Jonathan Swift’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ came out in 1726 and was an immediate best-seller. Gulliver, a surgeon and master mariner, encountered a number of bizarre races on his travels: the tiny Lilliputians, the gigantic Brobdingnagians and the uncouth Yahoos. These weird, early science-fictional encounters were actually satires on the now long-forgotten politics of the day.
Time, therefore, for an update. In the Flambaum’s ‘How to Make a Big Bang: A Cosmic Journey’, the latter-day Gulliver is Alice (the ‘Wonderland’ reference is hardly accidental) and here is how the book starts ...
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