BOOK REVIEW: Science becomes fiction in Hawking space stories
Lucy Hawking teams up with her famed physicist father to write a series of children’s books about science and space, writes Sue Grant-Marshall
GEORGE’S SECRET KEY TO THE UNIVERSELucy Hawking and Stephen HawkingJacana Lucy Hawking and her father Stephen are taking children in more than 40 countries on the ride of their lives. Hawking’s space thriller books, aimed at children between nine and 12 years, fulfil her dreams and those of her cosmologist father. She’s in SA to launch the isiXhosa and isiZulu editions of George’s Secret Key to the Universe. "It’s a celebration too, coincidentally right now, of a decade of the George series of books," she says. The books grew out of a question she heard a friend of her son (then about nine) ask her father. What would happen, he wanted to know, if he fell into a black hole? "Spaghetti," Stephen Hawking answered. The child instantly understood that the forces of gravity would shred him. "In that moment, I realised that this was the start of a story," says Hawking. "I could write it and my father could provide the scientific information." Her father was initially hesitant, unsure he wo...
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