The History of Information

"This is the most grown up of the books. I think it’s something that adults will get a lot out of, as well young people. The premise of the book is that what sets humankind apart is not that we’re more intelligent than the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s our ability to accumulate and share information , including in an intergenerational sense. We don’t have to relearn everything from one generation to the next and we have repositories of knowledge where learning comes together. We’re in the age of information, information is at the heart of everything that we do these days, we’re bombarded with it. The book is organised under different themes: language, drawing, writing, printing, science, news, networks, broadcast, computers, and it even has a section on the history of disinformation, which is such a current topic and such an important topic for young people in particular. The coverage is very big — we’ve got computer science, communication science, cosmology , military science, music — and that’s very interesting because it shows the underpinning nature of technology . It’s a very different book to the others on the shortlist, and it’s fascinating. It’s a novel way of approaching thinking and what has made us who we are today. Yes, we had a very rich longlist, 42 books down from over 90 that were submitted. There are definitely areas that are more represented than others. There’s an element of market economics in that certain things sell better, and publishers need to go with that. When we did the shortlist, we tried to find books that either did things a bit differently — like The History of Information — or that took something more familiar, like dinosaurs and animals, but took a different viewpoint on them. Not every area of science is getting equal playtime in terms of children’s books, but I was really inspired by the submissions that we had. I learnt loads from the other judges, and I think I’ll learn even more when we get the verdict back from our young readers. I’ve actually been writing a children’s book about volcanoes with Daniel Long as the illustrator. I’ve written for adults before, but it’s so different when you bring the combination of illustrations and text together. It’s really powerful when these threads come together, and that’s very different to adult science writing where you may have some illustrations, but they generally sit apart from the text itself, rather than being woven together with equal importance. It has fascinated me to think about how those two elements of scientific storytelling work together to best effect, and I think that when this synergy makes the science leap out of the page, it is part of what the Royal Society Young People’s Book Prize is all about."