Skip to main content

Bewilderment (SF) - Richard Powers ****

Generally speaking, I avoid anything listed for the Booker Prize as being too worthy and pretentious to be bothered with, but I'd heard good things about Bewilderment, and I have found in the past that genre books that manage to get past the literati (Wolf Hall, for example) are far better than the average entry.

The publisher would probably disagree, but the reality is that Bewilderment is science fiction. I wondered to start with if Richard Powers was dealing more in Lab Lit - fiction with a scientific context but where the science isn't the driver in how people's lives are changed - but this is pretty solid SF. Clearly the book is strongly influenced by that SF classic Flowers for Algernon - in fact, Powers does a couple of open hat tips in its direction. Although Bewilderment isn't as ground-breaking as Flowers, it follows the model of a person's brain being changed by science to deal with an issue, but here it's an emotional problem rather than an intellectual one.

There is also a second level of SF content - one of the two main characters is an astrobiologist, and the very short segments of the book (you couldn't call them chapters, but they make it easy to 'just read one more') are interspersed with 'visits' to imaginary other planets 'taken' by the character with his son, Robin, who is the one who undergoes the brain treatment that seems to mystically link him to aspects of his dead mother.

The book is genuinely engaging and we feel for father and son as they struggle with the realities of life. The SF concept is interesting and the scientific detail well-handled without it getting in the way.

I only have two small issues with the book. One is that the pretentiousness required to make the shortlist creeps in a bit. The dialogue of the boy and his mother is all in italics without speech marks. This makes for poor readability and provides no benefit for the narrative - it's just showing off. And the environmental context is very heavy handed. Not only is the boy's heroine a weakly disguised Greta Thunberg, but the real threat we face in climate change is presented in the pure doom terms typical of children - acceptable in the child character, but not the supposed scientist father. It simply doesn't reflect the real science of climate change in the way that the astrobiology parts do.

Overall, an interesting and enjoyable book. I find it entertaining that it's apparently a bestseller in the 'metaphysical and visionary' category: this underestimates its value. What Powers does here is what SF does far better than conventional literary fiction - explore what it is to be human by using hypothetical developments in science and technology to imagine how human beings would react to them. Bewilderment does this very well.

Hardback: 
Bookshop.org

  

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more