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New Scientist festive edition: Ocean documentary, climate books, Andor and Severance picks
Overview
In a special festive edition of The World, the Universe and Us, New Scientist editors share holiday culture picks spanning nature, climate science, and science fiction.
Host Rowan Hooper is joined by Alison Flood and Bethan Ackley to discuss Attenboroughs Ocean, climate-focused books, and top TV shows, offering a mix of bleak warnings and hopeful messages.
Festive culture picks from New Scientist
This special episode gathers favorite items from 2024 across film, TV, and books, with the lens of science and its societal implications. The conversation weaves through environmental themes, climate change, and human evolution, while also celebrating science storytelling in popular media.
Ocean documentary: Ocean with David Attenborough
Bethan Ackley praises Ocean for its stark portrayal of human impact on the oceans, especially industrialised fishing and bottom trawling. The film is described as bleak in its depiction of the current state of ecosystems, yet hopeful in highlighting planet resilience when given a chance to recover. The soundtrack by Stephen Price, particularly a track titled Out of the Emptiness, is highlighted as a powerful complement that can provoke a contemplative mood even if you cannot find time to watch the film.
The discussion notes that Attenborough’s films often end on a hopeful note and that the film balances alarm with optimism about possible recovery if humanity acts.
Climate-focused books and fiction
Alison Flood selects Every Version of You by Grace Chan, a near-future sci‑fi novel set in Australia where climate-driven drought shapes a relationship test around brain uploading to a virtual world. Chan’s handling of climate change is described as hard-hitting and thought-provoking without centering it as the sole plot driver, leaving space for social and ethical questions about technology and identity.
Rowan Hooper presents The Story of CO2 by Peter Brannan, a nonfiction biography of carbon dioxide that reframes CO2 as both villain and life-giving molecule through geological time. The book is praised for its breadth across geology, biology, and fossil fuels, offering a geological timescale context for today’s emissions challenges.
Alison later discusses Clearing the Air by Hannah Ritchie, a guide that answers 50 climate questions with concise conclusions and data-backed detail, making it a handy reference for casual conversations during holiday gatherings. Other climate titles include Tim Lenton’s Positive tipping points, which argues for rapid social transformations that can hasten decarbonization, and a Netflix documentary The White House Effect, which revisits climate policy debates in the late 1980s under a different political climate and highlights the human costs of inaction.
Neanderthals and human evolution
The Last Neanderthal by Ludovic Slimak is welcomed as a strong contemporary paleoanthropology narrative, offering a vivid reconstruction of Neanderthal lives and the archaeological context around Thorin, a 42,000–50,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton. The discussion also points to BBC’s Human, a five-part documentary that broadens the scope of human evolution and emphasizes symbolic thought across hominins, with presenter Ella Al-Shamahi guiding accessible exploration for families and casual viewers alike.
Television and film beyond climate
In TV and film, Bethan Ackley champions Andor as the year’s best TV, a mature, grounded Star Wars series that uses espionage and political resistance to explore fascism and the ordinary machinery that sustains it. Alison Flood also mentions Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s sci‑fi drama about a hive mind after an alien virus, and My Husband the Cyborg, a documentary exploring a marriage under the influence of a wearable neuro-sensing device. Severance is celebrated as one of the strongest science fiction series, using memory separation at a workplace as a compelling metaphor for autonomy and the ethics of work life in a biotech era. The participants discuss the show’s central premise and its ability to prompt multiple readings, from philosophy to emotional psychology.
