Chris Lintott’s Universe

As of today, Bang! is officially available in an American edition, published by the good people of Johns Hopkins Press. If you happen to be in and around LA, Brian is signing copies at Book Soup on the 6th May, but everyone else can now pick up a copy via Amazon for less than $20. This is the Bang! up to date edition, so you should get a copy now before anyone discovers dark matter.

I’m delighted to finally be able to say that Bang! will be available in the US in April, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. More news when we get it!

I’ve just seen that Bang! has been selected as part of the longlist for the Royal Society book prize. I’m ridiculously pleased about this, so couldn’t resist mentioning it.

Just to say that I’m giving a couple of public lectures in the next couple of days to promote . The first is on Sunday morning, in Newcastle as part of their Science Festival and there are still tickets left. The second, at Torquay museum, is on Tuesday. Hope to see you at one or the other (if anyone is at both then you probably need help).

Blogging may be even lighter than normal this month, as the Bang! team are the authors of a guest blog over at the New York Times. It’s subscription only, I’m afraid, but there is a free 14 day trial available.

Lots of posts coming up - I promise.

However, with Bang! now back in stock at Amazon we’ve had to reprint to keep up with demand. Sadly, there wasn’t time to print as many of the ‘flashy’ covers as we need before Christmas, so if you really want one of these, wait (or buy in a bookshop!). The contents (as reviewed in Sky at Night magazine) remain the same whichever edition you get.

See our announcement here.

The launch of the book on Monday was a surreal experience, at least for me. I suppose I’d got used to working with Brian and Patrick and it hadn’t occured to me quite how strange a trio we made! The Guardian had an excellent article which begins

Brian May wore a resplendent rock god crimson velvet jacket, Sir Patrick Moore wore his monocle, and Chris Lintott wore a slightly sheepish smile, when the most unlikely trio in the history of publishing took a curtain call yesterday.

and you can judge for yourself via Brian’s picture here.

So far people seem happy, but to judge for yourselves you really should read the book (of course). Amazon have sold out but you can still obtain a copy via the Bang! shop.

An article in the Guardian today - it’s a good job I have Brian to handle all of this media attention and take the pressure off my busy schedule (!).

Apparantly I am the ‘essential geek anchor’. I’m not really sure if this is a good thing…

The Bang! website has just gone live in anticipation of our launch next week. As well as plugging the book, it should provide a place for me to write updates and articles, like this one on the Bullet cluster. The Bullet is important because many people (including the NASA press office) claim that it provides direct proof of the presence of dark matter on galaxy cluster scales.

An interview with Brian May appears in New Scientist this week (subscription required), and he seems to have done an excellent job of relating the experience of working on Bang!.

The three of us would meet at Patrick’s house in Selsey on a Friday night, do a little gentle writing, have a couple of drinks, then hunt for Patrick’s cat, Ptolemy, who is an accomplished escapologist. When we got up the next day we were in the mood for serious work. Patrick shocked us by writing the first draft in two weeks. We all then spent the next two years rewriting it. He was good about it. He didn’t mind at all.