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1. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene, Penguin

2. Adam’s Curse by Bryan Sykes, Bantam Press

3. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, Doubleday

4. Schitterend! Over het universum (Flashing! About the Universe) by Kris Verburgh, Houtekiet

5. Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics by Martinus Veltman, World Scientific

6. My Family Album by Frans de Waal, University of California Press

7. Isaac Newton by James Gleick, Fourth Estate/HarperCollins

8. The Earth: An intimate history by Richard Fortey, HarperCollins

9. Niko’s Nature by Hans Kruuk, Oxford University Press

10. Maps of Time by David Christian, University of California Press

Information supplied by Scheltema, Amsterdam (fax +31 20 6227684), for bestsellers in popular science first published in hardback or paperback within the past year.

This year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction goes to Neal Stephenson for Quicksilver, a novel set in the 17th-century aftermath of the English revolution. It has a fictionalised account of the formation of the Royal Society – and hence, sociologists of science have argued, of science itself, particularly its pledge to stay out of politics. There are two more to come, apparently taking Stephenson’s parallel world up to the 18th-century Age of Revolutions.