Your Flying Car Awaits by Paul Milo

I don't know if it's me in particular, or a general ennui that strikes the middle-aged in general, but my reading life has never really recovered from the one-two punch (more than a decade ago) of first losing my editorial job and then the flood that destroyed most of the books I owned. I still keep a list of books I want to read, and even add to it, now and then, but it's full of stuff from twenty years ago. I have what looks like a huge to-be-read backlog - most of three big bookcases - but it feels like that's mostly stuff that's been there since the post-flood restocking or  the random things that survived. And the "new" things I add - to the shelves, to the list, to my eyeballs by reading them - seem to mostly be old, either actually so (by decades, in many cases) or in style and tone and audience.

What I'm saying is: I feel like I used to be smart and connected and in charge. Nowadays, I've got a bunch of random oddball things that I poke through, and I read some of them, as I get farther and farther away from any literary or genre mainstream, or even coherent set of interests. I don't know if that's something I even could fix, but it comes to mind in particular when I find myself reading one of the most random books on my shelves.

Your Flying Car Awaits is definitely one of those. It's a 2009 non-fiction book by Paul Milo, which I got in 2014 for no particular reason. Working on this post, I learn that Milo is somewhat local to me: he's been a reporter in New Jersey for a couple of decades, so I've possibly read his by-lines more than I thought. (I first had an inkling when he said he researched much of this book at Montclair State University, whose train station I used to commute into NYC for a few years.)

Milo assembled a breezy but informative look at a whole lot of things that looked plausible but didn't actually happen. From cloning to flying cars to moon colonies to power "too cheap to meter" to domed cities, Milo runs through a few dozen interesting ideas in nine themed chapters, with short potted histories about things that seemed reasonable up until the point where something stopped them from happening.

This is a particularly good book for SF writers and readers, especially those around my age. We remember a lot of these predictions, and many SF people still passionately believe that fusion power or the great asteroid mining land-rush or L-5 colonies are right around the corner if only we believe hard enough. But Milo explains how contingent so many things are - some of the ideas here were impossible, and that became clear after further study, but most of them were entirely possible, and just didn't happen for various reasons. It just wasn't steam-engine time.

Some of the most intriguing sections are on things that have started to happen, or happen in different ways, since Milo wrote the book. He has a section on the videophone, which didn't happen as expected in the late 20th century, but Facetime and similar technologies are definitely used now and video conferences are a big thing in business. And he gets into self-driving cars, which still don't quite exist, but that area has seen a lot of activity and claims over the last two decades. So his message might not be as purely "this didn't happen" as a reader might think - it's closer to "at this point in time, it hasn't worked yet."

So Your Flying Car isn't directly dated in quite the way I expected. It's retrospective to begin with,. and mostly looking at mid-20th century ideas, so the landscape was settled - most of the time, for most of the things he writes about - at the time. It likely will continue dating, bit by bit, especially if we do get undersea cities or mainstream bug- or algae-based protein sources. For now, though, it's an entertaining survey of the ideas of a generation or so ago, and what happened to them on the way from big concept to failed idea.

The Last Mechanical Monster by Brian Fies

Brian Fies, as a graphic novelist, seems to have two modes - I say "seems" because he's only had four long projects, so dropping them into two buckets of two each is plausible but probably awfully reductive.

Still: he's done two non-fiction books about crises in his own life, Mom's Cancer and A Fire Story. His other two books are both fictional tales with elements of super-science deeply tied to the years immediately before WWII, which is awfully specific to be random. His second book was Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, yet another Boomer's wistful "how come we never got jetpacks" lament.

And his fourth book is The Last Mechanical Monster, which explicitly calls itself a sequel to the 1941 Fleisher Brothers cartoon "The Mechanical Monsters," although the main character of that cartoon (a Mr. Superman, still the property of a large and litigious organization) is entirely absent, except for one namecheck in an old newspaper headline. It is a tale of super-science - the kind that steals from banks, is made with flashing diodes and sparking vacuum tubes, and may or may not be accompanied with maniacal laughter - and its collision with the modern world. I believed it a bit more than I did World of Tomorrow, but it's still a very artificial story.

The unnamed evil genius of that cartoon is released from prison. It's sixty or seventy years after his crimes; we don't know exactly when but let's say the early days of the twenty-first century. The Inventor - we never learn his real name; some call him "Sparky" - is not quite a hundred years old, and has not changed disposition or aims one iota in the long decades since his initial failure. He is nearly as brilliant as he was as a young man, just as dismissive of every other human being in the world, and entirely focused, in the way of a Republic serial villain, with the crudest kind of theft as the way to succeed.

So he buys some supplies with his discharge money, goes to the secret hideout where he was captured so long ago, gets into that place through a secret secondary entrance, and sets to work amid the smashed corpses of his robots.

He does have to return to Metropolis [1] occasionally, and makes a few "friends," including bus driver Ted, electronics-shop owner (and retired engineer) Lillian and librarian Helen, though he's brusque and demanding and rude to all of them, only advancing to the barest level of courtesy, sort-of, almost, by the end of the book.

His plan is a diminished version of the old plan: salvage enough to make one robot operational, use that robot to steal valuables from banks or wherever, and then Make Them All Pay!!!!! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!!!!!!!

There's an underpants-gnomes level missing step there, obviously. The Inventor never realizes it, and never would think of using his inventions to do anything else on his own. It's also a plan that was only barely plausible in 1941 and utterly impossible decades later, as another character eventually points out, without quite having understood that was The Inventor's plan.

He does get one robot working, as the title and cover reveal. It is somewhat more self-directed than expected, and doesn't steal the things The Inventor wants it to at first. It does have an impressive capacity for destruction, as we will eventually see.

I found Mechanical Monster enjoyable as a pulpy SF adventure yarn without ever quite believing in it. The Inventor is a standard character, the one who doesn't change in the slightest over the course of seventy years and then shifts when it would be touching near the end. The story is yet another Boomer love letter to the kind of SF that doesn't examine its premises, and I ran out of patience with those stories not too long into my own SF career, quite some time ago. Fies is good at this stuff, and clearly has a strong affinity for it. I hope it's hugely successful so that he can keep doing retro super-science stories for as long as he wants to, but I might not end up reading them.

[1] No character ever says the name, but we see it on signs.

Time Travel by James Gleick

Is there a fancy literary term to say "review of the literature" (in the scientific sense)? Because that's what this book is: Gleick idly wanders through the fields of physics and SF to pick out interesting theories of time, and time travel, and related concepts, stringing them together in ways that seem most pleasing to him.

That's Time Travel: Gleick starts with Wells, as he must, and ends with...well, somewhat Gibson's The Peripheral, somewhat with the Internet in general, and somewhat with we-are-all-time-travel-theorists now, which is at least true of anyone who will read this book. Along the way, he hits every 20th century physicist you've ever heard of (Einstein and Kip Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler, Feynman and Hawking and Heisenberg), several major SF writers (Dick and Ballard, Bradbury and Heinlein, even Simak and Ray Cummings), and the big media properties most appropriate for a writer in the early 2010s (Doctor Who's "Blink," the inevitable George Pal, La Jetee and Twelve Monkeys, Back to the Future).

It's divided into fourteen more-or-less thematic chapters -- each one starts with a particular vision of time travel, from a physicist or SF story, and then explicates that vision as best Gleick can until looping around to return to more or less where it started. Time loops are at least two or three of the visions, actually, so the book is something of a text-based test-bed for itself.

Time Travel is full of quotes, both from physicists explaining what is possible and what isn't (with regard to something that has never happened and quite possibly never will) and from SF writers gleefully making up their own rules and breaking them even more gleefully. At times, a cynical reader could even wonder if it is a book with an existence on its own, or only an extension of the notecards Gleick took during his preparatory reading. But that would be unkind. (And pointlessly snarky: this book was a bestseller at least twice, and probably sells more copies a year even now than the average new SF book.)

This is a book for people who like the idea of time travel, who know a bit about the history of the literature of time travel and/or the physics theories that might allow time travel, and who want to spend time with a book that makes reasonable demands and leaves the reader feeling smarter than he started. It can also be a good engine to build an expanded to-read list, though Gleick makes some books sound more appealing here than I found them in reality. (Case in point: Charles Yu's How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which I was not a fan of a decade ago and still sometimes remember with grinding teeth.)

And it will make you, at least for a short time, feel smarter for having read it. But that's the point of a book published by Vintage, so maybe don't put too much weight on that.

Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation by Wilson, Ottaviani, and Butler

When you're talking about people who have an inordinate fondness for insects, you probably mean either God or E.O. Wilson. And only one of them is a person you can actually have a conversation with. (Well, Wilson is 91, and probably still busy enough that it would be tough to get some of his time -- but you know what I mean.)

Actually, you can differentiate them a bit more than that -- God is said to like beetles better, and Wilson was always an ant guy. Just in case the distinction becomes important in your life.

Edward O. Wilson is the towering biologist of the 20th century, which is particularly impressive since that was such a physics-heavy century. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for books he wrote, is responsible for hundreds of scientific papers and possibly the foundational biological theory of the era, and is one of the pillars of the conservation movement. Naturalist was his memoir -- the story of how he grew up, got interested in ants, got into science, and navigated most of his career. That book came out in 1994, when Wilson was 65, and just a couple of years before he retired from active teaching at Harvard -- but, as I said above, he's still going strong now at 91, and has published as many books since Naturalist as he did before it. So the idea probably was that Naturalist was going to be basically the story of his life, but he may need to add a second volume at this rate.

Naturalist has had a strong life, and has been particularly influential on young readers interested in science -- obviously those kids who like bugs, but also the ones who end up going into chemistry or physics or possibly even (gasp!) engineering. [1] So clearly someone -- maybe even Wilson himself, since he's obviously a smart guy with a lot of ideas -- thought it would be good to do one of those new-fangled "graphic novel" versions of Naturalist, since all of the kids love them these days.

(I may be deliberately making this sound silly for comic effect. But it was a good idea.)

However it happened, Island Press -- the nonprofit that publishes the prose edition of Naturalist -- found Jim Ottaviani, the premier and almost only writer of science in comics form, to adapt Wilson's book into comics and cartoonist, illustrator, and cartoonist C.M. Butzer to draw it. Colors are by Hilary Sycamore, but the pre-publication proof I read only features color for the first seventeen story pages, so I can't really speak to her work here as a whole. The graphic adaptation came out last November, and is widely available now -- so now there are two versions of Naturalist available to be handed to a budding scientist, one of which features lots of pictures of ants to go with Wilson's words.

As usual with Ottaviani's work, there are lots of caption boxes and dialogue -- he likes to get in as many of the real words of the books and scientists he's adapting as possible. So this will be a denser graphic novel than many readers are used to: I'd say that's no bad thing, since science is demanding and full of details that require close attention. Anyone looking for something quick and surface-y is not cut out for a life in science to begin with.

And, of course, this is the story of a life, and one intertwined with field exploration, collaboration with other scientists, and writing -- some of it is about external action, but most of what was important in Wilson's life happened in his thoughts, as he examined ants around the world, thought about them back in Massachusetts, scribbled ideas on a board with colleagues, and bounced their theories off the real world to make sure they actually worked.

I wish there were more graphic novels like this, and fewer about punching people, but that's the world we live in. Intellectual activity is always less popular than punching. But this one is out there, and it's really good at what it does. If you know someone who could be a scientist eventually, this would be a good book to give her.

[1] Note: your present writer's son is a budding engineer, in the second year of a five-year undergraduate ChemE program, and so he kids because he loves.

Department of Mind-Blowing Theories by Tom Gauld

Some books you don't review so much as point at, to show that they exist. You might talk a bit about why you enjoy them, but that's about all. For me, books of cartoons -- especially themed collections of funny cartoons -- are squarely in that category.

Once you say "he's a fat cat, and he hates Mondays! It's hilarious!" what else is there to say?

So I'm here today to point at Tom Gauld's new book of cartoons, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories. It contains 152 cartoons, each presented in color on a separate page, all originally appearing in New Scientist, all on the subject of science, all funny and inventive.

You might know Gauld from his previous books Baking with Kafka (cartoons from The Guardian's book section) and You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (all over the place, with a general tropism towards SF and mad science). Those books are also about the same length, in the same format, and are full of funny and inventive stuff.

At this point it's usually typical for a reviewer to spoil a few of the jokes, in order to make it clear he really has read the book. (Like, duh. It's a short book of funny cartoons; it's harder not to read it once it's in front of you.) So let me say: cut-price science park, out-of-universe messages, #alchemists, classic fiction in binary.

Gauld is fond of doing variations on a theme, often starting with a common phrase like "fount of all knowledge" and extending the metaphor. He also gets a lot of mileage out of mad science, horrors from between the angles of normal space, robots, and of course the usual furniture of scientists' lives: papers, research, theories, experiments.

Again: I think this is very funny, very inventive. I like smart humor, and Gauld is one of the best at smart humor today. If you do as well, this is a book for you. If not...you just might be a redneck.

Eurekaaargh! by Adam Hart-Davis

Hey, remember Past Times? It was a chain of shops, based in the UK but having a mail-order and retail presence in the US as well, from the mid-80s until they collapsed in 2012.

Basically, if you wanted stuff like what you'd get for donating to PBS without actually donating to PBS -- or other vaguely British, antique-themed, or retro goods, primarily for gifts -- they were your go-to outlet. (And I may sound dismissive, but I got their catalog for twenty years, shopped in their stores multiple times, and bought plenty of tchotckes there.) [1]

They also had a fairly extensive publishing operation, since a lot of what they sold were books, and the mills of Big Publishing didn't grind twee quite fine enough for their needs. One of those books was the 1999 volume Eurekaargh! by Adam Hart-Davis, which combined a delve into the Patent Office records of at least two countries with some familiar-looking public-domain art to keep its board covers about 180 pages apart.

And I read that book not too long ago: it's yet another bathroom book that I'm catching up on, now that I'm pretending my ennui has dissipated. (Note: never claim to have gotten over anything, particularly vague psychological conditions. The world delights in hammering hubris.)

It is pleasant and factual in its way, with a dozen chapters offering, as the subtitle puts it, "a spectacular collection of inventions that nearly worked." In other words, it collects early versions of things that later became important -- cars, bicycles, airplanes, motorboats, flush toilets, small appliances, medical devices, and so on -- and explains quickly why those versions didn't work but led the way to later versions that did.

There are lots of illustrations, mostly taken from the patent applications themselves, making this an easy, quick read. The book is in a small format, making it convenient to carry if you did want to read it on the go -- though the content, being in lots of little snippets, makes it more suitable for reading in random moments in one place. (As I, in fact, did.)

I'm not exactly recommending it, and I'm not exactly not recommending it. It is what it is, it's amusing at that, and it fits the Past Times standard of "stuff about how the world 50-125 years ago was quirky, interesting, and/or better."


[1] I am less clear on what their USP was to people who already lived in Britain and were surrounded by vaguely British stuff already. I presume the retro piece was even stronger on that side of the pond.

Book-A-Day 2018 #352: Fallout by Jim Ottaviani and various artists

Jim Ottaviani has been writing comics about science and scientists for a little over two decades now, and I've only intermittently caught up with him. (See my posts about The Imitation Game, from earlier this year, and Feynman, from 2015.)

Fallout is a much earlier book than those two, published in 2001, and it shows Ottaviani struggling to put all of his material into comics form -- or, maybe, to determine what material should be in comics form.

That's always the question, though: what is this story that I'm telling here? What points are necessary, which scenes do I need to show, and which details are unnecessary or confusing? At this point in his comics-writing career, Ottaviani was still erring on the side of leaving everything in: Fallout not only has over twenty-five pages of notes and backmatter, it also contains entire government memos and long detailed letters crammed onto the comics pages themselves, running in tight columns next to related comics panels over a half-dozen or more consecutive pages.

In retrospect, Fallout does try to do too much, to include all of the sides of what the subtitle calls "the political science of the atomic bomb." And that overwhelms the tighter story that can sometimes be seen peeking around the edges, one that uses Leo Szilard and J. Robert Oppenheimer as contrasts and opposing lenses through which to see the Manhattan Project.

Ottaviani begins well before Manhattan, though -- even the famous letter to Roosevelt from Einstein urging its creation happens well into the book. Fallout starts out looking like the story of Szilard, starting in the interwar years as he fled the rise of Naziism and continuing as he became part of the team that built the first bombs. But Szilard, as Ottaviani tells it, wasn't actually all that important to the actual building of the bomb, and he wants to tell that story, too. So Szilard loses his center of the spotlight for long stretches, as Ottaviani includes nearly everyone on the very large team over many years that was involved in making atomic power into a weapon.

Again, there's too much here: it's not one story, and Ottaviani wasn't ruthless enough to cull it down to a single story that he could tell in one book. Oppenheimer, credited first in the subtitle, doesn't show up for the first time until the book is half over.

The art is similarly varied, from a variety of artists all doing interesting work but not looking like they're doing consecutive pages in the same book: Janine Johnston, Steve Lieber, Vince Locke, and Jeff Parker all drawn substantial sections, with Bernie Mirault providing interstitial material, Jeffrey Jones a cover, and Chris Kemple a few pages in one section.

I'm not exactly complaining that Fallout is too long: it's less than 250 pages. The problem is that there's too much crammed on too many of those pages -- those long memos reprinted in full here, when they don't need to be. And that it tries to do too much and loses focus because of that. Fallout isn't quite a really good comics history of the Manhattan Project, but it does contain pieces of about three different really good comics histories of the Manhattan Project. For readers who want a deep dive, or are impressed by ambition, that could be enough.

Book-A-Day 2018 #259: Soonish by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Pop-science is all about dreams -- how everything is going to be wonderful and perfect once we have flying cars, or beamed power, or can start mining He3 on the Moon. Some of the dreams may be nightmares, about how those slavering Reds are far ahead of us technologically and are going to murder us all while we sleep, but they're mostly positive.

The future is supposed to be better than the past, after all.

And so pop-science will never die out, as long as there's still optimism about the future and still scientists doing weird things that might turn into consumer goods someday.

What I have for you today is a big fat slab of fairly-new pop-science optimism. Soonish examines almost a dozen things that might happen, sometime in the next generation, that, as the subtitle puts it, could "improve and/or ruin everything." It's from working scientist Dr. Kelly Weinersmith and her husband, web cartoonist Zach. (Who provides at least the comics panels interspersed throughout, probably much of the humor, and maybe more than that.)

I recently grumbled about "monkeys in cans" while writing about a SFnal graphic novel -- this was the other reason for that grumble. The Weinersmiths' very first chapter is "Cheap Access to Space," and I'm afraid they mean making it easy for gravity-requiring, easily-damaged-by-radiation humans to get into space. This mostly for the usual Grand Destiny of Man! reasons, and ignoring that there are some useful things you can mine or manufacture or do in space, but vanishingly few that require monkeys to do them.

That, I'm afraid, sets the tone for the rest of Soonish: it's all very wide-eyed about things that quite likely would be more-or-less horrible if and when they actually happen (programmable matter! molecular production of engineered molecules! brain-computer interfaces!) Oh, sure, there are potentially good uses for everything they discuss in this book -- letting random people create any molecules they want, even anthrax and Ebola, would be fun for a little while -- but the dangers, which they cover briefly in a quick note at the end of each chapter, are vastly worse and much more likely.

This is inevitable, of course, in any nonfiction book about cutting-edge science: the only people who really know it well (and so will talk at length to book writers) are the people doing the research, and they're always convinced that what they're doing is worthwhile and meaningful. (Like all of us.) Unless a writer happens to luck into a field with several competing options, leading to scientists who all gleefully backstab each other to promote their own approaches, it's all pretty collegial and utopian.

A writer would have to deliberately seek out negative sources for each positive source, and who wants to spend so much time being that much of a downer? Besides, outside of politics, happy always sells better than horrible.

If you don't mind a heaping helping of Pollyanna in your futurism, Soonish is entertaining and even enlightening: the Weinersmiths got a lot of people doing interesting stuff (which may or may not pan out) to talk to them, and they're pretty good at explaining it all in layman's terms. But there is a hell of a lot more "ruin" in any of these ideas than the Weinersmiths are going to tell you about.

Book-A-Day 2018 #203: The Cartoon Guide to Physics by Larry Gonick and Art Huffman

If you had asked me "is physics more interesting than history?," I'd probably have to think about it. Both are fascinating in their own ways, full of convoluted intricate stuff that's fun to learn about or think through. It wouldn't be obvious at all.

So when I saw that Larry Gonick, author of multiple volumes of The Cartoon History of the Universe (and its follow-up, ...of the Modern World) had a book called The Cartoon Guide to Physics, created with physics teacher Art Huffman, I thought that was a book for me.

(And then it sat on my shelf for at least a decade, because that's what always happens.)

I finally read it recently, and it reminded me of something I learned back when I worked in publishing: a truism that I wanted not to be true but, eventually, accepted that definitely was.

The truism is this: Every equation in a book reduces its potential audience by half.

The Cartoon Guide to Physics has eight equations in the first chapter alone.

So this is a book primarily for people seriously interested in learning physics -- not learning about physics, or science in general, or general knowledge. It's for people who want to start with F=ma, understand what that means, and go on from there. My guess is that it's primarily used on the highschool level, and I could see it being a lot of fun for students who are learning this stuff anyway -- it's definitely more interesting and dynamic than a textbook.

But it's much less interesting and dynamic than, say, a random graphic novel, which is what it might be shelved next to. So if you pick up a Gonick Cartoon Guide book, take a look inside it -- they can vary a lot.

This one is divided into two large sections -- the first covers Mechanics, with the laws of motion, starting with speed and acceleration and moving on to cover orbits, momentum, gravity, inertia, collisions, and rotation (and several dozen equations). The second half of the book is Electricity and Magnetism, which has slightly fewer equations but just as many numbers and technical details.

I read this book casually, which really isn't the point. You should read each page carefully, think through the equations and implications, and only move on once it all makes sense to you. (I'm going to pretend that I already knew all of this stuff, and that's why I read it straight through. Yeah. That's the ticket.)

Gonick draws this is in a very loose, expressive style, and his main characters this time are a young woman (who is unnamed as far as I could see) and a Gonick-esque mustachioed man called Ringo. Like his other books, it's not really comics -- there are drawings on the page, but there's also a lot of words, mostly arranged in block around them, and the drawings only rarely form a sequence of action. But it's a first cousin of comics, and could be of interest to comics people for that reason. But the primary audience, again, is people trying to seriously learn physics, either as part of a regular course of study or just for themselves.

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? by Brian Fies

Building and sustaining a career as a graphic novelist is even harder than the equivalent for a prose writer: comics require at least twice as much work per page (writing and drawing -- sometimes inking and coloring and lettering, too) for something that's read in a fifth of the time. And that turns making comics, especially mid-list comics, into a time-sink which has serious trouble delivering monetarily on a level with the effort required. And yet people keep trying, like any artform: there are always people with stories to tell and images to share, and some of them manage to turn that into a career along the way. (Others fail entirely, or do a couple of stories and then move on to something else.)

Brian Fies is an interesting case along that continuum. His first major graphic story, Mom's Cancer, was a memoir comic that originally appeared in installments online, about ten years ago. That attracted attention, and got reprinted as a book, and the book apparently did well. His follow-up, Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, came four years later -- quite fast for a two-hundred page book written and drawn all by one person -- and was more thematically and conceptually inventive, a switch to mostly fiction, but eventually, it seems, was not quite as successful as his first book.

(This is really common: the disappointing second book/record/gallery show is a cliche across many media. Sometimes the disappointment is commercial, sometimes critical -- and sometimes it doesn't exist at all, which then is the surprising story in that case.)

Fies hasn't yet put out a third book in the six years since Tomorrow. (Though, again, remember that comics take time to make -- time to work up the idea, time to write, time to draw, and then all of the usual publishing stuff. And that often has to happen in between or on top of having a regular job.) And so outside observers like me wonder if Tomorrow was a disappointment to its publisher -- though an outside observer can never figure that out, since it depends entirely on costs and payments and expectations.

I'm not the best reader for Tomorrow, temperamentally: it's a thoughtful, careful fictionalization of the "why don't we have jetpacks?" line of complaint, and I've long since gotten sick of that from hearing it in SF circles for around thirty years. [1] This particular incarnation of that argument starts with the New York World's Fair of 1939, possibly the very height of technological optimism, and mildly asks why the dreams embodied in that fair never came true.

(How many dreams ever come true? But we're not supposed to ask such questions.)

Tomorrow focuses on a father and his son -- Pop and Buddy, as Everyman and Everyboy as Fies can make them -- on a visit to the fair, where they're thrilled and inspired by the wonders they see there. Fies clearly means these two to be iconic rather than real people, but, to my mind, that's ignoring the more important questions: I found myself wondering about the rest of their family, about what Mom or Big Sis would make of these particular technological wonders, and if they would be as impressive to them. (Or what Grandpa, who already went from horse-and-buggy to airplanes and ocean liners, would say. Pop does have a speech along those lines, but it's all in the service of Progress Always Thrusting Forward.)

After the Fair, Tomorrow presents a series of snapshot chapters in the middle of each of the next four decades -- 1945 through 1975 -- in which Pop and Buddy appear at the same ages as they were in 1939. (And there are still no other members of their family: no mother or hint of what happened to her, no other siblings, no extended family -- just two men, older and younger, and their technologically-mediated father-son bond.) So they witness V-E day, build a fallout shelter in the basement, watch a Gemini lift off from Cape Canaveral, and finally the Apollo-Soyuz separation -- almost all specifically space-exploration moments, like yet another sour Stephen Baxter story about how the author didn't get to visit Moon Base Alpha like he was supposed to.

And there's a lot of narration along the way, as "Buddy" tells the reader all of the space-related history in each ten-year span -- all still very much like those whiny "I was promised a house on Mars!" stories from SF magazines of 10-15 years ago. Again, I have very little patience for that viewpoint: I've heard it too many times, and I never bought into it myself. The Space Race is a thing that happened for geopolitical reasons, not scientific or exploration reasons, and it ended when those real reasons were no longer as powerful. There was no aim of history, no majestic purpose to spread monkeys in tin cans throughout the universe. And Tomorrow has a coda at the end -- with Pop and Buddy finally broken free from their static ages -- that somewhat addresses that, talking about the actual technological changes in the years since 1975. But it's also unabashedly still in the tank for the "man must conquer the universe with big phallic rockets!" idea, as if the last forty years was just a pause in the Inevitable Thrust of Man.

Tomorrow is an attractive, very well-presented version of an argument and a viewpoint that I rejected long ago. Other readers may be less negative towards the agitprop and thus be able to enjoy the book itself more than I did -- I've just seen this very same kind of story too many times before, by too many writers around Fies's age (fifty-ish, just old enough to be kids during the Apollo years and thus indoctrinated to expect they would go to space some day) to believe in it. And I'm young enough -- I don't get to say that very often, these days, so I'll take any chance I can get -- not to be part of that cohort; Apollo was dead by the time I was old enough to care.

If you love space, and the promise of ever-better transportation, and the dreams of the Space Age, you really will enjoy Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? In fact, if you're just not nearly as negative about those things as I am, you'll probably like it quite a lot.


[1] Short version of my comeback: geometric growth, in anything humans do, always flattens out. It never hits the asymptote, or comes close. We know this in general, but we keep forgetting it for specific cases. So the Transportation Singularity didn't happen: we didn't get ubiquitous flying cars or jet-packs, we can't go to Mars for a vacation, and FTL is still a pipe dream. Similarly, the Information Singularity won't happen either, for similar reasons. Any prediction that contains "and then it goes on just like this for a long time" is bullshit.

In Which I Pose as a Physics Teacher

I have no idea why I thought I was qualified to offer this particular explanation about dark matter in a Straight Dope Message Board thread from 2000, and I'm not at all sure today if I got it right at all. And I'd triply not sure why I should bother to resurrect it now. But it's a long post, and I certainly seemed to know what I was talking about, so let's hope I was closer to right than wrong about the state of cosmological knowledge eleven years ago:

Since no one else has jumped in yet, let me start off.

First, the term generally used is "dark matter" (which you probably slightly misremembered), though sometimes you may hear references to "missing matter."

Now, on to my wildly simplified explanation: Why is this matter "missing?" Well, we (meaning cosmologists and physicists, not me personally) have a pretty good idea of the age of the universe, from evidence like the cosmic background radiation and the observed motions of distant galaxies. From these and other data, scientists have been able to determine roughly how much mass the universe must have. (Because we can observe the effects of gravity, and know how gravity operates, we can deduce how much mass there is.)

For example, the Milky Way (our favorite galaxy) can be seen to contain a whole lotta stars (400 billion, roughly, IIRC). Judging from the evidence of our solar system, in which the sun is by far the greatest concentration of mass (everything else is trivial compared to the sun), we can make a rough estimate of the amount of matter in the galaxy. That calculated amount is lower than the amount of matter the Milky Way needs to have to revolve and stay together in the way that we've observed it to do by a factor of ten. In other words, the matter we know if there is only 10% of the matter needed to make the system operate in the way we know it is operating. Whether or not the missing mass is composed of the same elementary particles as the matter we're familiar with (quarks up through protons and their friends to atoms) is not quite clear.

So, where is that mass? There are several theories.

MACHOs are MAssive Compact Halo Objects -- dark, extremely massive objects in space. These would most likely be neutron stars and/or black holes. One problem with this theory is that if you chuck that much matter into what's effectively a single point, the gravitational effects would be very obvious -- it wouldn't really be "missing."

WIMPs are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles -- theorized elementary particles that have great mass but only interact with "regular" matter rarely and weakly. The problem with this theory is that particles that interact weakly have so far without exception been massless or nearly so; in fact, many scientists believe that it's physically impossible for a particle to be both massive and weakly interacting.

Then there are the more exotic theories (which I think are actually gaining in popularity at the moment), such as that the matter is a function of space itself. I don't pretend to understand this one, but it seems to say that "empty" space itself has a measurable mass.

If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend you pick up a recent book called Quintessence by Lawrence Krauss. It's not easy reading, but it's a serious look at the missing matter problem from one of the major theorists of the day.

Quote of the Week: Strike Briskly Before Using

I seem to have neglected to post today -- even to have a "Quote of the Week." So here's a meatier bit than usual, from a book I just finished yesterday, about the amazing properties of homeopathic cures:

"How does a water molecule know to forget every other molecule it's seen before? How does it know to treat my bruise with its memory of arnica, rather than a memory of Isaac Asimov's feces? I wrote this in the newspaper once, and a homeopath complained to the Press Complaints Commission. It's not about the dilution, he said, it's the succussion. You have to bang the flask of water briskly ten times on a leather and horsehair surface, and that's what makes the water remember a molecule. Because I did not mention this, he explained, I had deliberately made homeopaths sound stupid."
 - Ben Goldacre, Bad Science, pp. 37-38

Your Science Fact of the Day!

Courtesy of Nick Mamatas's review of G.I. Joe: I Can't Be Bothered To Look Up the Real Subtitle, this explanation of how objects behave in summer movies these days:

[I]t turns out ice only floats when you're not very very angry at the people riding in little submarines under it. Once you're sufficiently annoyed it falls right down on top of 'em.

And now you know.

Picking Up Girls -- a Controlled Experiment

Two British guys recently realized that their success (and the success of men like them) in attracting women was directly related to whether they had a puppy with them at the time. So, clearly, women respond to men with puppies, but they wanted more data -- they wanted to find out which breeds women responded best to.

So, with the aid of a phone that automatically takes a picture when it detects a smile, they devised an experiment to test the "puppy pulling power" of ten different popular breeds in the UK.

I'm sure there's something deeply dubious, sexist, and otherwise horrible about this, and the various Humorless Forces of the Internet will soon put their boot in -- but it's also a wonderful example of using geeky advantages to counterweight geeky disadvantages, and I have to salute that.

(I also note that there's a distinctive posture of the young women as they lean over to pet the dog -- I'm uncertain if capturing that was part of the point, or a serendipitous bonus. One excellent example is below.)

[via Geekologie]

What Nature Abhors

This doesn't seem to be a meme yet, but I picked it up from SF Signal, and it might well turn into one:


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