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NONESUCH, THE NEW NOVEL FROM FRANCIS SPUFFORD, NOW
A brilliant, beautiful account of how British boffins triumphed across the decades in creating everything from computer games to Martian landers.
Backroom Boys is a vivid love-letter to quiet men in pullovers, to those whose imaginings take shape not in words but in mild steel and carbon fibre and lines of code. Above all, it is a celebration of big dreams achieved with slender means.Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race - and who now are sending the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars.
'A wonderful accomplishment -
Backroom Boys sharply evokes a lost world of Dan Dare,
Look and Learn and Meccano, and goes on to show us how that world was never lost: that it is, in fact, the secret history of today.' Ken MacLeod
'Unreservedly marvellous . . . Francis Spufford is the Tom Wolfe of technology journalism.'
Focus
'Provides start-to-finish enjoyment . . . [Spufford] can make the heart leap simply by detailing what engineers do with mild steel or carbon fibre.'
Sunday Times
'I don't want to pretend that
Backroom Boys is perfect; It's just as near to it as makes no difference.'
Daily Telegraph
'The man writes like a dream - informed, fresh, racy prose . . .
You wouldn't think that a book describing the fall and rise of British technologies since 1945 could be unputdownable, but Spufford shows it can be done.'
Guardian
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Praise
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Epigraph
- Preface
- One : Flying Spitfires to Other Planets
- Two : Faster than a Speeding Bullet
- Three : The Universe in a Bottle
- Four : The Isle Is Full of Noises
- Five : The Gift
- Six : The Art of Falling
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- Sources & Further Reading
- Index
- About the Author
- Copyright
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Yes, you can access Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Technology & Engineering & Technology & Engineering Research & Skills. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.