“What does the gentleman think I will do with his extra baht?’ she asks. “Buy a pretty piece of jewelry? Take myself to dinner? I am property, yes? I am Raleigh’s.” She tosses the money at his feet. “It makes no difference if I am rich or poor. I am owned.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (MAY 14, 2010)

Unlike much of the world, the Thai Kingdom had avoided inundation by the rising oceans. It had avoided pandemic decimation of crops and population. It had kept the global agri-corporations from accessing and either exploiting or destroying its vast and precious seed banks. It had taken drastic, isolationist steps to preserve itself while most of the rest of the world faltered into massive contraction and potential extinction.

The white shirts of the Environment Ministry enforced the official policy of the Child Queen’s regime, burning fields and villages if genetic blight or plague struck, conducting customs inspections of the expensive goods imported on dirigibles and confiscating and destroying even items supposedly protected by large bribes. And, “mulching” any windups they discovered.

Windups — also called New People — were bio-mechanically engineered creatures from Japan that could pass for human beings except that their everyday movements were jerky — reminding natural people of windup toys. Emiko was one of these windups; she had been imported to Bangkok and was, by constitution, submissive: she had been designed to obey, submit, and please. Her current “master” was neither Japanese nor Thai; he was Raleigh, a Westerner whose “club” was bar, opium den, and bordello among other things. Emiko, who in severely underpopulated Japan would have been valued and accepted, was basically a slave and “genetic trash” here.

Emiko caught the eye of Anderson Lake, a representative of AgriGen, a so-called “calorie company,” i.e., one of the multinationals that had a stranglehold on genetically modified grains and other foodstuffs which were being sold at exorbitant prices to other starving nations. He ostensibly ran the SpringLife factory that produced next-generation kink springs which were commonly used to power items that had formerly run on oil. Lake’s factory employed not only Thais and “yellow card” Chinese refugees but also, on the dangerous manufacturing floor, towering elephantine megodonts with four tusks that sometimes rampaged. Lake’s factory was more of a sham than a real enterprise, however. His true preoccupation was trying to ferret out the top secret storage sites of the Thai seed banks and to do whatever he could to shift high officials away from isolationism and toward free trade. Lake hoped Emiko could become a valuable informant, but he also found himself vulnerable to her trademark silky skin and sexual charms, complicating both of their existences.

Meanwhile, Jaidee, the Tiger of the white shirts, a fervent believer in guarding his country’s borders and long-term survival, misjudged the changing political winds in the Kingdom. Accused by his superiors of overstepping his authority, he was made a scapegoat by those aligning for a crucial showdown regarding the country’s future. The immense pressure on the Kingdom to open itself to “free trade” and to “share” its seed bank with the world might crush Jaidee, not to mention Hock Seng, a scheming yellow card Chinese employee of Anderson Lake’s, and…Emiko.

Emiko had heard rumors of a place to the north where other New People had a community of their own, and she wanted to escape Bangkok and find her own kind. But as the city became a powder keg waiting to be lit, she got more, not less, entangled with Lake, Raleigh, a genetic scientist, and other mercenary or exploitative examples of humanity. She also discovered hidden strengths (and aggressions) within herself she’d never guessed at before. Would Emiko affect the entire course of history in the Thai Kingdom? Or would that be left to others, and would she end up as a bystander, a witness to ecological disaster?

The Windup Girl vividly depicts a dystopian future ushered in by radical climate change and the reckless depletion of our natural resources as well as mismanagement and “generipping” of our crops and other food sources. Paolo Bacigalupi invents a scenario that one hopes is not too prescient but which compellingly grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. This, Bacigalupi’s first novel (he had previously written award-winning short stories), creates characters and plot with assurance that builds immediate and continued reader confidence in the integrity of the unfolding story. His characters are blemished, greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. They often act “badly” but as one might expect in their unforgiving environment. The world in which he enfolds them leaks disease and death but continues to display irrepressible human ingenuity. Bacigalupi’s future is one where science’s interference with nature has led Mankind to the brink. Emiko and the other windups represent one tangent of scientific development that might outlive human beings, and although the idea of articifial “life” surviving us isn’t a new idea, Bacigalupi’s version teams with innovative perspectives about her construction and status. Although Emiko is reasonably accused of having no soul. the author convinces the reader that she possesses an inner life and has a survival instinct at least as insistent as that of any natural person.

This novel is a 2010 Hugo Award nominee — along with five others. Looking at the list through my own bias for science fiction that deals with space travel and alien civilizations in other star systems, I noticed a trend this year with a bit of a jaundiced eye: most of the nominees were about a dystopian future/fantasy earth. I’d hoped for more subject matter breadth. But when I read the publisher’s summary of The Windup Girl, it wasn’t to be passed up. Whether it actually wins the Hugo or not, this novel is visionary, gritty, cautionary and highly intelligent. It definitely ranks in the top echelon of science fiction. Bacigalupi is a great and already polished talent, and I expect many more terrific (but maybe not quite so terrifying) tales from him.

Editor’s note:  The Windup Girl has won the Nebula Award and tied for the Hugo Award. It has also been chosen as Time Magazine’s book of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 233 readers
PUBLISHER:	Night Shade Books (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paolo Bacigalupi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another 2010 Hugo and Nebula Award Nominee: The City and the City by China Mieville And another 2010 Hugo Nominee: WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Bibliography:

• Pump Six and Other Stories (2008)
• The Windup Girl (2009)
• Ship Breakers (2010)
• The Alchemists (2011)
• The Drowned (May 2012)

“How do trite things get to be trite. Why is the truth usually not just un-but anti-interesting?”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns (MAY 12, 2010)

I’ve thought a great deal about this review, since beginning the book, in fact. (I wonder if even the word “review” is the right one. A review implies more than I think I can deliver.) This is no ordinary book and writing about it is not a normal experience. This book is big and thick and juicy and full of complexities, ripe with humor and allusion, digressions and insights. For this reader, it is the book of a dream. I mean that in two ways. First, if one were to conjure up in a dream-state, a book perfect in balance of challenge and entertainment (a loaded word, entertainment, applied to this book, as I will demonstrate in a bit), pleasure and frustration, this is the book. An exact yin yang (reading) experience. (I say reading parenthetically because this book and the universe it describes turns on the reader such that the reader inhabits it, not so much reads it.) And second, if one wants to dream of the perfect experience one can dream with a book, this is it, at least for this reader. That is, in a search for the book to inhabit, this reader dreams of challenge, humor, weight and reach. Here it is, and so very much more. So, all that noted and affirmed. Onward we somehow must march.

Here are a few particulars you might want to know. Including footnotes (essential to the book and the reading thereof) Infinite Jest has 1079 pages and weighs almost 3 pounds in the paperback edition. There is no fluff, big spaces, wide margins, pictures or spaces. The font is small and the font for the 388 footnotes smaller still. David Foster Wallace wrote it when he was thirty-three. Thirteen years later he took his own life. There is no “essence” of the book, no Platonic IJ-ness. That is to say, it is like spilling mercury onto a tile floor. The book spreads out and rolls in a million self-contained little drops, all born from the same container, each perfectly formed and independent, yet containing part of the whole. But that is silly talk. And I should be serious. I’m trying to give you a sense, and not be too breathless about it. (But I am, I confess, rather breathless at even finishing the thing, not to mention, I think, “getting it” just ever so little bit.)

This was my second go at IJ. I took a swing at the book about a year ago and walked away from it. I am in a lot of company in this regard. (Famously, Lisa Schwarzbaum was assigned to review it for Entertainment Weekly and didn’t, or couldn’t. Regardless, she did not review it, but instead wrote about not reviewing it, even wondering if it was readable.) With the help and insight of a web resource, Infinite Summer, I outlined a sensible reading schedule of only ten pages a day. The web site, Infinite Summer, a sort of internet IJ book club, is filled with comments and information for the reader. The site got me off on the right foot, however, ultimately, I found it–the site–confusing and too littered with spoilers. The value I gleaned, though, was the pace, the ten pages a day, minimum, that and the net-peer ground postings.

Every reader is different, and I think I can be a pretty solid guy with a book in my hands, able to get through most anything, but not so with this book. With this book, I had to be careful. It required a structure and a commitment, gaming that the effort would be worthwhile. I needed a pace, which I could maintain. And I needed insight. Early on, in that regard, I picked up a reader’s companion, specifically, A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest by Robert Bell and William Dowling. There are lots of resources to assist the serious IJ reader. Mainly, I was seeking a source that would help me keep the characters straight, provide a dictionary of acronyms (there are about 450 sort-of-recognized slash known and totally-fabricated acronyms underlying the narration like a grid upon which a foundation is poured) and a plot outline. With Bell and Dowling at my side I set sail upon the deep waters of Infinite Jest. (I should mention too, Bell and Dowling were much more important at the beginning of the effort. As the themes developed, the characters fleshed out and the style absorbed, their guide became an infrequent resource.)

There are three main story lines to IJ. Each offers mini theme-within-the-theme story lines, and occasionally they crisscross, making things a bit more than interesting. The main story lines involve a tortured tennis prodigy, Hal Incandenza; a former Demerol addict, Don Gately, who works at The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House; and a bunch of wheel-chair bound Canadian terrorists who are trying to get their hands on a movie reputed to be so entertaining it renders the viewer interested in nothing but viewing it. Eventually the viewer grows listless, loses all interest in eating, sleeping, in life then dies. This movie, incidentally, was made by Hal’s father, James Orin Incandenza (referred to by many monikers, including JOI–which some take as a nod to James JOIce.) James Orin Incandenza is dead as the book takes place, having committed suicide by jurry-rigging a microwave oven and inserting his head. The backdrop to the novel, North America, a few years hence, is a depressing place, toxic and so commercialized that even the years have been sponsored, or more properly, subsidized, as in “Subsidized Time.” This is why sections of the book take place in the “Year of the Whopper” or the “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad.” There are nine Subsidized Times, plus a smattering of BS (Before Subsidization) time events. The novel opens during the “Year of Glad” (as in bag) and ends, completing a loop, the same year.

It is worth noting too, that the movie referred to above, called the “entertainment,” carries a logical argument to its extreme. That is, a culture so intent on being entertained, that if it gorges itself it will perish–at least its soul perishes. The movie, by the way, is produced by Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited, in one of many nods to Shakespeare (Prince Hamlet: “Alas, poor Yorick…a fellow of infinite jest…”). Here is this reader’s suggestion: Brush up on your Hamlet.

I’ve wondered quite a lot about the lasting nature of this book–or lack thereof. David Eggers says this in his introductory essay: “…this is his extraordinary, and irregular, and not-normal achievement, a thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us–how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.” I hope that is true. But I’m not so sure. I’m not sure Wallace would agree either. In a letter to his friend Jonathan Franzen he wrote of the book, “I don’t think it’s very good–some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.” Time magazine called it one of the most important books of the last one hundred years. I don’t argue with that. There are lots of things, however, that are important but are ignored, or worse, forgotten.

When something of consequence is accomplished one hopes–one who notices, that is–that something will come of it. But one of the themes present in this book is the progression of culture to a cliff and documenting the falling off of that cliff by said culture. It is part of the humor found here. I mean, who doesn’t laugh at a well choreographed pratfall? That doesn’t mean it will last, the book, that is. Ultimately, it is a question that cannot be answered from this distance, only guessed at. I guess it is less than fifty percent. I don’t say that because I don’t believe in the text, I do. I doubt we have the capacity to embrace something like this and bless it with immortality (as if we had such a capacity, go figure), even if it were worthy. Look at our culture so acutely defined in this book.

(I am talking here about the big arena. There is, in this big arena, present tonight, Beethoven and Bach, Picasso and Matisse (you get the idea), Hemingway and Joyce, Proust and Tolstoy. Yes, yes, I know I am missing a lot. But the room is dark. Oh, there’s Homer and back there, at the bar, I think I see Sibelius. Yes, that’s him, having a tottie with Bill Shakespeare. Those two, they’re a hoot. At the ticket gate are any number of others elbowing one another to get in. Ginny Woolf and Nabokov and, geezz, so many. But if you take a moment and look across the street you’ll see, standing there under the street light Mr. David Foster Wallace, wearing his bandana and taking notes. He is very deliberate that way. I have him in my sights and it seems he is making his way through the crowd. But who knows? It’s a rowdy bunch, that’s for sure. Not sure if he’ll make his way in…)

Jocularity aside, this is an important work. Seriously important and worthy. Maybe even lasting. That should entice one enough. Take a swing at it, but don’t force it. It took a few hundred pages to find a rhythm and then it was like a glider finding an updraft. You soar and the view below you is both frightening and exhilarating. Regardless, it’s a hell of a experience.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 575 readers
PUBLISHER:	Back Bay Books; 10 Anv edition (November 13, 2006)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	The Unoffical David Foster Wallace fan site Wikipedia page on David Foster Wallace
EXTRAS:	Excerpt The Infinite Summer fan site DFW’s Personal Files
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Pale King This is Water Consider the Lobster

Bibliography:

• The Broom and the System (1987)
• Girl with Curious Hair (1989)
• Infinite Jest: A Novel (1996)
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997)
• Oblivion (2004)
• The Pale King (2011)

Essays:

• Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999)
• Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003)
• Consider the Lobster (2005)
• This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (2009)
• Both Flesh and Not: Essays (November 2012)

Related:

• David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide by Stephen Burn (2003)

“Ever since her family had died in such sad ways, ever since she herself had disappeared from official view, Toby had tried not to think about her earlier life. She’s covered it in ice, she’d frozen it. Now she longed desperately to be back there in the past – even the bad parts, even the grief – because her present life was torture. She tried to picture her two faraway, long ago parents, watching over her like guardian spirits, but she saw only mist.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (DEC 2, 2009)

In The Year of the Flood, two women, separately isolated, watch as a gene-engineered plague wipes out humanity in a stand-alone novel set in the same dystopian world Atwood first created in 2003’s Oryx and Crake.

Both women – Ren and Toby – are former members of God’s Garderners, a vegan, pacifist eco-cult who long predicted the “waterless flood” which destroys humanity.

Ren came to God’s Gardeners as a child, brought by her pouty, high-maintenance mother, Lucerne. Lucerne’s abandonment of her gated suburb and bland husband for a life of Saints’ days (St. Euell Gibbons, St. Farley Mowat of the Wolves) sack-dresses and soyberries, never quite convinces despite the manly, taciturn hunkiness of Zeb, a lover with a past.

Toby came as an adult, rescued from the doom of sex-slavery to her boss at SecretBurgers (ingredients rumored but never revealed!). Bright, middle class Toby’s future had crumbled with her mother’s mysterious illness, mounting bills, and her father’s ruin and subsequent death. Inheritor of debt, Toby could only shed her identity and join the other dropouts and rejects at the bottom whose non-official lives are brutal, vicious and brief.

The story shifts back and forth in time from its vantage point of the plague year. Toby, holed up at a fancy spa, calls on her survival skills – from journeying to her father’s grave to recover an outlawed rifle, to protecting her garden from gene-enhanced pigs. Ren, locked in the quarantine wing of a high-end sex club, watches her coworkers die of violence and plague and waits for rescue while her food dwindles.

Both women pass the time remembering the past, particularly their days with God’s Gardeners – an oasis of gentleness in a world shaped by cynicism, greed and violence, not that the Gardeners simply sit by, stockpiling food, encouraging self-sufficiency and waiting for apocalypse.

Atwood creates a character-driven page-turner replete with details that make her entirely privatized world come to life. Ren in her drab clothes, envying the slum kids their bright trinkets and colorful fashions, the Painball prison where the last left standing are released back onto the streets, the Mo’Hair sheep, the Liobams (lion and lamb), the eyecolor injections that go painfully awry.

Fans of Oryx and Crake will love this; those who haven’t read the earlier book will want to (there’s no reason to read them in order). Many writers conjure up prophetic dystopian visions but few do it with Atwood’s humor, imagination and brilliance.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 223 readers
PUBLISHER:	Nan A. Talese; First Edition (September 22, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	The Year of the Flood
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Margaret AtwoodMargaret Atwood Society
EXTRAS:	Official website for The Year of the FloodReading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Oryx and Crake and our short reviews of The Robber Bride Lady Oracle The Handmade’s Tale

Bibliography:

• Double Persephone (1961)
• The Circle Game: Poems (1964)
• Kaleidosscopes (1965)
• Expeditions (1966)
• Speeches for Doctor Frankenstein (1966)
• The Animals in that Country (1968)
• The Edible Woman (1969)
• The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)
• Power Politics: Poems (1971)
• Surfacing (1972)
• Lady Oracle (1976)
• Dancing Girls: And Other Stories (1977)
• Life Before Man (1979)
• Bodily Harm (1982)
• Encounters with the Element Man (1982)
• Bluebeard’s Egg and Other Stories (1983)
• Interlunar (1984)
• The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
• Cat’s Eye (1988)
• Wilderness Tips (1991)
• Good Bones and Simple Murders (1992)
• The Robber Bride (1993)
• Morning in a Burned House (1995)
• Alias Grace (1996)
• The Blind Assassin (September 2000) /
• Journals of Susanna Moodie
• Penelopiad: the Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005)
• The Tent (2006)
• Moral Disorder and Other Stories (2006)

MaddAddam Trilogy:

• Oryx and Crake (2003)
• The Year of the Flood (2009)
• MaddAddam (September 2013)

Other:

• Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002)
• The Journals of Susanna Moodie (2004)
• Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2007)
• The Door : Poems (2007)

About:

• The Fiction of Margaret Atwood by Gina Wisker (2009)
• Engendering Fiction : The Works of Margaret Atwood by Riengard M. Nischick (2009)

E-Book Study Guide:

• Study Guide for SURFACING (2002)
• Study Guide for THE EDIBLE WOMAN (2002)
• Study Guide for THE HANDMAID’S TALE (2002)
• Study Guide for CAT’S EYE (2002)

Movies from books:

• The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)

(back to top)

Book Marks:

• Official web site for Margaret Atwood
• The Margaret Atwood Society
• Atwood’s speech on “Spotty-Handed Vilainesses” (very funny!)
• Notes on Margaret Atwood
• Reading Guide for The Edible Woman
• Reading Guide for Surfacing
• Reading Guide for Lady Oracle
• Reading Guide for Life Before Man
• MostlyFiction.com‘s short review of The Handmaid’s Tale
• Salon Magazine interview re: Alias Grace
• The New York Times First Chapter and Review of The Blind Assassin
• SF Gate review of The Blind Assassin
• MostlyFiction.com‘s review of Oryx and Crake
• MostlyFiction.com review of The Year of the Flood

“The eighteen young scientists featured here are investigating a variety of questions that will have long-term and fundamental effects on the way we live — and even on how we see ourselves and our place in the universe. Their ideas will eventually help to redefine who and what we are.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (AUG 28, 2009)

Max Brockman is a literary agent for such prominent scientists/authors as Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker. In this anthology, What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, the contributors have, for the most part, yet to establish themselves in the public consciousness; many of them earned their Ph.Ds within the last ten years, and the earliest doctorate among them dates to 1993. But within their fields, they are doing groundbreaking research and writing books that could ultimately rival those of Pinker, Dawkins and Diamond.

Of the eighteen essayists, David M Eagleman registered most with me because he recently authored SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, proving himself able to agilely apply his neuroscience background to wonderfully fanciful fables. In What’s Next? Eagleman contributes “Brain Time,” an apparent run-up to his forthcoming 2010 book, Plasticity: How the Brain Reconfigures Itself. On Eagleman’s website, a section entitled “Time Perception” links to “Time and the Brain (or What’s happening in the Eagleman lab).”  This online article covers some of the same ground as “Brain Time” but the What’s Next? chapter utilizes a different hook to begin: Kublai Khan.

Eagleman explains that the Mongolian empire “had grown so vast” that the messengers he sent out to the far reaches for status reports returned at different times. Eagleman compares: “I imagine that the Great Khan was constantly forced to solve the same problem a human brain has to solve: what event in the empire occurred in which order?” By conducting some experiments, Eagleman and his team are trying to tease apart how our brains synchronize outside signals and present a smoother progression of time than “actually” exists. He notes: “It may be that a unified polysensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest overall information.” He envisions far-reaching applications for continued study, suggesting that “the more distant future of time research may change our view of other fields, such as physics….[A]s we begin to understand time as a construction of the brain, as subject to illusion…we may eventually be able to remove our perceptual biases from the equation.”

Quite a few of the contributions in What’s Next? deal with biological or psychological aspects of human sentience. For instance, Joshua D. Greene, a cognitive neuroscientist, writes about “Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind,” a discussion of why people, when confronted with moral dilemmas requiring life and death decisions, tend to choose as they do. Why Is it “easier” for experiment subjects to agree that five people in the path of an oncoming train should be saved by diverting the train to another track where it will only kill one person, but balk when told pushing a single person nearby onto the tracks to stop the train is the way to save those five? Is it because the more personal act of pushing someone engages our emotions more? Are moral decisions then more likely to be based on emotion than rationality? These and similar dilemmas are being tested by Greene and his colleagues. He opines: “Perhaps by applying our capacity for complex cognition to the problems of modern life, we can transcend the limitations of our moral instincts.” More on that conclusion later.

Greene isn’t the only one of the eighteen young scientists whose enthusiasm for experimental progress potentially downplays or supercedes ethics. Nick Bostrom, a polymath currently the director of the Future of Humanity Institute, writes “How to Enhance Human Beings.” Although he acknowledges “that there is a grain of truth in the idea that nature has some wisdom,” he thinks “by systematically considering the limitations of the evolutionary process that created the human organism, we can identify promising possibilities for enhancing it….” For example, “genetic screening during in vitro fertilization could be used to guarantee heterozygosity, enabling us to reach the ideal optimum that eluded natural selection.” However he tempers that designer inclination by adding that if science were to reach the point where it were “[f]reed from most practical limitations, the task would then become to make wise use of our powers to self-modify. In other words, the challenge would shift from being primarily scientific to being primarily moral.”

Christian Keysers, again a neuroscientist, joins the conversation about ethics by sharing the results of some studies in “Mirror Neurons.” Experiments indicate that certain neurons in the brain trigger when watching another perform an action. One trial with monkeys showed that the “very same neuron that had responded when the monkey grasped a peanut also responded when the monkey simply saw someone else perform the same action.” But the empathy extends beyond actions. Mirror neurons allow us to “feel [others] actions, sensations, and emotions inside us, as if we were in their shoes. Others have become us.” Keysers continues that these “shared circuits create an ethical instinct” that binds us together and promotes moral and ethical behavior.

To return then to the idea that we could “transcend the limitations of our moral instincts” as a matter of experimental manipulation or as a result of scientific reductionism, such as aspiration could dehumanize us. Scientific inquiry and applications are already showing signs of outpacing our philosophical/rational abilities to assess them. Rushing forward without a constructive ethical and moral framework could well do more harm than good to humanity. The two should progress abreast. Our moral instincts, which are demonstrably (Keysers) a part of us, greatly define our humanity, and our goal should be to understand and clarify those instincts, not consider them limitations to transcend.

Despite the skewing toward neuroscience, What’s Next? does not neglect other branches such as physics and cosmology, earth science, and anthropology, as I will elaborate below. However, where are essays featuring chemistry, computer science, engineering and a few other disciplines that would have further broadened this anthology’s scope? One is left wondering whether this group of contributors is meant to be representative of where brilliant younger scientists are concentrating their talents. But perhaps we should not draw that conclusion. Perhaps another anthology is needed to corral the future of other branches of science?

Anyway, back to the contents of What’s Next?, Cosmologist Sean Carroll ponders “Our Place in the Unnatural Universe,” admitting the cosmos still haven’t yielded their secrets — either of origin or future. He is followed by physics professor Stephon H. S. Alexander who asks “Just What is Dark Energy?” Also known as the cosmological constant, dark energy “is the most bewildering substance known — the only ‘stuff’ that acts both on subatomic scales and across the largest distances in the cosmos.” As of yet, dark energy is theory, so any physicist or astronomer who empirically proves its existence will doubtless receive honors and fame.

Moving to geographic studies and global weather patterns, Laurence C. Smith explores the likelihood that human demographics may have to change drastically in this century in “Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?” And in “Extinction and the Evolution of Humankind,” Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist, examines the recurring question of how and why the Neanderthals became extinct with a view toward our own predicament as “our activities have been taxing Earth’s ecosystems and most probably shifting its climate.” The Neanderthals were not able to adjust and survive. She writes, “we must once more adjust our remarkably flexible behavior to meet the unprecedented challenge of climate change and a bio-diversity crisis approaching the scale of mass extinction.”

Gavin Schmidt, who writes the final essay, “Why Hasn’t Specialization Led to the Balkanization of Science?,” notes, “It has been suggested that the physicist, physician, and Egyptologist Thomas Young (1773-1829) was the last person to ‘know everything.” Certainly, our scientific knowledge has grown in so many directions that often one discipline (earth science, for instance) doesn’t know much about what a subdiscipline (paleoceanography) is doing. Yet, although it may take time, these “are human constructs, and they are simply no match for the forces of nature.” Sooner or later, the desire to know overcomes human barriers and information sharing takes place.

But what still lags behind even when scientific borders crumble is the mechanism by which we control science’s advancement. Ideally, the achievements of science will only enhance life — it quality, its length, its dignity. Science done with unwavering respect for life benefits us. However, science untethered from reasoned ethics becomes a potential danger. Science that does not properly assess the ramifications of brain complexity, in vitro manipulation, planetary climate tinkering, nuclear power, etc., can cause catastrophic consequences.These young scientists, dedicated to furthering the boundaries of science, need to recognize their responsibility to advance within the signposts of ethics and morals. Most of these eighteen contributors clearly understand that burden. A few ought perhaps to reassess.

What’s Next? offers, straight from the sources, an educational preview into certain areas of scientific study that is both valuable and eye-opening, especially for avid readers of popular science. But what is perhaps most important is learning about the personal values and perspectives of each of the contributors. In the choice of their areas of interest and how they pursue their studies, as well as how they express themselves, they reveal where science is headed in their hands. This is vital information since Brockman is, of course, correct: “Their ideas will eventually help to redefine who and what we are.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 5 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (May 26, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AMAZON PAGE:	What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Max Brockman
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More books like this: The Genomics Age by Gina Smith Tomorrow Now by Bruce Sterling

Bibliography:

• What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science (May 2009)