Title: The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man
Author: Hutchinson, Dave
Published by: Solaris
Year: 2019
Date reviewed: 10.19
ISBN: 978-1-78108-584-4

So the fifth-richest man in the world has bought up an entire county in Iowa, rebuilt a small town, recruited top scientists, and is building the world’s most powerful supercollider – one that will dwarf the LHC at CERN. What could possibly go wrong?

This is a story by Dave Hutchinson, so of course things do go wrong. Badly, strangely wrong. And when they do they change our reluctant hero, journalist Alex Dolan, hired to write a book about the collider, in ways neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen.

The story moves at a good pace with plenty of examples of Hutchinson’s pithy wit to elicit a guffaw from the reader. And any book that can work Calabi-Yau manifolds into the story has to be worth reading, I’m sure you’ll agree.