Guardian Review

From helicopters to a human cell, a fascinating illustrated guide to the science and technology of everyday life XKCD, the "webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language" written for the past 10 years by Randall Munroe, is a geek phenomenon. (The name, incidentally, is simply a set of letters that don't appear in any English words in that order, so are easy to Google.) Drawn in a simple, elegant and clean style, it tells jokes for people who know something about science and maths. It's delightful, good-humoured and never talks down to its readers; the opposite, if anything. There are comic strips with mathematical symbols, strips containing programming code, strips where you really need to know what a "clockwise polar plot" is to understand the joke. If that all seems a bit challenging, there is even an " Explain XKCD " site, which walks you through the science, technology or general knowledge needed to "get" each of Munroe's jokes. Part of the point is that you learn a little. Of course, explaining jokes is a task fraught with danger, but here goes. One of XKCD's most popular strips was titled "Up-Goer Five"; a diagram of the 1960s Saturn V rocket explained in simple terms. It's both good science -- it really does show how the rocket works -- and funny, partly because of the limitations and bathos of the language. "Another thing that is a bad problem," the diagram tells us, "is if you're flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won't go to space today, or maybe ever." And now this concept has a book of its own. Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words is an illustrated "how things work" book. Munroe's beautiful, ligne claire -style illustrations are perfect for this task: you can pick out the tiny individual chairs in a recreation room on an oil rig, or the parcels in the hold of a tall ship. He has chosen a diverse range of things to explain: from helicopters to a human cell, from the table of elements to the machines in a hospital room. And there's that gimmick from "Up-Goer Five": the book is written using only the top thousand (or "ten hundred") words most commonly used in the English language. At some points, this produces passages of such startling clarity that one forgets there was ever anything difficult to understand about these phenomena. Explaining why there are U-shaped tanks of water in the centre of skyscrapers, the caption reads: "This room is very carefully shaped so that when the building leans one way, the water runs the other way and hits the wall, pushing the building back up." No jargon needed there; it's precise, to the point and absolutely fascinating. At other times it's harder to work out what's going on. It took me a little too long to realise, from a diagram titled "Stuff in the Earth We Can Burn", what the "stuff" is in this description of the product of a mine: "This is white stuff, like what we put on food to make it better (although we mostly get the kind we eat from drying out sea water)." Ohhhhhh, salt. Why didn't you say so? But not saying so is part of the joke: the book has a cryptic crossword feel and it's a joy to puzzle out what he's talking about. Another well-loved XKCD strip involves "synonym movie titles". Can you work the movie meant by The Jewellery God: The Jewellery Team? Or Tropical Boaters: Spooky Boat? If you thought it over and had a chuckle, then this is the book, and the webcomic for you. If there's a technologically minded child in your family, Thing Explainer would be a wonderful gift and a great book to work through together, comparing these diagrams and simple-English explanations to the "proper names" you can easily find online. If you're an adult who knows most of this stuff already, it's a beautifully designed journey through the intricacies of daily life, which might still have some surprises in store. * Naomi Alderman's The Liar's Gospel is published by Viking. To order Thing Explainer for [pound]12.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Naomi Alderman.