Two-Fisted Science

Authors: Various

A collection of science related stories done by various different artists and writers, Two-Fisted Science is a slight piece of work that does very little in giving the reader anything new.

The biggest problem with this book is that almost half of it's length is made up of adaptations of Richard Feynman stories. While this is all fine and good, Feynman's own writing is already incredibly accessible and entertaining to the casual reader. In addition, neither story has very much to do with science! If anything, that's the biggest flaw in this volume: there is very little science. In and of itself, this isn't a particularly fatal flaw. However, combined with the fact that the stories (with the exception of Feynman's) give very little insight into the scientist, there's not much to recommend from this book. The art varies from contributer to contributer (as should be expected), while the writing and narrative are either sub par (Newton versus Leibniz!) or borrowed whole cloth from another work (Feynman, again).

I have nothing particularly against the Feynman stories, after all they are entertaining and competently told, but they display nothing special to explain why they are being told at all. If there had been a single story this would be no problem at all, but Feynman after Feynman just raises the question why!? The volume gives enough recommended reading to have pointed the reader to the originals without such a need for adaptation. My guess is that each author was left to their own devices in choosing what scientific story to tell and, given Feynman's widespread popularity, chose independently a Feynman story. But this just makes the whole volume seem weakly edited: why is this not simply a comic dedicated to Feynman--with a few more additions, it could have easily been so. This seems largely like a failure on the editor's part.

There is one story that stands out from the rest. Steve Leiber's Heavy Water is a fascinating discussion between two physicists on two sides of the war in Nazi Germany. The art is expressive and the story itself fascinating. At the same time, it makes one focus again on how focused this book is. Here is another story about the nuclear bomb. Out of the entire history of science, half of the book (possibly more) is devoted to a very small period of scientific advancement.

While seemingly an interesting idea, Two-Fisted Science has too little coherence as a result of an imbalance in it's topics. If you are looking for stories about scientists lives in the early 20th century, you may find something of interest here--but it will most likely be slight.

Status: In the trash can