From Publishers Weekly
There's science beneath the fantasy in the beloved television series about a teenage girl battling monsters in her California exurb, insists this lightweight pop-science primer. Science writer Ouellette (
Black Bodies and Quantum Cats) hopscotches through the fictive world of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff
Angel to rationalize their outlandish goings-on and mine heuristics that illustrate scientific principles. She compares exotic demons to real animals, draws lessons on Newtonian kinematics from Buffy's kickboxing, susses conservation laws in Buffy's economy of magic and compares Buffy's fight against evil to mankind's doomed struggle against entropy. Many Buffyverse plot devices (teleportation, time loops, alternate dimensions) lead Ouellette to advanced physics concepts (wormholes, relativity, quantum entanglement) that are equally weird and esoteric. Here, unfortunately, the author's sketchy disquisitions fall back on strained metaphors ("Just like the couplings... between the various characters in the Buffyverse, each iteration of string theory is connected to another through various dualities") and opaque analogies ("[i]t's best to think of imaginary time as a direction of time that runs at right angles to real time") that laymen will find as baffling as a runic scroll in a dead language. Too often, Ouellette's treatment comes across the way science does on
Buffy—as a breezy, jargon-filled, unenlightening gloss on some fanciful spectacle.
(Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Vampires and demons might be regarded as the stuff of fantasy writers' imaginations, but science writer Ouellette finds that real-world science can indeed be applied to the universe of the cult TV shows
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Angel. Despite the title--which owes a debt to the 1995 tome
The Physics of Star Trek--Ouellette doesn't limit herself to physics; she also takes a look at the biological and chemical workings of the Buffyverse. Ouellette explains the ins and outs of vampire physiology, discusses why Buffy's fighting techniques are successful, and even delves into robotics and AI technology as seen on the show, and in our world. Not everything is scientifically sound--Ouellette argues against the possibility of telekinesis based on the amount of energy it would require--but she presents a strong case for many of the seemingly impossible aspects of the world Buffy and her friends inhabit. All the while, she makes the science accessible, guaranteeing that fans of the show will be receptive.
Kristine HuntleyCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved