmic Bullsh*t is a survey of the “deceptively profound nontruth[s]” about the universe that all-too-often distort our understanding of science and let the unscrupulous scam us.

It all comes down to stories, Ferrie argues. Humans love stories, and those stories are how we try to understand the world. But a good story isn’t necessarily a true story. The traditional mythologies and modern pop culture from which so many derive so much of our "knowledge" are compelling stories, even as they are simply wrong --- even dangerously so --- scientifically. The origins of much of bullsh*t lies in the fact that stories make us feel, and science tells us facts, and facts don’t always make us feel good.

Thus, the book begins, appropriately enough, with the “stories [that] seek to explain the origins of life, Earth, and the universe, aiming to address fundamental human questions about where we come from and how the world around us came to be.” Ferrie moves from creation myths to the theory of evolution to the current understandings of the origin of the Earth and solar system and universe at large, showing how science gives us a well-founded picture of our origins without need for the mythic and the divine.

Then astrology finds itself in the crosshairs, explaining how and why it is not science. Astrology once was science, of course, and its study laid the foundations for actual science, but at this point it’s just bunk. Yet it has been stubbornly resistant to debunking, because its vague generalities are uniquely immune to falsification and easy to find “truth” in.

From the “canals” of a dying Mars to Area 51, aliens are a modern obsession, the modern inheritors of tales of the Greek gods, flying saucers abduct hapless humans for anal probing supplanting Zeus coming to earth to impregnate hapless mortals. But much like Greek gods and their amorous adventures aren’t real, neither are Gray Men and their invasive medical devices. Alien life, if it does exist, will probably never come a-calling due to the distances and physical constraints.

Time travel is a seductive and persistent idea. Who isn’t curious to know "true" history, or, more poignantly, longs to fix the mistakes and disappointments of the past? But, as commonly conceived (with DeLoreans and wormholes and such), it just isn’t a thing. It’s just full of too many paradoxes and hypothetical, and probably impossible, components to ever work. We’ll have to content ourselves with boring old “time travel” into the future.

Then we come to The End. Of Everything, not just the book. There are many options! Eventually, the Sun expands and cooks the oceans, then takes out whatever is left of Earth in its death throes. In the even more distant future, we have the still-uncertain fate of the universe (will it rip apart, cool down to nothing, or contract back to a point?) to “look forward” to. But the far and away most likely avenue for human extinction: we do it to ourselves via AI, nuclear war, climate change, or pandemics.

The general tone of humor is mostly welcome, in contrast to the drier tone traditional to popular science, but the constant deluge of quips can occasionally grow tiring. A little editing and joke punch-up, to make them flow more with the main content instead of seeming, as they occasionally do, shoehorned in to keep up the foul-mouthed, irreverent style would have been welcome. Ten percent, maybe, edited out would make for a tighter and more flowing work.

Also, I detected an edge of meanness at times, barbs of contempt for the public. Now, far be it from me to insist on the wisdom and sense of humanity writ-large in these ludicrous times, but contempt leaves a bitter taste. Yet at other times, Ferrie is quite understanding and generous. We all contain multitudes, I suppose.

An amusing, succinct --- and at times surprisingly poetic --- account of what we misunderstand about the universe and our relationship with it, Cosmic Bullsh*t is ultimately a celebration of humanity and our fragile moment of life, a call to cherish simple existence “before the curtain falls, [raising] a glass not to forgotten gods or hollow hopes, but to the fierce, flickering flame of being itself, burning a path to oblivion.” Highly recommended.

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.

This is absolutely a fun and wacky book with a ton of information! This book is a deep dive on creation myths and why we are so enraptured by them!

If you want to laugh and learn this book is for you!

4⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️