Thursday, January 06, 2011

nine megabikes at the edge of the Universe

I just found out that my next book is going to come out earlier than I expected, on Feb 23rd. So now I have to get going building a web page for it (under construction here) and spreading the word ...

The book is in German, and it is a collection of my humour and opinion pieces from the last ten years, mostly published in Nachrichten aus der Chemie or Spektrum der Wissenschaft. Some previously unpublished gems are included as well.

The title of the book, 9 Millionen Fahrräder am Rande des Universums (9 million bicycles at the edge of the Universe) comes from a piece I wrote about Simon Singh's objections to the lyrics of Katie Melua's song 9 million bicycles back in 2005. The gist of it is obvious from my letter to the Guardian, which is online here.

The book will look like this:



I love the cover a lot. Never mind the text, buy it for the cover! Oh, and there are 14 cartoons by Roland Wengenmayr inside as well.



PS (4.3.) It's now listed at amazon.co.uk with the correct title!

2 comments:

Paul Halpern said...

Congratulations on the new book! I would like to attempt the bike path circumnavigating the universe, but I expect that I would need to set aside more than a weekend to complete it, and keep clear of the other 8,999,999 bicycles.

Michael said...

thanks Paul. If you visit the amazon.co.uk page: you can still see the title which I originally suggested (Obskure Objekte der Wissbegierde). From the 100 chapter titles on offer, the publishers went for the craziest, but that's fine by me ...