Giles Sparrow’s book is a quirky examination of the Solar System produced as a mock travel guide in the style of a futuristic Lonely Planet or Insight guidebook. It is a light-hearted and sometimes outright funny take on the subject but it also has a lot of fascinating facts and serious information contained within. Notionally set in the near future, where interplanetary travel is a valid option, it runs through the best tourist spots in the Solar System and addresses all the technical issues to overcome when visiting them. Like a real travel guide, it has all the travel essentials such as planning your flight, using your spacesuit, food & drink for the trip and even a “Phrase Book” (in this case, a Glossary of astronomical and scientific terms).

Novice space tourists are advised to cut their teeth on the “vomit comet” for a bit of zero-gravity practice before beginning their space explorations with a trip to our nearest neighbour, the Moon. As well as visiting the Apollo sites, how do you fancy a one-sixth gravity snowball fight with the ice from one of the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s southern pole? The guide informs us that this ice comes from comet impacts and is basically unaltered since the birth of the Solar System.

When you are ready to venture further, this book covers everything and everywhere from Mercury out to the Oort Cloud: “the ultimate in hard-to-reach destinations”. Approximately a thousand times more distant than Pluto, the Oort Cloud has been “included for insurance” to stop anyone demanding their money back a century from now because their battered copy of “Travellers Guide” didn’t say something about it!

Every destination has all the relevant travel advice as well as a list of good and bad points. When visiting the distinctive Tharsis Bulge region of Mars, remember to avoid the Martian perihelion as that is peak storm season when the dust will spoil all of the spectacular views. When travelling to the Jovian moon Io make sure that you have a set of the most up-to-date maps as this is the most volcanic body in the Solar System and it resurfaces itself at a phenomenal rate changing the landscape features. Incidentally, the best views of the Jovian system can be found on its moon, Amalthea where Jupiter’s cloud tops are only 68,000 miles away and the planet takes up fully 1/3 of your field of view! Note: a very high-tech protective environmental suit will be required for this location.

Visits to Uranus, Neptune and the outer Solar System represent several-year round trips so these are best for career-break city slickers, wealthy retirees and trustafarian students. You will need to time a visit to Uranus better than Voyager 2 which arrived during one of its dull periods which coincide with midsummer and midwinter for each hemisphere and result in a featureless, dull globe. This unfairly gave the planet a reputation of being boring, however, at other times the weather system on Uranus “really comes alive and… can give the other giants a run for their money”.

Like any travel guide, the information in this book is well-presented, methodical and organised. I particularly like the colour-coding on the edge of the pages which enables you to quickly find the section you want. The text is entertaining and informative so the book can be enjoyed as a cover-to-cover read and it is lavishly illustrated with pictures by Pikaia Imaging and the NASA image archives. It’s a pity that none of the wonderful trips to the other planets that the guide describes is currently possible, so come back in a hundred years and let’s see what’s available!