Bookshelf
July-August 2008
By Laurence A. Marschall
Beach Reading—Reading may not be sweat-inducing, but something about the dog days of summer makes one want to go light on mental exercise. July and August reading choices should require only a comfortable beach chair, a generous coating of SPF-30 lotion, and a few lazy hours. Here are some recent offerings whole authors add a little bit of science and natural history to the mix.
Cretaceous Dawn
by L. M. Graziano and M. S. A. Graziano (Leapfrog Press, 2008; $15.95)
Something strange has been happening in the graviton laboratory of Yariko Miyakara, a physicist at the University of Creekbend, South Dakota. Although the chamber that holds her apparatus is sealed and airtight, beetles are randomly turning up inside.
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Several pages into this fast-paced novel, you just know what’s going to happen next: Miyakara and Whitney, along with another physicist, a security guard, and a German shepherd, enter the graviton chamber and—boom!—find themselves “translocated” into the age of dinosaurs. Something unforeseen in the graviton apparatus is transporting objects back and forth through time. Beetles were small stuff. Now this motley crew is stuck in a world of giant carnivores, with only a few tools and no return ticket.
Of course, there is a way back, since the disappearing beetles presumably made the return trip. But unfortunately for our heroes, and fortunately for us readers, it involves an adventure-filled journey through a thousand miles of Cretaceous landscape. Since the brother-and-sister authors of the book are both Ph.D. scientists (in oceanography and neuroscience), this gives them plenty of opportunity to discourse on the behavior of dinosaurs and the ecology of ancient North America. It’s not hard to imagine the authors consulting journal articles on Cretaceous biology and ecology to flesh out their story, converting research on dinosaur diets, for instance, into descriptions of the foul stench of ankylosaur turds.
In spite of its references to hard academic science, however, Cretaceous Dawn is a first-class adventure story, an effortless read as engaging as vintage Jules Verne. The descriptive prose is both evocative and illuminating, and the plot has enough twists and cliff-hangers to keep readers traveling on to the inevitable translocation back to the present.
Final Theory
by Mark Alpert (Touchstone, 2008; $24.00)
Given the centuries-old literary tradition of the Holy Grail and the more recent blockbuster success of The Da Vinci Code, it’s not surprising that new versions of the grail quest story continue to appear. This latest contribution, however, is about the holy grail of theoretical physics: the Unified Field Theory. The pursuit of a single set of equations knitting together quantum mechanics and relativity occupied Einstein for much of his later life, but he did not solve the problem, nor has anyone since.
What if Einstein actually had succeeded, but because the military implications of the theory appalled him, he decided to keep it to himself? Well, not quite to himself . . . what if he had spilled it to his most trusted collaborators with the understanding that they would remain forever silent? And what if, many years later, someone learned of Einstein’s secret and set about to extract it from the few surviving confidants . . . by whatever means necessary? Then suppose that an innocent person, say an unassuming historian of science, was called to the deathbed of a former mentor, an old physics professor who had been tortured by a mysterious assailant . . . and suppose the professor asked him to memorize a seemingly random sequence of numbers—keys to the Unified Field Theory.
David Swift, the hero of this first novel by Scientific American editor Mark Alpert, is abruptly swept into a nightmare of violence and intrigue by just such a chain of events. Pursued by police, federal agents, and a terrorist of diabolic depravity, he allies himself with a stunning Princeton string theorist named Monique, an autistic teenager named Michael, and a snake-handling fundamentalist named Graddick, to rediscover Einstein’s notes and to foil the forces of evil. That’s all you need to know—other than a warning: do not begin this book less than several hours before a dinner or other social engagement. You will probably not be able to stop reading until (I’m not giving much away here) the world is safe and David Swift is in the arms of Monique at last.
The Stone Gods
by Jeanette Winterson (Harcourt, 2007; $24.00)
This isn’t exactly science fiction, though it does feature a lot of space travel and a world in which people are genetically engineered to stay as young as they choose. Nor is it exactly lesbian lit; yet the central love theme is an affair between a beautiful renegade government employee named Billie Crusoe and a “drop-dead gorgeous” fembot named Spike (according to the book, the first “Robo sapiens”).
At first, this does not even appear to be a novel, but rather three short stories. The first begins on the high-tech planet Orbus, dying because humans have exhausted its natural resources. The hope is that as Orbus dies, humans will be able to start all over on a newly discovered blue planet light-years away, where the only inhabitants are animals in a much earlier evolutionary state, including dinosaurs. Billie and Spike join a group of prospective colonists who land on the planet, but things do not quite develop as planned: dark clouds gather over paradise, and they face their own extinction as well as that of the blue planet’s native inhabitants.
The second story takes place on Earth in the eighteenth century a.d., when a member of Captain Cook’s crew, named Billy, finds himself marooned on Easter Island, witnesses the destruction of the island’s last tree, and becomes enmeshed in a tragic cycle of tribal warfare. The third and final story is a vignette of an Earth after a nuclear war. Engineers have developed a robot—only a head, also named Spike—to help bring about a lasting peace. The robot, however, makes other plans.
What connects the three stories only becomes apparent in the final section, when seemingly unrelated motifs come together and the narrative resolves into a meditation on how humans relate to each other and to the natural world. That may be a bit more weight than is advisable for light summer reading, but the humor and sheer intelligence of Winterson’s prose more than offset the novel’s underlying darkness.
The Abyssinian Proof
by Jenny White (Norton, 2008; $23.95)
You can almost see the smoke and hear the calls to prayer as author Jenny White guides you through the narrow streets of Istanbul. The year is 1887, and Kamil Pasha, a magistrate under the Ottomans, is trying to keep the city from going up in flames. Muslim refugees from wars in the Balkans are flooding the neighborhoods, straining relief agencies and stirring already tense relations between Christians, Muslims, Jews, and a variety of smaller sects. To make matters worse, treasured relics have been disappearing from churches, mosques, and synagogues, and each group is blaming the others, and the sultan’s government, for the robberies. The Middle East, you might conclude, hasn’t changed much.
The measure of a mystery set in the past lies in its command of details and of character. White, a Boston University anthropologist who has written widely about Turkish culture and politics, gets those just right. Her hero, Kamil, in his second outing (the first was in The Sultan’s Seal), embodies all the contradictions of the Eurasian metropolis in which he lives. He is a thoughtful, literate man in a violent line of work, a Cambridge graduate who carries his grandfather’s worry beads along with a revolver through the mean streets of the city. Equally memorable is Malik, the patriarch of an exotic Abyssinian sect, who enlists Kamil’s help in investigating the theft of a silver box believed to contain proof of the existence of God. With a supporting cast of jaded police officers, ruthless crime lords, resourceful street urchins—and especially the green-eyed beauty, Saba—this book will leave you convinced you have traveled to an exotic time and place, if only for a few breathless hours.
ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION
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Flatland: A Journey of Many Dimensions,
The Movie Edition
by Edwin A. Abbott with Thomas Banchoff and the Filmmakers of Flatland (Princeton University Press, 2008; $15.00)
Originally published in 1884, this wonderful fantasy—written three decades before Einstein’s general theory of relativity and a century before string theory—explores the world of many dimensions by imagining a world of only two. When its protagonist–narrator, A Square, is visited by a sphere, his mind is stretched, and ultimately his placid world is turned inside out. The book is the companion piece to a 2007 animated movie, but whether you see the movie or not, the book is a must-read. If you’ve never thought much about why we inhabit only three dimensions, it may turn your world inside out.
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Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2008