"Magic Universe brings current science to the general reader in an imaginative and wholly original way. It offers an exhilarating tour of the horizons of knowledge, from quarks to linguistics, climate change to cloning, and chaos to superstrings, presented as a set of self-contained stories. The stories are arranged as A-Z entries, but this is not a conventional encyclopedia: each story unfolds in a totally unpredictable way, seamlessly crossing disciplines, and told in engaging, accessible language."--Jacket.