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

Comments

The Language of Mathematics - Raúl Rojas ***

One of the biggest developments in the history of maths was moving from describing relationships and functions with words to using symbols. This interesting little book traces the origins of a whole range of symbols from those familiar to all, to the more obscure squiggles used in logic and elsewhere. On the whole Raúl Rojas does a good job of filling in some historical detail, if in what is generally a fairly dry fashion. We get to trace what was often a bumpy path as different symbols were employed (particularly, for example, for division and multiplication, where several still remain in use), but usually, gradually, standards were adopted. This feels better as a reference, to dip into if you want to find out about a specific symbol, rather than an interesting end to end read. Rojas tells us the sections are designed to be read in any order, which means that there is some overlap of text - it feels more like a collection of short essays or blog posts that he couldn't be bothered ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein, but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Search This Blog