No such thing as a stupid question?

John Brockman invited many of the best minds in the world to pose questions for his book The Last Unknowns. So why do so many of their questions seem stupid to me?

Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand, best known for Whole Earth Catalog, asks, "Can wild animals that are large and dangerous be made averse to threatening humans?" Does he want to tame lions and alligators? Or does he want to drug them or kill them? Can humans be made averse to threatening wild animals?

Someone else asks, "Will scientific advances about the causes of sexual conflict help to end the 'battle of the sexes'"? Understanding the battle of the sexes is one thing, but do we really want science to end it? Wouldn't that mean ending the differences between men and women?

"How do I describe the achievements, meanings, and power of Beethoven's piano sonata Appassionata?" Yes, how do you describe it, and how is that more important than how any other music lover describes it? And is this really the last question humanity should be asking?

"How can we design a machine that can correctly answer every question, including this one?" Some questions have answers, but some don't. There are rhetorical questions, for example. There are questions like, "How are you feeling today?" that can have imprecise answers or different answers depending upon circumstances. Why would we even want a machine to answer all questions?

"How will we know if we achieve universal happiness?" Maybe when everyone is happy. I wonder, has this scientist ever read 1984 or Brave New World?

"Can we create new senses for humans — not just touch, taste, vision, hearing, smell, but totally novel qualia for which we don't have words?" No comment necessary.

"Will civilization collapse before I die?" According to people on both sides of the political spectrum, it could happen soon after the next election.

"Has consciousness done more good or bad for humanity?" Is this professor suggesting that we might be better off if we were all unconscious?

"Will questioning be replaced by answering without questions?" This comes from a physicist, in whose field I am sure answers sometimes come before anyone thinks to ask the questions. But on the whole, a world without questions seems neither desirable nor possible.

A journalist named Carl Zimmer asks, "How does the past give rise to the the future?" The answer, I believe, is that thin dividing line known as the present.

"How can the process of science be improved?" Someone else asks a similar question. The answer seems obvious to me — stick to science. Forget about politics and political correctness. When scientists no longer feel free to express dissenting findings in such areas as climate change, the treatment of Covid, gender transition and evolution, real science is no longer being practiced.

Last questions

For more than two decades, John Brockman annually posed a question and then invited scientists and others to answer it in short essays. These have resulted in fascinating books, some of which I have reviewed here. In the last book in the series, The Last Unknowns (2019), Brockman invited individuals from a variety of fields to pose the ultimate unanswered question. Thus the book is composed of many questions, suggesting that Brockman could have continued his series for many more years. There are numerous "last unknowns," it turns out. Some questions are posed multiple times, in one form or another, in these pages.

"Is a single world language and culture inevitable?" asks a professor of evolutionary biology. A Harvard professor answers that question with another question: "In which century or millennium can all human be expected to speak the same primary language?"

Immortality is another frequent topic on the minds of intellectuals. One asks if immortality is even desirable. Another wonders if even a thousand years would be too long to live. Yet another worries about the practical implications of humans living significantly longer than they do now.

Many questions center around artificial intelligence. One man asks, "Will AI make the Luddites (mostly) right?" Another puts it differently: "How far are we from wishing to return to the technologies of the year 1900?" I would settle for the year 2000. Other experts take a much more positive view of AI. One wonders how AI can help create global institutions that we can trust. I would ask, how can we trust AI?

A common subject of these questions has to do with religion and spirituality. "Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century?" asks Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton. (Does she want to put herself out of a job?) Others ask variations of the same question. In other words, why do we still have religion when people should know better by now?

Others seem to be asking about what religions call the spirit, without actually using that word. One person asks, "Does consciousness reside only in our brains?" Another asks, "Can consciousness exist in an entity without a self-contained physical body?" Another, "Is there a subtle form of consciousness that operates independent of brain function?"

Interesting questions. More next time.

Bot dilemmas

Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas.

Martha Wells, Rogue Protocol

When Murderbot, as it calls itself, freed itself from human control by disengaging its governor, it hoped to spend its time watching the thousands of hours of media stored in its system. But this SecUnit has enough human cells built into its machinery to not just look human but also, sometimes, to feel human.

And thus at the end of Rogue Protocol, the third installment of The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, we find Murderbot saying, "I hate caring about stuff. But apparently once you start, you can't just stop."

This time Murderbot finds itself on an abandoned space station with helpless humans. All humans are helpless, in its view. But not all are innocent. Murderbot hopes to remain out of sight but must reveal itself to protect the humans from killing machines left to guard the station. Then it discovers that two of the humans have killing on their minds, as well.

The short novel offers plenty of action, yet the heart of the story involves Murderbot's relationship with Miki, one of the human's pet bot. The two bots work together, forming something like a friendship. Could it even be more than friendship?

Murderbot wants to get back to its videos, but once you start caring about stuff, you can't just stop.

Gone and forgotten

How could he be remembered if he could not be described?

Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road

Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road by Dan B. Miller was published in 1994. Thirty years later it seems unlikely that anyone would bother to write — or read (except me, of course) — a biography of this man who was once one of the most famous writers in America.

William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and others considered Caldwell one of the best writers of the 20th century..

His paperbacks outsold those by every other writer of his time.

He was married to one of the most glamorous women in the country, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

His short stories were once a staple of most college courses on contemporary American literature.

Yet today few people recognize Caldwell's name, and even his most notable novels, Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, are difficult to find, assuming there is anybody looking for them.

This was all true in 1994, and is even more true today.

Caldwell may have been his own worst enemy. He tended to burn bridges, whether it was with his wives, his friends, his agents or his publishers.  He was often paranoid, believing everyone was out to get him, while failing to recognize his own faults.

Caldwell strived for art, yet wrote sleaze, often at the same time. And it is this that makes him hard to describe and thus hard to remember. In which category does he ultimately belong? The main reason his paperbacks sold so many copies was the sleazy covers, which usually promised more than his books actually contained, though even his best work contained enough. Eventually his reputation suffered, although the sales certainly padded his bank account for many years.

Perhaps the most admirable thing about Erskine Caldwell is that he never burned the bridge connecting him with his beloved father, a preacher, just as his father never stopped loving and believing in his wayward son.

Men reading women

For years I worked with a man, a photographer, who was an avid reader, and we sometimes talked about books. One day he surprised me by saying he never read a book written by a woman. It sounded like a boast.

Certainly there is nothing wrong with preferring one kind of book over another, action and adventure over relationships and romance, for instance. Yet some women can write action and adventure very well, while men, Nicholas Sparks among them, can write best-selling romances.

George Eliot

Male readers (and publishers) favoring male writers has long been a problem for female writers. It is why Mary Ann Evans wrote under the name of George Eliot and why J.K. Rowling, like so many other women, have chosen to put their initials on their books or used a name that could be taken for male, such as Harper Lee.

This is clearly less of a problem today than it once was. A visit to any bookstore makes it obvious there is more fiction being written by women than men — and being read by women, too. My photographer friend might have to search a bit to find the kind of male-written novel he is looking for.

Yet there are plenty of men, including many in my own generation, who do not look first at the sex of the author before choosing a book to read. Another friend of mine, a retired farmer, sometimes reads Amish romances. I know a retired pastor who likes Debbie Macomber novels.

I, too, fit into this minority, men not ashamed to be caught reading novels written by women mostly for women. Just consider some of the novels I've reviewed recently on this blog: The Messy Lives of Book People, Take What You Need, Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, Rock Paper Scissors, The Psychology of Time Travel and Kopp Sisters on the March.

Female writers, like male writers, write some pretty good books. Why not read them?

The poetry of three

Whenever I look for examples of something to bolster an argument, I strive to find three of them. One proves nothing. Two examples are insufficient. Four seem superfluous. But three, that is the ideal.

It's not just me, of course. Consider the Apostle Paul's "faith, hope and charity." Or "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" from the Declaration of Independence. Somehow poetry comes in threes, and not just in haiku.

Sarah Hart

Sarah Hart explores the power of three in her book Once Upon a Prime. "What can explain the hold that the number 3 has on our psyche?" she asks. "I propose that the mathematics of triangles and trichotomies enables the triumph of the triple." I won't try to say what trichotomies are, as if I could, but she goes on at length with her explanation. But in essence, you can't make a geometric shape with just two sides. You need at least three. And for physical objects you need three dimensions.

There are many examples of common threes in our culture and in our literature, and here are more than just three. Morning, noon and night. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Three cheers. Small, medium and large. Our ABCs.  "Row, row, row your boat." Three little pigs. Three bears. Three billy goats gruff. The Holy Trinity. Gold, frankincence and myrrh. In jokes it is usually three people who meet in a bar. And on and on.

"Stories themselves have a beginning, middle, and end. The most common multivolume set is the trilogy," Hart writes. Even her own book has three parts.

Words and numbers

Of all the subjects we may have studied in school, math and literature might have seemed to have had the least in common. Sarah Hart begs to differ in her intriguing book Once Upon a Prime (2023).

Hart is a British mathematician who also enjoys reading a good book, and she has noticed that mathematics plays a vital role in a great many notable literary works, such as Moby-Dick, Ulysses and Middlemarch.

She observes, for example, that haiku poetry is built on prime numbers: three lines including two with five syllables and one with seven syllables, for a total of 17 syllables. She describes a short book that contains 100 trillion poems, more than you could read in a lifetime. How is this possible? She tells us how.

Some notable literary works were written by mathematicians and not surprisingly are full of mathematical ideas. These writers include Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) and Edwin Abbott (Flatland). Other fiction has been written by people such as Herman Melville, George Eliot and James Joyce who were simply fascinated by mathematics.

Her analysis includes several contemporary novels, such as The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

The professor checks the work of all these writers and doesn't give all of them a passing grade. Jonathan Swift, for example, got much of  his math wrong in Gulliver's Travels, as did Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. Of the latter novel she writes, "my goodness, there's a lot of mathematical nonsense in it."

She includes a section on novels about mathematicians, although she somehow ignores A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin.

This good-humored book will delight many who love either math or literature. For those who love both, as Sarah Hart does, it may be a priceless joy.

Happy trails

I knew I had to read The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie (2023) because I loved The Dog of the South by Charles Portis.

Although the McKenzie novel was clearly inspired by the Portis novel (1979), the only clear allusion to the earlier work comes early when Penny Rush, our narrator, asks why a beat-up old van is called the Dog of the North.  She's told it was named "in honor of a beloved novel with a similar name." And, yes, the Dog of the South is also the name of a vehicle, an old bus.

The newer novel is by no means a sequel, and the characters are entirely different, yet it has a spirit similar to that of the Portis novel. It is also a hero-takes-a-crazy-journey kind of story, this time with a female hero.

Penny has family troubles. She has left her husband. Her mother and stepfather disappeared in the Australian outback five years before. She goes to Santa Barbara to try to help her grandparents, who divorced years ago, to sort out their problems. Her grandfather has been given the boot by his current wife,  while her grandmother, Pincer, a retired physician, has gone loopy, lives in clutter and filth and is found to have a man's skeleton on her property.

Penny takes a shine to Burt, a man who owns that van and who has been trying to help Pincer. He develops serious health problems, which brings his brother Dale to his side. And then Penny takes a shine to him.

The scene shifts to Texas, and then she and her grandfather decide to fly to Australia to make one last attempt to discover what happened to her mother and stepfather.

And it all ends in Carlsbad Caverns.

Many novelists have attempted to tell wacky travel adventures of this sort, but few have succeeded as well as Charles Portis. And now Elizabeth McKenzie.

Beginning with the ending

Over the past several months I have written a couple of times about novels with unique chapter headings. Back in April ("Clever foolishness," April 15, 2024) I wrote of A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks, in which each chapter is headed by the city in which the action takes place, all in alphabetical order. Then in June ("Playing games," June 14, 2024) my subject was the Amor Towles novel A Gentleman in Moscow, in which chapter titles use only words beginning with the letter A.

In the meantime I was reminded of The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time by Mark Haddon, in which the chapters are numbered but only prime numbers are used. Thus there is no chapter 4 or chapter 6.

Michael Faber

Michael Faber has his own unique way with chapter headings in his novel The Book of Strange New Things. He makes the last words in each chapter the title of that chapter.

The first chapter, for example, is called "Forty Minutes Later He Was Up in the Sky," which is exactly how the chapter ends. Thus in each chapter `you know the ending before you read the beginning, not that it actually tells you much.

Missionary in space

Peter leaves behind his beloved wife Bea to become a Christian missionary on the distant planet of Oasis in Michael Faber's strikingly original 2014 novel The Book of Strange New Things. He is not there as a chaplain for his fellow settlers, who show little interest in Christianity, but rather for the benefit of the native inhabitants of the planet.

The settlers cannot get their own crops to grow on Oasis, meaning that, except for rare shipments from earth, they must get their food from the Oasans. These odd but peaceful beings want two things in exchange: someone to teach them about The Book of Strange New Things, their name for the King James Bible, and any excess pharmaceuticals available. It is not clear why they want the drugs, for their diseases are nothing like those of humans, but the drugs are regularly delivered just the same. And soon Peter is going and returning with the drug deliveries, finding the Oasans amazingly receptive to Christian ideas and quick to learn English.

While this novel may sound like science fiction, Faber clearly has no interest in science. The planet is described as a billion miles from Earth, yet the trip takes a matter of days, and communication between Peter and Bea takes just minutes. And all this happens in the 21st century, not the distant future. Humans living on this distant planet listen to the likes of Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline, as if it were an even earlier century.

Peter desperately misses Bea, especially as he is drawn to Grainger, the female pharmacist who transports him back and forth. The messages Bea sends from England become more and more disturbing. Natural disasters strike with increasing frequency, even as civilization rapidly crumbles around her. Nothing works anymore, not businesses, not government, not even the hospital where she works as a nurse.

This dystopian novel, viewing the collapse of human society from a billion miles away, may disturb readers. Yet Oasis is hardly paradise, as becomes more clear the longer Peter stays. The Oasans, with their beloved Book of Strange New Things, seem to be the only ones who have it together.

Love on hold

Covid, which practically brought the entire world to a standstill for a couple of years, has been all but ignored by novelists. It is as if it never happened. That is not the case with Touch by Olaf Olafsson (2022).

Olafsson bookends his wonderful novel with two events, Hiroshima and Covid, in which human existence was threatened by human technology. Life is precious, the author tells us with his beautiful prose. Don't waste it.

Kristofer, our narrator, closes his Reykjavik restaurant in the middle of the pandemic. He is of retirement age and has money saved. More importantly he has received a cryptic Facebook message from Miko, a Japanese woman he met and fell in love with while working in her father's restaurant in London back in the 1960s. He decides to fly to Japan to find her, Covid or no Covid.

Miko's mother died because of radiation from the Hiroshima bombing. Those exposed to radiation, as Miko was as a baby and her father was, were ostracized in Japan. So she and her father moved to London. The  two lovers work side by side in the restaurant, all the while keeping their relationship a secret from her father for reasons Kristofer doesn't fully understand.

Then one day Miko and her father disappear. After a long and fruitless search, Kristofer gradually accepts the truth. He marries another woman he never truly loves and raises a stepdaughter who never loves him. He buys a restaurant and lets the decades pass. Now widowed and 75 years old, he gets the message from Miko, and his heart catches fire again.

Olafsson builds his story with agonizing slowness, a little bit about the present followed by a little bit about the past. And this pace works to perfection. The ending may or may not surprise you, but either way you will love it.

An element of deceit

There is, naturally, an element of deceit in what copywriters do. Writing "blurbs," or the copy that appears on the back of a book, involves distorting the truth in some way.

Louise Wilder, Blurb Your Enthusiasm

The above comment by professional blurb writer Louise Wilder is not really as shocking as it may first sound. When you are trying to sell something, whether it's a book, a can of peas or yourself on a first date, you naturally accentuate the positive and try to eliminate the negative.

The purpose of the blurb is to sell the book. Buyer beware. Some books may actually be better than their blurbs, but in most cases blurbs make books seem more interesting, more exciting, more essential than they actually are. That's what advertising is all about.

A box of cereal in my cupboard says this on the back: "Our unique combination of tastes and textures are simply a cut above the rest." That's a cereal blurb. Don't expect to find any negatives in a blurb, but because nothing is perfect, there is naturally "an element of deceit" in every blurb. One just needs to bring that understanding with you when you go to a bookstore — or a grocery store.

Laws now require pharmaceutical companies to mention possible side effects in their advertising. meaning that drug advertising often devotes more words to the negatives than to the positives, even though the negatives may impact only a very small number of people.

Imagine if there were similar legislation relating to book blurbs. Blurb writers would have to tell us that anyone reading this particular mystery novel may be able to identify the killer by page 50. Or this novel starts out with a bang, but become tedious in the middle. Or this memoir amounts to little more than boasting and name-dropping.

No, pointing out flaws is the book critic's job. Let the blurb writers do their job, which is to try to sell us books, even if they do employ an element of deceit.

 

Game warden detective

In The Disappeared, C.J. Box's 2018 Joe Pickett novel, the Wyoming game warden gets assigned by the new governor to investigate the disappearance of a prominent British businesswoman from an exclusive dude ranch in another part of the state. Because his eldest daughter, Sheridan, works at the ranch, Joe welcomes the assignment, yet wonders why a missing person case should be a game warden's responsibility.

Kate's disappearance was months ago, and other investigations have gone nowhere. The fact that the game warden in that part of the state also disappeared at the same time adds to the mystery. Then there is the mystery, which readers learn about long before Joe Pickett does, about someone paying bribes to burn something in the middle of the night in a sawdust burner. And why does the fire those nights smell something like burning flesh?

Box juggles these and other elements of the plot with great skill, leaving readers guessing all the while. Unfortunately the guessing must continue even after the last page, for Box leaves some questions unanswered. Such as, will Joe, fired by the governor midway through the novel, get his job back? I hate having to read series novels in the proper order to get the whole story.