By Lucy Hawking, Stephen Hawking
A boy chases his runaway pig through a hole in the fence and comes out the other side with Cosmos, the most powerful computer in the world, which can open a doorway into space and let him walk through it.
George's parents don't hold with technology, so there's no computer and no television in the house. Then his pig Freddy shoves through the fence into the garden next door, and when George climbs after him he meets a scientist named Eric, Eric's daughter Annie, and Cosmos, the most powerful computer in the world. Cosmos can draw a doorway in the air and open it onto space, and George steps through to stand on a comet, watch moons drift by, and see the edge of a black hole. He also catches the eye of Dr. Reeper, a teacher who was once Eric's student and now wants Cosmos for himself, and who isn't above using George to get it. Every few chapters the story stops for a run of real photographs and a plain explanation of what just happened on the page. Stephen Hawking wrote the black hole material himself.
Some children love space long past the point where fact books satisfy them and want a story to go with it. That's the child this is for. It's a real adventure, with a villain and a rescue, and it runs nearly three hundred pages, so it can keep a reader company for a couple of weeks in a way a stack of picture books can't. The science isn't set dressing, either. Stephen Hawking wrote the black hole chapters, and the photo-and-fact pages come right after the story has shown your child the thing, which is when they most want to know how it really works. There are three more books after this one, so a child who falls for it has somewhere to go.