Skip to main content

Wegener’s Jigsaw (SF) – Clare Dudman ****

Recently we’ve had something of a spate of books that present science or history of science through fiction, what with Arturo Sangalli’s Pythagoras’ Revenge and Douglas Richards’ The Prometheus Project. Clare Dudman sets out to provide a scientific biography of the man who devised the concept of continental drift, Alfred Wegener, but in fictional form.
There are pros and cons to using ‘informative fiction’ this way. The good side is there is a natural narrative flow. There is no sense of a story being imposed on the information and not fitting well with it as can happen when a purely fictional story is melded with scientific fact. The downside is that the strongest parts of the story may well not be the ones that are about the individual’s life. (I had a similar problem with moving picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge in my biography of him (admittedly non-fiction, but still strong on narrative). The most dramatic aspect of Muybridge’s life, the murder of his wife’s lover, occurs before any of his interesting work.)
In the case of Wegener, his life – and the story – really seemed to come alive when he was undertaking expeditions across Greenland. Here the story becomes truly gripping, in the style of a man-versus-the-elements novel. But there is no science of interest at all here. Wegener’s big ideas – continental drift (the precursor to plate tectonics) and the meteor theory of moon craters – come up in rather dull periods of university life.
There are two questions to be asked. Does this work as popular science, and does it work as a novel? I have no doubts about the former. It got across the story of Wegener’s life and work as well as any straight scientific biography would, if not better. As to the latter, Clare Dudman has great style, and really pulls you into the realities of life on the Greenland ice. The only slight concern I have about it as a novel is that the book is written as a first person historical reminiscence. Inevitably this means there is rather more ‘tell’ than ‘show’ in the way things are put across – it can seem a little disengaged from reality compared with a narrative that really puts you in there with the action.
I don’t know if it was the writer’s intent, but the other observation that came across strongly to me is how much expeditions to hostile places that involve sacrifice and suffering, like Wegener’s, are about the people, not about the place or science. They are, in effect, a form of showing off – in the end, the achievement is arbitrary and has very little value. It makes for a strange contrast between Wegener’s truly valuable scientific insights that were largely ignored at the time, and this terrible waste of life (Wegener’s own, not to mention all the dogs and ponies that get slaughtered) for little more than an ego trip. Fascinating.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you   
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...