Cosmic Pizza Party. By Nick Murphy and Paul Ritchey. Illustrated by Bea Tormo. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.
A History of the Universe in 21 Stars (and 3 imposters). By Giles Sparrow. Welbeck Publishing. $14.95.
Space is less a “final frontier” than a kind of goopy setting for
assorted oddities and speculations in numerous books whose objective is to get
the Earthbound to a better place, at least temporarily and in their
imagination. The “goopiness” element is especially pronounced in Cosmic Pizza Party, a graphic novel
featuring the usual odd assortment of characters thrown together as a team – in
this case, for the sake of delivering the best pizza in the known (or unknown)
universe, or at least in the Marinaris (“marinara,” get it?) System. Hint: read
the back of the book first, since Bea Tormo’s over-the-top illustrations do not
really make it clear that one central character is an “intergalactic sloth,”
another a “robotic intern,” a third a “rocklike” being, and a fourth a
“mecha-slug” – that is, a soft-bodied space slug snugly supported by a suitable
space slug spacesuit. The end pages also show the interplanetary pizza truck
used by the good guys for deliveries – and give some information on the
inevitable bad guy, a three-eyed character called Papa Roni (“pepperoni,” of
course) who stands for all that is evil in pizza delivery, including “I don’t
really mean it” asterisks after each and every one of his supposed promises to
pizza lovers. The five chapters by Nick Murphy and Paul Ritchey include one
involving a search for the ultimate pizza cheese; one in which our heroes are
sucked into a video game during a prince’s pizza party; one in which the synthetic
inhabitants of a certain planet cannot eat pizza because they are unable to
consume organic food, but find out that the trash from pizza deliveries can be
the basis of some great meals; one in which planetary storms make deliveries
nearly impossible; and one in which the good guys and bad guys confront each
other on a game show called “The Slice Is Right.” It would be nice to say this
is all inspired silliness, but there is nothing particularly inspired about Cosmic Pizza Party, although there is
certainly silliness enough to give preteen graphic-novel fans who love pizza
some pie-in-the-sky (ha!) enjoyment.
Quirky in a very different way, and intended for adults rather than
younger readers – although written in such a manner that teenagers and even
preteens will find much of it accessible – the latest popular-science book by
Giles Sparrow lands plunk in the middle of a large and ever-increasing pile of
writings intended to present science simply enough for non-scientists to
understand it, but accurately enough to prevent non-scientists from misunderstanding it. Every chapter of
the book has references, which can be found at the back – this is de rigueur in a work professing to any
level of academic solidity – and there are also plenty of footnotes. These,
however, mirabile dictu, are often
just as entertaining as the main text. Sparrow even includes his own references
to comic strips, although not to Cosmic
Pizza Party. At one point, for instance, a footnote relating to the shape
of Earth goes, “Like Asterix’s best friend Obelix, Earth’s not fat, but its
chest has slipped a bit – due to our planet’s fast spin, the Equator is
literally trying to fly away into space.” True, René Giscinny’s Asterix comics are much better known in
Europe than in the U.S., but since Sparrow is British, his reference is
understandable – and could interest readers enough to send them to the Asterix
saga as well as the astronomical one on which Sparrow focuses. Sparrow enjoys
combining levity, and a touch of irreverence, with his serious comments on
life, the universe, and all that. Another footnote, about the magnitudes
assigned to stars, begins, “We’ve inherited this system from Ptolemy, so blame
him…” Sparrow also uses chapter subtitles to bring science down to Earth (so to
speak), as in a chapter called “Mizar (and Friends)” that is subtitled “A quick
waltz among multiple stars.” This opens with a sentence that perhaps makes more
sense in England than across the pond: “Stars, like policemen, often come in
pairs.” And Sparrow continues, “the only thing your average star likes more
than pairing up is hanging around in small groups, like surly teenagers kicking
their heels on a celestial street corner.” And no sooner do readers get that image into their minds than Sparrow
presents this expository footnote: “Having said that, the old assumption that
singleton stars like the Sun are actually in the minority no longer seems to
hold true… Curiously (and for reasons we don’t entirely understand) it’s bigger
and brighter stars that tend to be multiples.”
All of these quotations provide a fair sample of Sparrow’s A History of the Universe in 21 Stars (and 3 imposters), which mixes the chatty with the serious, the what-we-know with the what-we-don’t-know-yet, and throws in the occasional Britishism simply because that is Sparrow’s style and not because he is trying to confuse the poor benighted Americans (so when, at the end of the Mizar chapter, he writes that “it’s ticked off a series of remarkable firsts,” Americans should not think anything out there has been repeatedly angry at anything else). The 21 stars and three additional non-star objects (Omega Centauri, the Andromeda Nebula, and quasar 3C 273) that Sparrow discusses in this brief tour of the stuff out there do not fit any particular pattern except Sparrow’s own: he chose celestial objects that interested readers could locate in the sky for themselves with relatively little trouble and that demonstrate various properties that scientists study in much more excruciating detail. Variable stars, supergiant stars, black holes, nebulae, stars of different colors, even “the star on our doorstep” (the Sun) – all are here, all discussed in chapters packed with facts and mercifully minimalized math (that being the area where astronomers spend most of their lives when they are not spending them scanning the universe). Many famous and not-quite-as-famous scientists make brief appearances here, but Sparrow relentlessly focuses on their star-related discoveries rather than their personalities: the celebrities here are celestial, not Earthbound. Yet the intermingling of people and stars is often fascinating, as in his discussion of Annie Jump Cannon, a profoundly deaf scientist who, in the late 19th century, created a star-classification system that remains part of “astronomy basic training” for its neat encapsulation of star spectra, colors and temperatures, all neatly packed within the mnemonic, “Oh, Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me!” (The footnote here, after “Girl,” reads, “Or Guy, we’re not fussy.”) The highly personal nature of Sparrow’s book – even the maps of the night sky are hand-drawn – makes it as much a work of art as one of science, a view into Sparrow’s way of thinking as well as a view of the cosmos. It turns out that that is all well and good, because Sparrow has so wide a range of interests within the field of star study that readers will get carried into areas they surely never expected to visit on their own, from “Anatomy of a Black Hole” to “The CNO Cycle” (carbon/nitrogen/oxygen). Under the circumstances, the fact that the book lacks an index seems less an omission than an assertion that one need not go into full academic mode in order to communicate simplified (but not too over-simplified) versions of some extremely complex scientific concepts and findings. In his own way, Sparrow himself is a star.
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