Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 11 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
What first got you interested in science?
When I was little, my mum was very keen on taking me to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum in London. We would go to Kensington Gardens and play in the playground, and then walk down to Exhibition Road where she’d drag me round the dinosaurs and the spaceships. I found them a bit boring, but if I hung out with her at the spaceships and the dinosaurs then I would get to go and play in the Launchpad gallery, and have a go with some physics, which I enjoyed.
Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum are a big favourite with most children, but you found them dull?
Yes, I wanted to play with things not just stare at them. I really liked the Natural History Museum’s human body gallery that Richard Gregory helped produce in the 1970s, and the Science Museum had Launchpad or the old children’s galleries in the basement. Those were interactive exhibits, not just big iconic things you were meant to stare at.
On the topic of the human body, let’s start with How Your Body Works by Judy Hindley and Christopher Rawson, which has some great illustrations.
This book has been in print for a long time, so there are a few generations of children that have read it. For me, it’s fascinating to talk to people who are now in their twenties and thirties about how they remember it. People often mention the illustrations. The book plays with metaphors to explain things but does so in a visual way. They had white knights as white blood cells, a scab which the knights are protecting, and the battlements of a castle. When I talk to adults about this today, they will say, “I remember that!” Another bit that people often remember are the robots that explained reproduction. The book clearly tried to make it not very obviously human – a way of distancing it from reality while also being able to explain it.
Are there two robots grappling with each other?
They are doing a running jump at each other!
Isn’t that a bit oblique as a metaphor for sex?
I think it has confused generations of children. There is an, er, energy to it though. There are hearts and cartoon movement lines as they run at each other. Clearly the illustrator has really thought about the reproductive system and how to communicate that in the weird abstracted form of rather box-like robots, because if you know what you are looking for you can see how it is meant to link to parts of the reproductive system. It is actually quite explanatory in many ways. But if you had been the sort of child whose parents were quite open, and you had seen examples of where babies come from and how the body works in a slightly less euphemistic way, it might just have seemed a bit odd.
For you, are the illustrations still the key to the book?
Yes, and it is something that you see a lot in children’s books, especially the Horrible Science books which I did my PhD on. They use visual metaphors and visual analogies. You play out almost fantastical things in often quite a jokey way, like that idea of white blood cells as white knights. There is another beautiful visual metaphor in one Horrible Science book where they are talking about amplitude and sound waves, and they have a character dubbed “an ample scientist” who is quite fat. The roundness of the scientist, as well as the way he is really messy about eating his food – with bits flying off him – becomes part of a scientific diagram with the shape of the sound waves coming off him. It is really clever at explaining something while making a visual pun.
Not all kids’ science books are so metaphorical, it’s only really the cartoonish ones. One of the things I like about children’s science books is that as a field it is actually really diverse. There are all sorts of different styles to reflect the many ways children like to learn. I tried to reference a range of styles in the books I chose, to reflect that.
You said earlier that you are not particularly interested in dinosaurs – but to reflect all those children who are, you have chosen Dinosaur.
This is an Eyewitness book, which is an international series sold all over the world. The design is done internationally and the text locally, so they look very similar from country to country. A lot of them work with museums like The Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian, using images of their exhibits, and the attraction in some ways is a chance to view these objects when you can’t go to the museum.
With this book, you have pictures of dinosaur fossils but also artists’ impressions of dinosaurs. It’s a bit unusual for the Eyewitness style, which is normally more photo-realistic in its approach – an idea of science which is very immediate and about things you can see.
Surely people also want text to explain which bit of the dinosaur they are looking at.
That is there as well, it’s just that they are image-led – which is very different from, say, the Victorian book I’m going to talk about next or a more novel-like narrative work. The Eyewitness style is also less metaphorical than, for example, How Your Body Works. Dinosaur is in my list as an example of a famous series, but also of a style which is image-based, taking advantage of showing science not through reading as much as through seeing. It is almost meant to be like a paper version of a museum experience.
Alice Bell is a science writer based in London, specialising in relationships between science and wider society. She also teaches at Imperial College London, where she worked as a lecturer in Science Communication for several years. Bell has a PhD in children’s science media, as well as degrees in the sociology of education and the history of science. She spent many years working in the children’s galleries at the Science Museum and has worked broadly in science education, policy and media
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