Skip to main content

Vampirology - Kathryn Harkup ***

This is the second non-fiction book featuring vampires that I've read in recent days. The other, The Modern Myths by Philip Ball, didn't claim to be a science book, concentrating as it did on the nature of myth - but in Vampirology, Kathryn Harkup seeks to put vampires squarely into the remit of popular science. It's even (somewhat oddly, perhaps) published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

To an extent, what Harkup is doing here is the well-established format of a 'science of' book - the subtitle is indeed 'the science of horror's most famous fiend.' Harkup has already given us Making the Monster taking a similar approach to Frankenstein, which worked well. Although the natural topics of such books tend to be science fiction - and Frankenstein is arguably proto-science fiction - we've seen a number of titles successfully straying into fantasy, from the Science of Discworld books to Science of Middle Earth. 

Here, we get a reasonable summary of what the vampire legend has entailed throughout history - with some pretty unpleasant attempts to dispose of 'real' supposed vampire corpses - plus a bit on the better known literary and screen vampires (though thankfully the Twilight gang don't get much of a mention) - particularly giving focus to Polidori's Ruthven and, of course, Dracula. But the majority of the book picks up on aspects of science and medicine/disease (particularly the medical side) that have some sort of parallel with the fictional abilities of vampires.

This means we get plenty on being undead - so the nature of death and conditions that can appear like death but aren't - on the function of blood (in general and as a supposed restorative), on sunlight and conditions that make people light sensitive (though they don't usually disperse in a cloud of ash), and includes pretty far-fetched attempts to deal with the potential science of supernatural capabilities, such as walking down walls or mind control.  Although I love vampires in fiction, I found the medical and disease-related aspects outside both my interest and comfort zone. You could either regard some of the linkages as ingenious or far-fetched - so, for example, in a chapter on disease, the idea of modelling the spread of vampires is tied to Snow's cholera mapping. Other chapters are driven primarily by vampire lore when dealing the evolution of vampires, vampiroids (essentially vampire wannabes), prevention and slaying (where I was disappointed not to have more on the science of Buffy).

As a book, perhaps surprisingly in a topic based on fiction, there's a bit of tendency to pile on facts with relatively little storytelling, which can feel a little heavy. This wasn't helped by a structure that felt like a series of articles that had been pulled together - a number of key points were introduced several times as if they hadn't mentioned before. For example, the Murnau film Nosferatu was introduced in some detail three separate times. 

Harkup has done a really good job of coming up with science that could be linked to vampires, often producing fascinating factoids along the way - but I did finish the book wondering if this was really a topic that required a 'science of' title.

Paperback: 
Bookshop.org

  

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

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more