Subin: inflexible planet from the outback
All the most interesting and important, as usual, remains unnoticed. Meanwhile, a real breakthrough happened in Russian crowdfunding: with the help of public investment, a serious popular science book will be published for the first time in the country. Pavel Shubin, a 32-year-old Kemerovo citizen, a delicate and deep explorer of all the vicissitudes of space conquest, conducted a swift crowding campaign full of ups and downs on Bumstarter, collected almost a million rubles and is now preparing his Venus: Indomitable Planet to print. And this is only the first book of the planned trilogy!
The words “breakthrough”, “for the first time” and “serious” were not a stretch (correct us if we are mistaken). Next to the brilliant scientific publishers published under the supervision of the Dynasty Foundation, it will soon be possible to put a no less remarkable, no less real book. With the only difference that it is published, it will not be a professional publishing house, but an obscure mathematician from the provinces. And the money collected on it by tech readers who are starving for good popular science literature. About how the crowd campaign took place, what preceded it, why several dozen (!) Publishers did not notice the book, we will talk now with Pavel Shubin (@shubinpavel). Not forgetting, of course, to ask him to share tips with the scientific authors who are just eyeing crowdfunding.
')
Pavel, though with an indecent delay, but heartily congratulate you on a successful crowd campaign. In our opinion, you performed a miracle. Or maybe even a breakthrough). (Here the word “breakthrough”, by golly, is much more valuable than a “miracle.”) Or are equally successful crowd campaigns concerning serious popular science literature not uncommon for Russia? You, getting involved in this fight, for certain have studied everything, you know everything about crowd science in our country ...
Pretty flattering assumption. But before starting my project, I studied in detail only what was on Bumstarter. This was enough to make a decision. In particular, the crowds on the publication of the books “ Simple Science: Fascinating Experiments for Children ” and “ Being a Dolphin ” ended in success. Both projects "raised" to 800 thousand rubles or more. Serious money! But I understood that my fees could be much higher. If only because “Venus” is noticeably more voluminous than “Simple science”. Finally, these books became one of those "experimental", with which I evaluated the dynamics of income.
At the same time, I also realized that my sample would not necessarily be characteristic of this site. The mechanics of Boomstarter are such that it is easy to find exactly successful projects here. And failures go to the archive; Of course, they can be found through a search, but to estimate their number is not easy. That is, I did not know how many unsuccessful starts fall on these two projects. However, I didn’t find anything really interesting through the search ...
" Planet " also studied, but did not notice successful popular science books. Maybe I was looking bad. In addition, there is a separate niche on “Bumstarter” - “Scientific and popular science literature”. It means that any person who is interested in such publications will definitely look at this page and, probably, will see my project. And with limited collection time, this is important.
When presenting your book, you wrote: “... major publishing houses abandoned my project or suggested cutting the manuscript several times, discarding science. In part, they can be understood ... ”In what can they be understood, even if“ in part ”? Is worthy books - this is not something for which "major publishers" have to fight? Or, perhaps, the shops are overwhelmed with good space science reading?
I just understand well how it looked from the side ... A complete stranger appears, who has almost nothing behind him, and offers a rather serious book. Moreover, in order to assess how “true” it is, you need to put a lot of strength. I cite rare facts, and you need to somehow make sure that they are real and not invented. Man-in-topic, of course, is able to evaluate and test, but it still needs to be found.
"Near the cosmos" a lot of very specific people rotate. Ufologists, authors of their own theories of relativity, fans of "conspiracy theories" (as far as other planets are concerned), etc. And, unfortunately, they also write books.
For example, already during the crowd-campaign I received three books in which Venusian projects were mentioned. I am ready to recommend two of them. These are the "Cosmonautics of the USSR / Russia" by Karfidov (unfortunately, it was withdrawn from sale because of problems with rights) and the work of Marov and Huntress "Soviet robots in the solar system." But this is not a scientific support. In fact, this is the realization of my original idea about pure reference books. And in this quality they are good. As for the third book - “Under the sign of the comet Venus,” here the situation is different. According to the description and table of contents it was not very clear what it is; Probably, there were enough oddities, but it could also be interesting. Alas!
In a word, sometimes a very difficult choice is made before publishing houses. Now, if this book were brought by Bazilevsky or Ksanfomaliti , the situation, I think, would be different. Moreover, I am sure that they would have written better than me. Just do not write for some reason.
I am also sure that something in the mailboxes of the publishing houses just does not get in, and getting lost in this stream is probably easier than simple. Well, at one time I was trying to break through directly (which seemed to be a mistake), but even so, it was completely impossible to reach some publishers. So, I can congratulate "AST" with a high level of security. The site was informed that the reception of all manuscripts was discontinued, except for technical literature, but the address to which it was proposed to send materials did not work. How did not work and all these phones. And in their stronghold in the "Moscow-City" is harder to get into than the headquarters of the Space Forces or to the station of distant space communications. I, by the way, am not joking. The headquarters is located in the same building with the Space Research Institute, and at first I confused the "entrances", and in order to be on the territory of the Center for Remote Space Communication, it is enough just to photograph it.
Or "Dynasty". Serious foundation! Under his supervision released many interesting books. But how easy it is for them to lose everything ... First, I memorized the form, described everything, made an additional file, sent it, received confirmation that everything was successfully gone and completed and I will receive an answer within a few weeks. I call through these very weeks, and it turns out that nothing has come, you need to repeat the procedure. I send, I receive confirmation by phone. In a few weeks I’m informed that they’ll respond "within a few weeks." In a word, they never answered ...
I sent the manuscript to several dozen publishing houses; I visited many myself. Partly, only Peter became interested (if I'm not confusing anything). The editor called and said that the idea might be good, but “everything is difficult” and I can’t simplify the text, reduce it, and also add information on other planets to put everything in one book. The publication will be standard, with the usual printing, that is, only two-color illustrations and diagrams are allowed. Throw out of the book all the fun? This is very, very bad, but I agreed. Break, do not build! After all, the original will still be possible to try to print ... However, then Peter also changed his mind.
But all the popular science publications, in which I asked to give information about the start of the project on "Bumtarter", supported me immediately. These were “Science and Life”, “Trinity Option” and “Knowledge is Power”. With pleasure I thank them again!
By the way, what is in your understanding of "serious non-fiction"? Who can you highlight (not only on "your" subject)? To whom to be equal? Who to read? You can start with the Soviet books :-). And - do you manage to keep track of not the "cosmic" (again, we are talking about scientific science)?
When asked a similar question, you start frantically digging into the memory, but you still forget something. If we start from the Soviet times, then, in my opinion, one of the most characteristic examples is the Children's Encyclopedia of the 1960s. It was the highest class! For some reason I always understood that this is a very good edition. And when I studied the internal kitchen a little, I stopped to imagine how much this project was worth in production. Beautiful illustrations, diagrams, technical explanations at the highest level ... It seems there could not have been a single author below the doctor of science ... The encyclopedia is good thanks to two things that, in my opinion, should be in any popular science literature. The first point is connected with Rutherford’s famous statement: “If a scientist cannot explain the meaning of his work to a cleaner who’s cleaning up in his laboratory, he doesn’t understand what he is doing.” Exactly! Take the same physics: it is quite simple and only from the outside it looks complicated.
And second: do not neglect the illustrations. Just because with their help it is often much easier to explain many things. Perhaps, modern book publishers therefore do not undertake a worthy scientific work? Oh, they have a good idea how expensive a full-fledged popular science book, with all its “pictures”, will be in production ...
I really like the book “The Universe, Life, Mind” by V.I. Shklovsky; the works of Pavel Amnuel are good (“The sky in X-rays”, etc.). From a relatively fresh stand out, for example, " SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Mind " by L. M. Gindidis. From the biological recall “Animals build” Freude, a very beautiful and interesting publication.
If we take mathematics, then besides the obvious Perelman or Gardner, I will mention the old book of Sergey Bobrov “Archimedes Summer, or the History of the Commonwealth of Young Mathematicians”. In my opinion, it is unique. Under the Detgiz cover there is a very, very serious scientific work on the history of mathematics, which presents such moments and such historical geometric solutions (for example, the quadrature of a circle), which I have not seen even in special literature.
Modern non-space scientific books? .. I really liked the work of Svetozar Chernov (https://ru.wikipedia.org/Poberovsky, _ Stepan). If we continue the historical theme, I will note the book “ Courts of witchcraft ” by Nikolay Bessonov (yes, this is really a science but not a child’s one; it’s better to keep the book away from children). Or here is the “ Incredible Zoology ” by Vitaliy Tanaysichuk, and also the “ Lords of the Abyss ” by Andrei Ostrovsky ...
You wrote: “... the support of the publication will mean much more to me. "Venus" was originally planned as part of the trilogy. The work also contains books about the Moon and Mars. And if it turns out that this story is really interesting to readers, it will be much easier for me to finish the rest of the parts. ” This passage is interesting not only because we, God willing, will get a couple more excellent volumes, but also this: in fact, you are talking about the potential appearance of “professional readers” - who sponsor certain books at the stage of their semi-readiness and breathe . Do you just try on yourself? Or can it become something universal, so to speak, the norm? (Of course, we are talking only about Russia for now, because you haven’t gotten involved in Kickstarter yet.)
Initially, a slightly different moment was implied here. Yes, I was “sick” with this topic, I worked through it in detail, but at the same time I understood perfectly well that this work would not touch many. This is normal, people are different, as are their interests. But I would really like to know how much she will be curious. Moreover, I really wanted to believe that there are many people interested in astronautics, astronomy and the history of science in Russia. At the same time, they tried to convince me that I was mistaken in my hopes that in fact there were no more than 500 such readers in the whole country.
Oddly enough, this is a fairly common opinion. We see this at least by what and in what quantities is published. A rare modern scientific or popular science book has exceeded 1,000 copies. Meanwhile, the experience of professional publishers is much more than me. In all likelihood, they have a detailed analysis of the market, because such estimates should be based on something?
I hoped that all this is just an ordinary reinsurance, that the real audience in such literature is much more. I really did not want to believe that this was true! And what, the crowd experiment, it seems, confirmed my point. Even if I managed to unite almost 500 people for some month, then what can we expect from professional publishing houses with their advertising capacities!
If it turned out that the people are cool to the topic and the critics of the project are absolutely right? .. Then I would finally leave this work for the soul and move on to other, socially useful matters. However, the "Venus", probably, would still have issued. Next year, at his own expense, in small circulation. But the work on the "Moon" and "Mars", I think, would have stopped for another ten years.
Actually, the fact that in such projects it is possible to assess the audience in advance, in my opinion, is one of the biggest advantages of the crowd scheme. And, which is nice, the audience is real, ready to actually support the project. Thanks again to all of you!
As for Kisstarter ... I have not thought about that yet. An attempt to translate "Venus" into English (in order to later promote an electronic copy) is in the plans. But first you need to deal with the translator, to figure out how to control the translation. Arranging scientific and technical literature into another language is a very complicated process, there may be problems when translating head-on ...
Let's take a break from the total. A private, but we think, an interesting question for many: how long and how hard do you write? How long have you been carrying "Venus"? How many books, articles have been studied before it became clear to you that it is impossible not to write?
A partial answer to this question can be found in this video:
... And also here:
And in this picture is not all. There are no books that are “left” in the library; There is no abyss of articles from magazines like "Space Research." In addition, various NASA technical reports were used.
The earliest file I found here is dated May 2005. But, according to my feeling, the work began a little earlier. In general, I think this year Venus is ten years old ... Well, the book was originally planned as a guide to interplanetary stations, outlining their designs, a story about flights and a brief description of what they did. But after a while it seemed to me important to emphasize the text on the scientific side of the question - in order, for example, to understand exactly why we (like the US) threw stations at the cost of hundreds of millions of rubles / dollars to Venus. Unfortunately, there were very few popular science books. From a certain point only scientific monographs began to appear, quite complex for understanding. But the idea of ​​dealing with it captured me; I started ordering books and magazines, periodically visiting the libraries, wool of the NASA electronic library.
The idea of ​​reformatting the book in any case was correct. There are similar directories. Examples have already been mentioned, in addition, the NGO them. Lavochkina released the Talmud with a detailed technical description of almost all of its stations. But in the science of the question, as far as I was aware, no one went deep.
Of course, it was difficult to study the book all the time, because you need to work. Therefore, "Venus" went through both periods, so to speak, of information takeoff, and the time when everything connected with the book was relegated to the background. But the work still went on, and the mosaic gradually evolved into an increasingly complete picture. Do not forget that I dug in all directions: except for "Venus" there is also "Moon" and "Mars". Just "Venus" was previously completed.
"Here you will find information that has not yet been published in popular science literature," you say in the preface to The Indomitable Planet. Can you briefly list these highlights? (In addition to the fact that your work, apparently, for the first time gives the general public comprehensive information on the "Venus issue.")
Examples of highlights are in this fragment . So, as far as I know, the story of the discovery of carbon dioxide is mentioned only in the Kuiper collection “Atmospheres of the Earth and Planets” (1951). The discussion on the level of carbon dioxide was reflected in the next edition of this work, but it was not translated into Russian. About balloon probes are now also forgotten ...
Or here is the story that the English radio astronomy Lavelle managed to get a signal from Venus-1 when the station flew over the planet. In Russian-language sources about her no sound. I found it on the site of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. Actually, as it turned out, it had certain consequences; in the book, this episode is slightly extended (compared to the demo fragment).
In my opinion, the “battle” of the ionospheric theory with the “greenhouse”, with a description of who put an end to this question, is a highlight. I have a very detailed account of the history of "Venus-4": it tells about canceled projects, both ours and the American ones.
However, in any case, I was in an advantageous position. Popular science books on this issue are really very few. In the general approach to the presentation of the material "Venus", in my opinion, is closest to the book "Planet Venus" by Patrick Moore (1961). But the most interesting thing in Venus history happened after 1961 ...
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The words “breakthrough”, “for the first time” and “serious” were not a stretch (correct us if we are mistaken). Next to the brilliant scientific publishers published under the supervision of the Dynasty Foundation, it will soon be possible to put a no less remarkable, no less real book. With the only difference that it is published, it will not be a professional publishing house, but an obscure mathematician from the provinces. And the money collected on it by tech readers who are starving for good popular science literature. About how the crowd campaign took place, what preceded it, why several dozen (!) Publishers did not notice the book, we will talk now with Pavel Shubin (@shubinpavel). Not forgetting, of course, to ask him to share tips with the scientific authors who are just eyeing crowdfunding.
')
Pavel, though with an indecent delay, but heartily congratulate you on a successful crowd campaign. In our opinion, you performed a miracle. Or maybe even a breakthrough). (Here the word “breakthrough”, by golly, is much more valuable than a “miracle.”) Or are equally successful crowd campaigns concerning serious popular science literature not uncommon for Russia? You, getting involved in this fight, for certain have studied everything, you know everything about crowd science in our country ...
Pretty flattering assumption. But before starting my project, I studied in detail only what was on Bumstarter. This was enough to make a decision. In particular, the crowds on the publication of the books “ Simple Science: Fascinating Experiments for Children ” and “ Being a Dolphin ” ended in success. Both projects "raised" to 800 thousand rubles or more. Serious money! But I understood that my fees could be much higher. If only because “Venus” is noticeably more voluminous than “Simple science”. Finally, these books became one of those "experimental", with which I evaluated the dynamics of income.
At the same time, I also realized that my sample would not necessarily be characteristic of this site. The mechanics of Boomstarter are such that it is easy to find exactly successful projects here. And failures go to the archive; Of course, they can be found through a search, but to estimate their number is not easy. That is, I did not know how many unsuccessful starts fall on these two projects. However, I didn’t find anything really interesting through the search ...
" Planet " also studied, but did not notice successful popular science books. Maybe I was looking bad. In addition, there is a separate niche on “Bumstarter” - “Scientific and popular science literature”. It means that any person who is interested in such publications will definitely look at this page and, probably, will see my project. And with limited collection time, this is important.
When presenting your book, you wrote: “... major publishing houses abandoned my project or suggested cutting the manuscript several times, discarding science. In part, they can be understood ... ”In what can they be understood, even if“ in part ”? Is worthy books - this is not something for which "major publishers" have to fight? Or, perhaps, the shops are overwhelmed with good space science reading?
I just understand well how it looked from the side ... A complete stranger appears, who has almost nothing behind him, and offers a rather serious book. Moreover, in order to assess how “true” it is, you need to put a lot of strength. I cite rare facts, and you need to somehow make sure that they are real and not invented. Man-in-topic, of course, is able to evaluate and test, but it still needs to be found.
"Near the cosmos" a lot of very specific people rotate. Ufologists, authors of their own theories of relativity, fans of "conspiracy theories" (as far as other planets are concerned), etc. And, unfortunately, they also write books.
For example, already during the crowd-campaign I received three books in which Venusian projects were mentioned. I am ready to recommend two of them. These are the "Cosmonautics of the USSR / Russia" by Karfidov (unfortunately, it was withdrawn from sale because of problems with rights) and the work of Marov and Huntress "Soviet robots in the solar system." But this is not a scientific support. In fact, this is the realization of my original idea about pure reference books. And in this quality they are good. As for the third book - “Under the sign of the comet Venus,” here the situation is different. According to the description and table of contents it was not very clear what it is; Probably, there were enough oddities, but it could also be interesting. Alas!
In a word, sometimes a very difficult choice is made before publishing houses. Now, if this book were brought by Bazilevsky or Ksanfomaliti , the situation, I think, would be different. Moreover, I am sure that they would have written better than me. Just do not write for some reason.
I am also sure that something in the mailboxes of the publishing houses just does not get in, and getting lost in this stream is probably easier than simple. Well, at one time I was trying to break through directly (which seemed to be a mistake), but even so, it was completely impossible to reach some publishers. So, I can congratulate "AST" with a high level of security. The site was informed that the reception of all manuscripts was discontinued, except for technical literature, but the address to which it was proposed to send materials did not work. How did not work and all these phones. And in their stronghold in the "Moscow-City" is harder to get into than the headquarters of the Space Forces or to the station of distant space communications. I, by the way, am not joking. The headquarters is located in the same building with the Space Research Institute, and at first I confused the "entrances", and in order to be on the territory of the Center for Remote Space Communication, it is enough just to photograph it.
Or "Dynasty". Serious foundation! Under his supervision released many interesting books. But how easy it is for them to lose everything ... First, I memorized the form, described everything, made an additional file, sent it, received confirmation that everything was successfully gone and completed and I will receive an answer within a few weeks. I call through these very weeks, and it turns out that nothing has come, you need to repeat the procedure. I send, I receive confirmation by phone. In a few weeks I’m informed that they’ll respond "within a few weeks." In a word, they never answered ...
I sent the manuscript to several dozen publishing houses; I visited many myself. Partly, only Peter became interested (if I'm not confusing anything). The editor called and said that the idea might be good, but “everything is difficult” and I can’t simplify the text, reduce it, and also add information on other planets to put everything in one book. The publication will be standard, with the usual printing, that is, only two-color illustrations and diagrams are allowed. Throw out of the book all the fun? This is very, very bad, but I agreed. Break, do not build! After all, the original will still be possible to try to print ... However, then Peter also changed his mind.
But all the popular science publications, in which I asked to give information about the start of the project on "Bumtarter", supported me immediately. These were “Science and Life”, “Trinity Option” and “Knowledge is Power”. With pleasure I thank them again!
By the way, what is in your understanding of "serious non-fiction"? Who can you highlight (not only on "your" subject)? To whom to be equal? Who to read? You can start with the Soviet books :-). And - do you manage to keep track of not the "cosmic" (again, we are talking about scientific science)?
When asked a similar question, you start frantically digging into the memory, but you still forget something. If we start from the Soviet times, then, in my opinion, one of the most characteristic examples is the Children's Encyclopedia of the 1960s. It was the highest class! For some reason I always understood that this is a very good edition. And when I studied the internal kitchen a little, I stopped to imagine how much this project was worth in production. Beautiful illustrations, diagrams, technical explanations at the highest level ... It seems there could not have been a single author below the doctor of science ... The encyclopedia is good thanks to two things that, in my opinion, should be in any popular science literature. The first point is connected with Rutherford’s famous statement: “If a scientist cannot explain the meaning of his work to a cleaner who’s cleaning up in his laboratory, he doesn’t understand what he is doing.” Exactly! Take the same physics: it is quite simple and only from the outside it looks complicated.
And second: do not neglect the illustrations. Just because with their help it is often much easier to explain many things. Perhaps, modern book publishers therefore do not undertake a worthy scientific work? Oh, they have a good idea how expensive a full-fledged popular science book, with all its “pictures”, will be in production ...
I really like the book “The Universe, Life, Mind” by V.I. Shklovsky; the works of Pavel Amnuel are good (“The sky in X-rays”, etc.). From a relatively fresh stand out, for example, " SETI: The Search for Extraterrestrial Mind " by L. M. Gindidis. From the biological recall “Animals build” Freude, a very beautiful and interesting publication.
If we take mathematics, then besides the obvious Perelman or Gardner, I will mention the old book of Sergey Bobrov “Archimedes Summer, or the History of the Commonwealth of Young Mathematicians”. In my opinion, it is unique. Under the Detgiz cover there is a very, very serious scientific work on the history of mathematics, which presents such moments and such historical geometric solutions (for example, the quadrature of a circle), which I have not seen even in special literature.
Modern non-space scientific books? .. I really liked the work of Svetozar Chernov (https://ru.wikipedia.org/Poberovsky, _ Stepan). If we continue the historical theme, I will note the book “ Courts of witchcraft ” by Nikolay Bessonov (yes, this is really a science but not a child’s one; it’s better to keep the book away from children). Or here is the “ Incredible Zoology ” by Vitaliy Tanaysichuk, and also the “ Lords of the Abyss ” by Andrei Ostrovsky ...
You wrote: “... the support of the publication will mean much more to me. "Venus" was originally planned as part of the trilogy. The work also contains books about the Moon and Mars. And if it turns out that this story is really interesting to readers, it will be much easier for me to finish the rest of the parts. ” This passage is interesting not only because we, God willing, will get a couple more excellent volumes, but also this: in fact, you are talking about the potential appearance of “professional readers” - who sponsor certain books at the stage of their semi-readiness and breathe . Do you just try on yourself? Or can it become something universal, so to speak, the norm? (Of course, we are talking only about Russia for now, because you haven’t gotten involved in Kickstarter yet.)
Initially, a slightly different moment was implied here. Yes, I was “sick” with this topic, I worked through it in detail, but at the same time I understood perfectly well that this work would not touch many. This is normal, people are different, as are their interests. But I would really like to know how much she will be curious. Moreover, I really wanted to believe that there are many people interested in astronautics, astronomy and the history of science in Russia. At the same time, they tried to convince me that I was mistaken in my hopes that in fact there were no more than 500 such readers in the whole country.
Oddly enough, this is a fairly common opinion. We see this at least by what and in what quantities is published. A rare modern scientific or popular science book has exceeded 1,000 copies. Meanwhile, the experience of professional publishers is much more than me. In all likelihood, they have a detailed analysis of the market, because such estimates should be based on something?
I hoped that all this is just an ordinary reinsurance, that the real audience in such literature is much more. I really did not want to believe that this was true! And what, the crowd experiment, it seems, confirmed my point. Even if I managed to unite almost 500 people for some month, then what can we expect from professional publishing houses with their advertising capacities!
If it turned out that the people are cool to the topic and the critics of the project are absolutely right? .. Then I would finally leave this work for the soul and move on to other, socially useful matters. However, the "Venus", probably, would still have issued. Next year, at his own expense, in small circulation. But the work on the "Moon" and "Mars", I think, would have stopped for another ten years.
Actually, the fact that in such projects it is possible to assess the audience in advance, in my opinion, is one of the biggest advantages of the crowd scheme. And, which is nice, the audience is real, ready to actually support the project. Thanks again to all of you!
As for Kisstarter ... I have not thought about that yet. An attempt to translate "Venus" into English (in order to later promote an electronic copy) is in the plans. But first you need to deal with the translator, to figure out how to control the translation. Arranging scientific and technical literature into another language is a very complicated process, there may be problems when translating head-on ...
Let's take a break from the total. A private, but we think, an interesting question for many: how long and how hard do you write? How long have you been carrying "Venus"? How many books, articles have been studied before it became clear to you that it is impossible not to write?
A partial answer to this question can be found in this video:
... And also here:
And in this picture is not all. There are no books that are “left” in the library; There is no abyss of articles from magazines like "Space Research." In addition, various NASA technical reports were used.
The earliest file I found here is dated May 2005. But, according to my feeling, the work began a little earlier. In general, I think this year Venus is ten years old ... Well, the book was originally planned as a guide to interplanetary stations, outlining their designs, a story about flights and a brief description of what they did. But after a while it seemed to me important to emphasize the text on the scientific side of the question - in order, for example, to understand exactly why we (like the US) threw stations at the cost of hundreds of millions of rubles / dollars to Venus. Unfortunately, there were very few popular science books. From a certain point only scientific monographs began to appear, quite complex for understanding. But the idea of ​​dealing with it captured me; I started ordering books and magazines, periodically visiting the libraries, wool of the NASA electronic library.
The idea of ​​reformatting the book in any case was correct. There are similar directories. Examples have already been mentioned, in addition, the NGO them. Lavochkina released the Talmud with a detailed technical description of almost all of its stations. But in the science of the question, as far as I was aware, no one went deep.
Of course, it was difficult to study the book all the time, because you need to work. Therefore, "Venus" went through both periods, so to speak, of information takeoff, and the time when everything connected with the book was relegated to the background. But the work still went on, and the mosaic gradually evolved into an increasingly complete picture. Do not forget that I dug in all directions: except for "Venus" there is also "Moon" and "Mars". Just "Venus" was previously completed.
"Here you will find information that has not yet been published in popular science literature," you say in the preface to The Indomitable Planet. Can you briefly list these highlights? (In addition to the fact that your work, apparently, for the first time gives the general public comprehensive information on the "Venus issue.")
Examples of highlights are in this fragment . So, as far as I know, the story of the discovery of carbon dioxide is mentioned only in the Kuiper collection “Atmospheres of the Earth and Planets” (1951). The discussion on the level of carbon dioxide was reflected in the next edition of this work, but it was not translated into Russian. About balloon probes are now also forgotten ...
Or here is the story that the English radio astronomy Lavelle managed to get a signal from Venus-1 when the station flew over the planet. In Russian-language sources about her no sound. I found it on the site of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope. Actually, as it turned out, it had certain consequences; in the book, this episode is slightly extended (compared to the demo fragment).
In my opinion, the “battle” of the ionospheric theory with the “greenhouse”, with a description of who put an end to this question, is a highlight. I have a very detailed account of the history of "Venus-4": it tells about canceled projects, both ours and the American ones.
However, in any case, I was in an advantageous position. Popular science books on this issue are really very few. In the general approach to the presentation of the material "Venus", in my opinion, is closest to the book "Planet Venus" by Patrick Moore (1961). But the most interesting thing in Venus history happened after 1961 ...
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/361743/
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