A children’s book about lift, weight, thrust, drag — and the stubbornness of a nine-year-old with a question.
Watch a sparrow for long enough and you begin to suspect it of cheating. It does not appear to work at flight so much as use the air to trampoline. A ladybug, you may not think it would lift itself off. It walks slowly on your finger and then, swoosh, off it goes. They are not cheating. They are all paying constantly in the same four currencies: lift, weight, thrust and drag. Nothing flies for free. That is the whole of it, and it is more than enough to keep a nine-year-old busy for an entire book.
I am delighted to announce that What Does It Take to Fly? is now available — in English and in Spanish, as ¿Qué se necesita para volar?
- What Does It Take to Fly? — Apple Books
- ¿Qué se necesita para volar? — Apple Books
- They are available Amazon too here and here.
The premise
In a sunlit corner of Mexico City, nine-year-old María has one question she cannot let go of. She stands on her tiptoes, stretches her arms as wide as they will go, and remains — disappointingly, immovably — on the ground. The sparrow on the wall has no such difficulty. Neither does the ladybird, who keeps a second pair of wings folded under her shell like a magician withholding the good trick.
So María does what any serious investigator does: she interrogates witnesses. A sparrow. A ladybird. A masked superhero of decidedly lucha libre provenance. Her family, and the friends of her family, who did not realise they had signed up for a viva.
What she uncovers along the way is that Mexico has its own heroes of flight, and they are considerably better than fiction. Emilio Carranza, the Eagle of Mexico, who flew a wooden monoplane named after an Aztec god. Emma Encinas, turned away from every flying school for the crime of being a girl, who earned her wings regardless. Berta Zerón, who caught sight of Amelia Earhart’s aeroplane from the deck of a ship as a child and never stopped looking up.
I will not tell you what María concludes. That is the point of the book. Go and find out alongside her.
Why physics, and why for children
The suspicion that explaining a thing diminishes it is, I think, exactly backwards. Nobody has ever enjoyed a rainbow less for knowing about refraction. Understanding does not shrink the world; it opens it. Feynman made this argument better than I will, but it bears repeating, particularly to five-year-olds, who have not yet been persuaded that science is something that happens to other people.
Making physics genuinely available — not diluted, not decorated, available — is the thread that runs through most of what I do, from data science texts to app development and, now, to picture books. The four forces of flight are not a simplification invented for children. They are the actual answer. A nine-year-old can hold all four in her head at once, which is more than can be said for some project steering committees I have sat on.
The other reason is more prosaic: representation of a fairly specific kind. A curious Mexican girl, asking a physics question, in Spanish and in English, who finds that the history of flight in her own country is populated by people who look like her. That book did not exist on my shelf. So I wrote it.
On writing, and the scriptwriting detour
Regular readers of this blog will know that the writing thread here has been widening for some years. Technical books first — they are their own discipline, and a brutally good school for structure. Then playwriting, which broke several habits I had not realised were habits: The Last Grasp went up as part of the OSO Writers’ Studio,, and I later had the pleasure of directing Merry Graham’s short play What’s Going to Happen to Us? at the OSO Arts Centre. Indeed I have been dabbling into creative writing in recent times, see here for example.
Theatre teaches you something no technical writing ever will, which is that you do not control the interpretation. You control the blueprint. Dan Rebellato’s line about a script being a living document rather than a finished artefact turns out to apply to picture books almost verbatim: prepare several pages to be illustrated (see below) and you discover which of your sentences were load-bearing and which were merely fond of themselves.
That trajectory now has a next step. I am seriously considering an MA in scriptwriting at Birkbeck later this year. Screen and stage narrative operate under constraints I find genuinely interesting — you cannot narrate interiority, you can only stage its consequences — and I would rather learn the craft properly than continue reverse-engineering it from the outside. There is an unexpected companion to this: I have recently completed a Level 3 Certificate in Counselling Studies, which is, among other things, a sustained exercise in listening to what people are not saying — how they deflect, what they guard, which sentence arrives three beats after the feeling that produced it. That is subtext described clinically rather than dramatically, and I suspect the two disciplines have more to teach each other than either would immediately admit. Whether this makes me a better physicist is an open question. It has already made me a better editor.
The illustrations
Words were definitely one half of the story. That is not how this started… I genuinely thought getting the story finished was going to be the end. However, as I gave the story to some earlier young readers (or rather their parents to read to them) it became clear that illustrations were expected. That is the other half. Turning María, a wooden monoplane and a Mesoamerican deity into a coherent visual language — one that reads at five and does not insult at ten — was a separate project entirely, with its own failure modes. I wrote that process up in detail here:
Short version: briefs are specifications, ambiguity is expensive, and “make it look Mexican” is not a brief. But that is the other post’s problem.
A note on María
The book is dedicated to, and inspired by, my niece María — who asks better questions than most adults and accepts fewer hand-waving answers. Everything beyond that inspiration is invention. This is a work of fiction; names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For whom
A read-aloud book for curious children aged roughly five to twelve, and for the grown-ups who never stopped looking up. If your household contains a budding scientist, a young dreamer, or anyone who has recently demanded to know why four times in a row before breakfast, this one is for them.
Buckle up. María is about to find out what it really takes to fly.
More on my other books over on the Books page, and the rest of the archive lives at the Quantum Tunnel Blog.