Forget Posh - the big book money is in physics

A book about the universe, yet to be written by a physics professor, has scooped the biggest advance at the Frankfurt Book Fair, pipping the memoirs of Posh Spice.

It was certainly not the catchy title that attracted an American publisher, Knopf, to Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality. Knopf, a division of Random House, is paying $US2 million (NZ$4,850,000) for the rights, in the hope that Professor Greene's book will prove as successful as Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, one of the all-time bestsellers in non-fiction science.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said: "This is going to be a tremendously defining work about modern physics, written in terms which a general reader will be able to appreciate."

Professor Greene, who teaches at Columbia University in New York, may have to give up his day job to complete the project, but he can be certain of a rich future. The payment buys only the American rights. His agent will no doubt strike lucrative deals in other markets.

"He has written a proposal and some sample work," Applebaum said. It was not unusual to award large contracts on such flimsy evidence, he added.

Professor Greene had, after all, become a best-seller with his first book, The Elegant Universe. "Professor Greene is brilliant and wonderfully lucid, and tremendously photogenic."

But can he sell a million or more copies of a book that deals with the universe?

"Remember, there was equal scepticism when Stephen Hawking wrote his book on such an obscure subject. But there is an audience for space and time," Applebaum said.

The man behind the deal is John Brockman, a New York literary agent who handles some of the biggest names in science with the brash, hard-nosed attitude of a Wall St dealer. "It's very simple: it's a bullshit industry, with a bunch of phoneys in it, and I'm just a business person," he said earlier this year.

"It's a very refreshing message for the clients because it depersonalises it. They're the geniuses, they write the books. I do the best I can to get them what they're worth."

As well as being a bestseller, The Elegant Universe won this year's Aventis Science Book Prize, the top award in science book publishing. The book deals with superstring theory, which attempts to explain the properties of elementary atomic particles.

Professor Lewis Wolpert, chairman of the judges, said that Greene's book handled an emerging theory that promised to unify the laws of nature. It was far from easy to read and understand.

"But why shouldn't books be difficult? People like them because they have a sense of magic. It's a bit like the reason why children like Harry Potter. You enter a completely different world."

An advance of $2m, however, is viewed as over the top by many in the industry. Annabel Huxley, a freelance science publicist who has handled many of the big names, finds the logic difficult to comprehend.

"It's completely mad," she said "It's going to be a loss leader. There's no way they can make their money back. Nevertheless, I do think physics will be the next big subject. We've sort of done biology."

Since Hawking hit it big with A Brief History of Time, a work rejected by a score of publishers before it was picked up by Bantam Books, publishing companies have tried to tap into the public's desire for science.

At the end of the 1980s, a fascination with physics gave way to books about evolution, the new genetics, the human brain and the development of language. Now this may come full circle back to physics, the one science that can unify all others.

Although Hawking's book was one of the biggest sellers, much of his audience found no time to read it, but that is hardly the publisher's concern.

The memoirs of Posh Spice, alias Victoria Beckham, will probably be read by more people. Yet her book fetched "only" £1m (NZ$3,500,000) from Penguin.

This year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Xao Xingjian, has been snapped up by HarperCollins, but his fee is unlikely to be in the millionaire league. He should have written about pop or physics.

- INDEPENDENT