(++++) SPACED OUT

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 19^th 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.