Science, Fiction, and points in between

Wednesday 27 November 2002

§ In the wake of the huge bequest by Ruth Lilly to Poetry magazine a couple weeks ago, Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten wonders why so many people want to write poetry when so few want to read it (a problem not unique to poetry).

Buried deep in the avalanche of stories about the magazine's good fortune, however, was a set of numbers that ought to arch the eyebrows of anybody who cares about culture generally and poetry in particular:

According to [Poetry editor Joseph] Parisi, Poetry receives 90,000 submissions from 45 countries each year.

Its total circulation per issue?

Just 10,000 copies.

In fact, despite all the international publicity generated by Lilly's bequest, the magazine reported that it had signed up only 165 new subscribers this past week.

Sunday 10 November 2002

§ Slate: NASA's research into don't-call-it-antigravity...

§ Nick Mamatas in the Village Voice: TransOrbital Incorporated's plans for exploring the Moon.

§ Salon: Did H.G. Wells plagiarize The Outline of History?

§ New York Times: Edgar Allan Poe anticipated modern cosmology.

§ Recommended blog: Chris Lawson's Frankenstein Journal, with entries like his 31 October description of the evolution of creationists...

Wednesday 2 October 2002

§ New York Times: "According to a recent survey, 81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them — and that they should write it." (Here's a report on that survey.) Joseph Epstein urges them not to.

Something on the order of 80,000 books get published in America every year, most of them not needed, not wanted, not in any way remotely necessary.

[...]

I wonder if the reason so many people think they can write a book is that so many third-rate books are published nowadays that, at least viewed from the middle distance, it makes writing a book look fairly easy. After all, how many times has one thought, after finishing a bad novel, "I can do at least as well as that"? And the sad truth is that it may well be that one can. But why add to the schlock pile?

§ Edge: long, fascinating interview with Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature...

The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left.

§ The Atlantic: A long interview with Nick Cook, author of The Hunt for Zero Point: Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology.

§ Salon: review of Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time by Tom Siegfried.

§ Salon: Math is hard.

§ Wired: Wil McCarthy on programmable matter.

§ Leave it to William Shatner, nominal author of Star Trek: I'm Working on That: A Trek from Science Fiction to Science Fact, to see that Star Trek's future technology comes about; here's a long excerpt from the book.

Wednesday 28 August 2002

§ The London Review of Books reviews Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton (Fourth Estate).

One of Morton's strengths is his familiarity with people from the whole gamut of Mars studies. Indeed, if it weren't for his stories about scientists, academics, artists, writers and dreamers, and his interviews with some pretty wacky individuals, it might have been more difficult to carry his narrative so readably through the requisite geology and physics. Better still is the account he gives of the lively, often acrimonious debate surrounding the purpose and ethics of going to Mars. The home of this debate is the Mars Society, an informal aggregation - predominantly but not exclusively American - of people who eat, sleep and dream Mars, scientists or not. These are people who in some sense are already living there. That they do so in the freedom of their imaginations rather than in Portakabins doesn't make their visions any less real.

Other reviews have appeared at This Is London and New Scientist, the latter by Charles Sheffield:

Mapping Mars is beautifully written and carefully edited and produced. A number of authors might fairly claim to have written the best Mars novel, but this is the best factual book on Mars that money can buy.

The book comes out in the US in September from Picador--the cover and link shown here.

§ American Heritage of Invention & Technology for Summer 2002 has an article by Ron Miller, with several good-sized scans of artwork, about Chesley Bonestell.

Saturday 17 August 2002

§ Is it possible to define the current state of American literature? Jonathan Yardley tries.

A cartoon in the New Yorker several weeks ago said it all. Two people are in a bookstore. One stands in front of a section called "Self-Improvement," while the other is browsing "Self-Involvement." That, exactly, summarizes the state of the art of literary fiction in these United States in the year 2002. Much of it is written and constructed with technical facility, for technique is one thing the schools can teach. But it rarely is interested in anything except the inner lives and private experiences of the author-surrogates who are its central characters. It connects with itself but has little to say to the world outside, indeed makes surprisingly feeble effort to connect with that world. It is flat and lifeless--by way of example, consider all those who have followed in the train of that echt minimalist, Raymond Carver, the Jehovah of the writing schools--and just about the only people who appear to read it are other riders on the writing-school circuit.

And a bit later--he doesn't mention SF, though he mentions Michael Chabon--

It also is worth noting that some of the most interesting novels being written these days are not self-consciously literary but are what is commonly known (and often dismissed) as genre fiction.

And in conclusion...

People long to be told stories. The need is essential to human nature. The urge to satisfy it explains why we read bubblegum pop fiction as well as genre fiction both high and low, but also why we still read Shakespeare and Dickens, Cather and Faulkner. The pity is that so many writers who represent themselves as serious and worthy of respect now decline to take up the storytelling challenge. They are content to tell us about themselves, blissfully unaware of how uninteresting they are. ...

— Washington Post, July 14, 2002

§ When readers meet writers, what do they want to know? Process, not product.

No matter how well read the audience may be, when it comes to the Q&A, it is always the same. After a few polite interrogatory skirmishes for form's sake come the only questions that matter to the reader.

"Do you write in longhand or on a computer?"

If longhand: "Pencil, ballpoint or old-fashioned ink pen?"

If computer: "PC or Mac? Which font do you prefer?"

— New York Times, July 29, 2002

§ Writers who are beseeched to blurb.

Several galleys per week arrive at my door. I always open the envelope, and I always read the editor's letter. I like the personal, the flattering, the imploring: "In so many ways this book reminds me of yours, Ellie —" (Heartwarming adjectives follow the dash.) Or, "I would be in your debt — more in your debt, that is, than I already am for having your wonderful books to enjoy, if only. . . ." Am I truly this novelist's favorite author?

— New York Times, August 12, 2002

§ Novelists who hire novelists.

Tom Clancy, for instance, oversees a vast farm of fiction writers who crank out stories that he imagines.

... In order to get away with such sleight of hand, writers need three things: a fruitful imagination, a total lack of personal style or voice, and a reputation as a rainmaker.

... Receiving help on a fiction project seems to be a particularly modern phenomenon. It's hard to imagine Leo Tolstoy writing "War" and someone else writing "Peace." Most great writers don't even get along with themselves.

— Washington Post, July 24, 2002

§ You had second thoughts, and deleted that webpage or site. Or you thought you did... Google archives pages.

These days, people are seeing their privacy punctured in intimate ways as their personal, professional and online identities become transparent to one another. Twenty-somethings are going to search engines to check out people they meet at parties. Neighbors are profiling neighbors. Amateur genealogists are researching distant family members. Workers are screening co-workers.

In other words, it is becoming more difficult to keep one's past hidden, or even to reinvent oneself in the American tradition. "The net result is going to be a return to the village, where everyone knew everyone else," said David Brin, author of a book called "The Transparent Society" (Perseus, 1998). "The anonymity of urban life will be seen as a temporary and rather weird thing."

— New York Times, July 25, 2002

Tuesday 9 July 2002

§ More about Stephen Wolfram: Sunday's New York Times Magazine published a Q&A.

In academia, there is this common statement: New ideas have either been done before, or they're wrong, or both. And it's kind of charming to me that people send mail about some things in my book, say, ''We've said this before.''

But I don't think they've understood what I've said. In fact, if they did understand, their first response would be, ''That can't be right.'' People's responses are being documented in a very obvious way. There are newsgroups and postings. I find it rather interesting. But so far, I'm just collecting the data. The thing one learns about the history of science is that these things take awhile. And one waits.

Also, today's Los Angeles Times summarizes the Wolfram controversy in a long front page article by Charles Piller.

§ David Weinberger's "unified theory of the web", in his book Small Pieces Loosely Joined (Perseus), gets a baffled response from reviewer David Futrelle in Sunday's Washington Post Book World.

Weinberger, a writer and business consultant, argues that despite all the technology behind the scenes, the Internet is fundamentally about people, not data. "The Web is a world we've made for one another," he writes. "It can be understood only within a web of ideas that includes our culture's foundational thoughts, with human spirit lingering at every joining point."

Trouble is, Weinberger has a little trouble connecting these airy generalizations to the specific details of life as it is lived online and off -- in part because he doesn't seem to have any real curiosity about how others make sense of their worlds. ... Weinberger spends most of the book lost inside his own head.

§ Do Americans read lots of books? Or just say they do? (With coincidentally discussion of Wolfram's book along the way).

Reading occupies an uncertain place in American culture, which has simultaneously celebrated and suspected the thinker. The United States was conceived by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and other intellectuals, but the true folk heroes tend to be generals, cowboys and gangsters.

At the same time, millions have subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club and joined reading groups. The desire to at least appear well-read has led CliffNotes and other publishers to expand summaries of great literature from the student market to adults.

§ Speaking of which, CliffNotes competitor SparkNotes has begun publishing study guides to (among many others) recent SF and fantasy novels, by Bradbury, Card, Clarke, Crichton, Frank, Heinlein, and Rowling...

§ Vocabulary note: know what a bonkbuster is?

Friday 5 July 2002

§ Salon recommends The Bellybutton Fiasco by Tom Bissell and Webster Younce, a deliberately bad novel concocted by two book editors to demonstrate that online publishers like Xlibris, who "published" this, will publish anything, just as traditional vanity presses have always done. Here's an Amazon link where you can buy the book yourself, or read the reader reviews.

§ Cthulhu dolls (link via Robot Wisdom).

§ Salon revisits the familiar story about varying criteria for assembling bestseller lists, and the coming age of BookScan.

...the increase in the number of lists has also begun to make the word "bestseller" a slippery term. Now there are scores of books each week that can be called "bestsellers." (In fact, USA Today lists its 150 bestsellers on its Web site, so that "Junie B. Jones Is a Beauty Shop Guy," the No. 150 book through June 9, can call itself a "national bestseller.")

§ Also in Salon, an interview with James Gleick, whose new book, What Just Happened, reviews the past decade's changes in information technology.

Something happened starting 10 years ago that was really exceptional. The speed of change of technology is different now. It's qualitatively different. It's disturbing. We can't always appreciate that because our memories are unreliable. Our attention spans seem to be shorter. We all feel this.

But something very much like it happened a century ago, when the world suddenly got electricity and telephones, and underwent a sudden and dramatic change in the size and topology of the globe. So, it's happened before.

§ The "biggest book of the summer", according to Time Magazine, is the latest in Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins's "Left Behind" series of Rapture fantasies, The Remnant, and it signals a peculiarly American obsession with the end of the world.

A TIME/CNN poll finds that more than one-third of Americans say they are paying more attention now to how the news might relate to the end of the world, and have talked about what the Bible has to say on the subject. Fully 59% say they believe the events in Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack.

§ The dinosaurs we grew up with, according to U.S. News, were an unrepresentative, and pale, sample. (Via Slate.)

The dinosaurs featured in children's books and museums grew to prominence because their fossils happened to be located in the American West, where the first concerted effort to uncover them took place. But remains of species that could "kick T. Rex's ass," in the words of one paleontologist, are showing up on other continents, forcing a ground-up reconstruction of the dinosaur world.

§ And now to undermine those Chesley Bonestell paintings: astronomical colors are more a matter of interpretation than commonly thought, says Space.com.

...the very vocabulary of astronomy is riddled with misleading color terms. Red giant stars like the bright and popular Betelgeuse, for example, are not really red, though they can sometimes appear so from Earth.

"If you could walk up to Betelgeuse, it would look white," [astronomer Kenneth Brecher] says.

That's because the star's light would overwhelm the color-sensing cones in your eyes. Only from a great distance, when the star is relatively dim, can the cones sometimes detect a hint of red. The vast majority of red giants, however, set off only the rods in your eyes, which cannot detect color at all. So most stars appear white, regardless of how they are classified.

§ The current controversy over the Pledge of Allegiance, originally written by a Christian socialist at a time when flags were rarely displayed in public schools, is an object lesson in the gap between a writer's original meaning and the meaning readers later perceive; Reason summarizes the flag issue:

A recitation whose leftist author apparently intended it to instill regard for a benevolent central authority was soon read by rightists as an indispensable performance of patriotism. This rightist interpretation long ago established itself as the only valid reading. ... We often pretend otherwise, but cultural meaning trumps everything else, from taste to law.

§ If there really were space aliens, asks Space.com via MSNBC, what is the likelihood they would be visiting Earth, as so many people believe they are?

§ At Slate Princeton assistant math professor Jordan Ellenburg examines the media's obsession with Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

Wolfram is selling not just a theory, but a story—the story of a genius who retreats from the misunderstanding and jealousy of smaller minds. Some call the genius crazy, but he doesn't mind. Some raise technical objections to his theory. But the genius knows that true ideas are always simple and that technicalities are just the so-called experts' way of hiding the inadequacy of their ideas. ... Sound familiar? You've heard it a lot lately. It's the story of A Beautiful Mind: Ron Howard's cartoon version of John Nash is shown scribbling in the library a lot...

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