Andrew Crumey

In the Shadow of Mercury

The Hunt for Vulcan: How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet and Deciphered the Universe

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Head of Zeus 229pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

If aliens somehow manage to tap into our internet then I wonder what they’ll make of the Vulcan Language Institute. Its website proclaims, ‘In addition to language lessons and many pages with specialized terminology, we have information on noted Vulcans, Vulcan history etc.’ The planet is, of course, the fictional home of Star Trek’s Mr Spock, but fans have been developing the language since 1980 and it now has a vocabulary of 12,000 words.

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