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A comic novel about the death of God

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F by Daniel Kehlmann reviewed for the Guardian

It cannot be an easy thing to write a comic novel about the death of God. Still, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann may just have pulled it off. “F” is the protagonist of a book within a book, the debut novel of Arthur Friedland, a rather disorganised buffoon who never had any success as a writer until an encounter with a hypnotist gave his life its chilly purpose: “This is an order, and you’re going to follow it because you want to follow it, and you want to because I’m ordering you, and I’m ordering you because you want me to give the order. Starting today, you’re going to make an effort. No matter what it costs. Repeat!”

My Name Is No One is so exuberantly nihilistic, its readers are throwing themselves off TV transmission towers. As Kehlmann says: “The sentences are well constructed, the narrative has a powerful flow, the reader would be enjoying the text were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked.”

If Kehlmann played this intertextual game to the hilt – if F itself were as unforgiving as Arthur’s novel – then we would be looking at a less important book, as well as a less enjoyable one: some Johnny-come-lately contribution to the French nouvelle vague. The spirit of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movement’s greatest exponent, illuminates the scene in which Arthur takes his granddaughter to an art museum to study a picture by her missing uncle: “She stepped even closer, and immediately everything dissolved. There were no more people any more, no more little flags, no anchor, no bent watch. There were just some tiny bright patches of colour above the main deck. The white of the naked canvas shone through in several places, and even the ship was a mere assemblage of lines and dots. Where had it all gone?”

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There are many such moments, they are all as beautifully judged as this one, and they are not the point. The point of F is not its humour (though Kehlmann, like Robbe-Grillet, can be very funny indeed), but its generosity. Arthur’s three sons, in their turn, make superhuman efforts to give their lives significance, and these efforts tangle and trip over each other to generate the comic business of the book. The eldest, Martin, a Rubik’s Cube expert, embraces the priesthood despite his lack of faith. Of Arthur’s two sons by his second marriage, Eric enters the glass-and-steel world of high finance to help control his fear of cramped spaces. His twin brother, Ivan, is a would-be painter turned art dealer, and author of Mediocrity As an Aesthetic Phenomenon.

“When I was young, vain, and lacking all experience,” he recalls, “I thought the art world was corrupt. Today I know that’s not true. The art world is full of lovable people, full of enthusiasts, full of longing and truth. It is art itself as a sacred principle that unfortunately doesn’t exist.”

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Ivan, like all the others, lives in a nihilistic universe, but he is not himself nihilistic. It worries him that the world cannot live up to his expectations and those of the people he admires. These people include his lover Heinrich Eulenboeck, an artist with a true calling but only mediocre ability. What kind of world is it that plays such a trick on a person? “How do you live with that, why do you keep on going?”

The answer seems to be love. In a godless world, love counts for a great deal. And failing love, ordinary human decency goes a long way. Since Kurt Vonnegut died, there has really been no one to tell us this; the reminder is welcome.

F is again translated by Carol Brown Janeway, but it is a better book than Kehlmann’s last, Fame, whose narrative gymnastics caused characters to lose or swap their identities, and even to topple into their own or other people’s fictions. Fame was knowing, driven by its own absurdity. F is about the world’s absurdity, and this makes a huge difference morally. The world is big, and ultimately unknowable, and life is short and memory pitifully limited.

In the absence of God, Kehlmann’s protagonists hold themselves to account, and they give themselves hell. Sometimes, they give each other hell. “Something terrible has happened and the people seem to be wanting to cover it up. If you were to look a little longer, hunt a little better for clues, you’d be able to figure it out, or at least you think so. But if you step back, the details disappear and all that remains is a colourful street scene: bright, cheerful, full of life.”

It is very hard to express how funny this all is. But laughter matters most in the dark.

“We don’t know why we did it”

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Two views of the US space programme reviewed for New Scientist, 2 July 2014

“WE HAVE no need of other worlds,” wrote Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer and satirist in 1961. “We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is.”

A few years later, as NASA’s advocates hunted for suitable justification for the US’s $24 billion effort to put a man on the moon, they began to invoke humanity’s “outward urge” – an inborn desire to leave our familiar surroundings and explore strange new worlds.

A hastily concocted migration instinct might explain tourism. But why astronauts visited the moon, described by the 1940s US columnist Milton Mayer as a “pulverised rubble… like Dresden in May or Hiroshima in August”, requires a whole other level of blarney.

In Marketing the Moon: The selling of the Apollo lunar program, released earlier this year, David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek curated that blarney in their illustrated account of how Apollo was sold to a public already paying a bloody price for the Vietnam war.

Historian Matthew Tribbe, on the other hand, looks in an almost diametrically opposite direction. His No Requiem for the Space Age sweeps aside the Apollo programme’s technocratic special pleading – and the subsequent nostalgia – to argue that Americans fell out of love with space exploration even before Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon in July 1969.

There is no doubt that national disillusionment with the space programme swelled during the 1970s, as counter-cultural movements sent the US on “the biggest introspective binge any society in history has undergone”. But digging beneath this familiar narrative, Tribbe also shows that opposition to Apollo was both long-standing and intellectually rigorous.

The Nobel laureate physicist Max Born called Apollo “a triumph of intellect, but a tragic failure of reason”. And novelist Norman Mailer considered it “the deepest of nihilistic acts – because we don’t know why we did it”.

Apollo was the US’s biggest, brashest entry in its heart-stoppingly exciting – and terrifying – political and technological competition with the Soviet Union. By the time Apollo 11 was launched, however, that race was already won, and only a fanatic (or a military-industrial complex) would have kept running.

There was a fairly concerted attempt to sell Apollo as science. But that never rang true, and anyway what we really seek in space, as the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke told the American Aeronautical Society in 1967, is “not knowledge, but wonder, beauty, romance, novelty – and above all, adventure”. Apollo was supposed to offer the world’s most technologically advanced nation a peacetime goal as challenging and inspiring as war.

But the intractability of the war in Vietnam put paid to John F. Kennedy’s fine words to Congress on 25 May 1961, about sending an American safely to the moon before the end of the decade. As the Washington Evening Star columnist Frank R. Getlein observed: “The reason you have a moral equivalent of war is so you don’t have to have war… For us Americans, unfortunately, the moral equivalent of war has turned out to be war.”

Tribbe argues that popular enthusiasm was doused as soon as people realised just who was going into space – not them, but the representatives of the very technocratic power structure that was wreaking havoc on Earth.

This, you could argue, was hardly NASA’s fault. So it is reassuring, among all this starkly revealed futility, to see Tribbe expressing proper respect and, indeed, real warmth for NASA and its astronauts. NASA had labelled them “super-normal”; with such a moniker, it was perhaps inevitable that they failed to capture hearts and minds as easily as everyone had assumed they would. While public uninterest is Tribbe’s theme, he does not lay the blame for it at NASA’s door.

Explorations rarely inspire contemporary stay-at-homes. For example, over a century elapsed between Columbus’s initial voyage and the first permanent English settlements. Lem was right. We don’t need alien places. We need an ever-expanding supply of human ones. The moon may yet provide them. This, at least, is the compelling and technically detailed argument of Arlin Crotts’s forthcoming book The New Moon: Water, exploration, and future habitation – a perfect speculative antidote for those who find Tribbe’s history disheartening.

Tribbe quotes an unnamed journalist who wrote, during the Vietnam war: “The moon is a dream for those who have no dreams.” This may sum up many of the problems people had with Apollo in the 1970s. But Tribbe is no pessimist, and history need not demoralise us. Times and technologies change, so do nations, and so, come to think of it, do dreams.

Arctic nightmares

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Russia's relentless quest for Arctic fuel treasure

Reading Paul Josephson’s The Conquest of the Russian Arctic for New Scientist, 25 June 2014

AT -15 °C, high-carbon steel cracks. At -30°C, pneumatic hoses split and cranes fail. At -40 °C, compressors stop working. Ball bearings shatter. Steel structures rupture on a massive scale.

Still Russia builds, and mines, and tries to settle its Arctic territories. President Vladimir Putin has revived the old Stalinist vision that saw slave labour assembling cities on beds of permafrost. This time around, in place of the inexhaustible human resources of the gulag, there are delays, cancellations and nervous foreign investors.

The Arctic contains 90 per cent of Russia’s recoverable hydrocarbons. Were the country to finally overcome its many and various technical challenges, after more than a century of trying, it would be vastly wealthy.

So the Arctic remains a burden Russia cannot bear to relinquish. This potentially great nation continues to saddle itself with the costs of transportation over great distances, of keeping warm, or just staying alive, in great cold.

Since the mid-1980s, Paul Josephson, a historian of science and technology, has charted the country’s heroic engineering projects. He has traced its gigantomanic ambitions back, more often than not, to Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. Launched in 1948, it aimed to divert the flow of major waterways, industrialise Siberia, and turn the infertile steppe into a breadbasket.

The consequences for the environment have been at best ambiguous, at worst catastrophic. Natural resources had no price in Soviet economics. Since they were not owned privately, they had no value. Development had no regard for waste or loss. Little has changed under the current system of state capitalism; the Arctic’s underfunded environmental projects are smothered under state plans for “modernisation”.

Josephson is a well-travelled, well-connected and impassioned analyst. But his call for Putin’s Russia “to move more slowly, to adopt measured policies… forego impatience for circumspection” is unlikely to be heeded.

After 40 years writing sober, academic accounts of the world’s most hubristic, atrocity-littered engineering projects, it may be time for Josephson to bare his teeth a little.

Life signs

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Image: @LydNicholas (swiped from her twitter feed)

Image: @LydNicholas (swiped from her twitter feed)

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and the editors of Synthetic Aesthetics pulled no punches when they launched their new book at a “Friday late” at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. A couple of audience members interrupted to bemoan the sheer abstractness of the enterprise. Why couldn’t the panel explain what synthetic biologists actually did? A rather unfair criticism of an event that scattered living biological materials across every floor of the museum. The task of explaining where beauty sits in the world of synthetic biology fell to Drew Endy, assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, California. Endy explained how, when synthetic biology began, its self-styled “engineers” treated living things as wayward and overcomplicated machines, in need of radical simplification. Now, researchers are learning to appreciate and harness biological complexity. “Ford’s original Model T motor car was simple, in engineering terms, but it was hell to operate. A Tesla is complicated but a pleasure to drive.” Standards of beauty are fuzzy, personal and intuitive. They inspire real conversations. So I imagine talking about beauty in design is useful for a discipline that’s constantly struggling with its own hype, never mind other people’s panic.

X at heart

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Reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation for the Guardian, 5 March 2014

When you were a child, did you ever repeat some random word until it went strange in your mouth? Do you recall it growing heavy, as if by repetition it was acquiring the power of a spell?

“The biologist” (we’re not told her name) has spent her life staring into puddles, into rock-pools, until “I had a sense that I knew nothing at all – about nature, about ecosystems.” Now she is staring into the kind, bland eyes of her husband. He is newly returned from fabled Area X, unharmed, intact and utterly scraped out.

Area X is an abandoned and apparently unspoilt stretch of US coastline, held under strict quarantine by a mysterious government agency called the Southern Reach.

Into this place come the biologist and her colleagues: a surveyor, a linguist, and a psychologist. They are all women. And that is all. Sensitive readers will already have begun to feel their fingers prised loose from the edge of the swimming pool, when it turns out these explorers are unable to divulge their names. “Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.”

In Annihilation, the first part of an imaginatively marketed and beautifully produced trilogy (the other parts are out in May and September), the novelist and publishing entrepreneur Jeff VanderMeer sets out to create a lasting monument to the uncanny by revisiting – without embellishment, and with a pitiless focus on physical and psychological detail – some very old ground. An alien invasion site. Assimilative spores. An unfurling of promiscuous alien biology.

On the first page we are told that the women’s enterprise is doomed. Their equipment is either nonsensical, or inadequate, or antiquated. Their training and instructions are sometimes vague, sometimes misleading. They cannot recall the moment they crossed into Area X, and they have no clear idea how they will leave. They cannot agree about what they are seeing (a shaft? a tower? a throat?) and three of them are all the while half-aware of being hypnotically manipulated by their team leader.

You enter Area X with them, thinking the uncanny must lurk in some particular spot. The lighthouse? The reed beds? The “tower”? Very quickly you spot your mistake, as a subtle, well-engineered wrongness turns up in every character, every deed, every observation until, at last, you find yourself afraid to turn the page.

The uncanny, by VanderMeer’s measure, is not, and never was, a thing. It is, and has always been, the actual state of the world. Familiarity is a fiction we perpetuate through psychological necessity. The closer the nameless biologist comes to this realisation, the more she falls back on her scientific training – not in any petulant, pedantic way, but rather as a means of limiting the kinds of questions she needs to ask the world, and of her rapidly transmogrifying self.

From this self-destructively objective vantage point, there can be no “us” or “them”, no threshold to cross, no home to flee to when all’s done. Science is there to handle the uncanny, and the biologist’s declaration near the end of the book – “Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish” – is anything but an expression of doubt. It is as stirring in its admission of human frailty and ambition as Beckett’s “You must go on. / I can’t go on. / I’ll go on.”

Where this story will end I cannot begin to guess. We are less than 200 pages in to the Southern Reach Trilogy by the end of this first volume, and already home is a distant memory, and an unreliable one, too: for who’s to say that home was not always X at heart?

Albert Hofmann vs The West

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New Scientist sent me down the LSD rabbit-hole recently in pursuit of its discoverer, Albert Hofmann. The subs did a cracking job as usual; but here’s the  unwound version for those who have the time.

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Image swiped from Leonard Freed/Magnum

A cloud of scorn fogs our understanding of LSD. It is justified. Those who fear The Man may remember the murderous human experiments conducted for the CIA’s MK-Ultra programme. Those who deplore social breakdown will recall Timothy Leary’s plan for young Americans to “turn on, tune in, drop out” – fuelled by his insouciant purchase order, in 1963, for one million doses of LSD and 2.5 million doses of psilocybine.

What of the substance itself, and the Swiss chemist who invented it, Albert Hofmann? In March this year, Hofmann’s own memoir, LSD: my problem child, was published by the Beckley Foundation Press in association with the OUP, in a new translation by Jonathan Ott. At once stiff as a board and lush as a jungle, Ott’s translation neatly captures the romance of Hofmann’s discovery. LSD provides the capstone for  a grand European project to explore the psyche, begun by Goethe, developed by Purkinje and Mach,  von Helmholtz and Exner, and obliterated by the rise of National Socialism in Germany. LSD is also the foundation of modern popular culture, inspiring everything from the personal computer to Gaia theory. For this reason, all writings about LSD are unavoidably – often comically – anachronistic. Whole pages of Hofmann’s own, deeply felt and beautifully written memoir could be dropped wholesale into a Thomas Pynchon novel with no-one any the wiser.

In an attempt to bring the LSD story up to date in time for the seventieth anniversary of its discovery,  two of Hoffman’s close acquaintances, Dieter Hagenbach and Lucius Werthmüller, have assembled a copiously illustrated volume of stories, biographies, memoirs and reflections. Mystic Chemist is the sort of mess you get when your aspiration gets ahead of your writing time. Its by-the-numbers approach contains spadefuls of trivia of the  “Mexico is the fifth largest country on the American continent” variety. It is horrible. It is also touching, sad and angry. And – so long as it’s not the first book a reader picks up about LSD – it is pretty much indispensable.

LSD is a psychiatric and medical tool. Not a medicine, since it tends to reinforce a person’s prevailing mood. Not a recreational substance: it triggers a psychosis, still poorly understood, that exposes to consciousness, and temporarily deconstructs, the processes by which a self maintains itself. Psychedelics were used as a spiritual aid for millennia, before falling as collateral damage in the West’s “war on drugs”. But regret at such a profound cultural loss cannot but be tempered by the thought that Greece, powered by the Eleusinian mysteries, still succumbed to decline, and Mexico, in its psilocybine haze, is a violent and impoverished political backwater. LSD does not harm people; nor does it make humanity evolve. The fault is not in LSD but in ourselves, says Hofmann: in “hypermaterialism, alienation from Nature through industrialisation and increasing urbanisation, lack of satisfaction with professional employment in an increasingly mechanised, lifeless, workaday world, ennui and purposelessness in a wealthy, oversaturated society, and the utter lack of a religious, nurturing, and meaningful philosophical foundation for life.”

Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem

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I reviewed this mix of prescience, philosophy and irony for New Scientist’s Culture Lab.

Here’s a more relaxed version for Lem initiates:

Stanislaw Lem

Image shamelessly ripped from Aleksander Jalosinski http://aleksanderjalosinski.pl

 

Halfway through his epic cybernetic rewiring of the Western cultural project, at the top of his rhetorical curve, and scant pages before the neologisms begin to gum and tack, tripping the reader’s feet (the second half is a slog), Polish satirist Stanislaw Lem recasts the entire universe as a boarding house inhabited by Mr Smith, a bank clerk, his puritanical aunt, and a female lodger.
The boarding house has a glass wall, and all the greats of science are about to look through that wall and draw truths about the universe from what they observe. Ptolemy notes how, when the aunt goes down to the cellar to fetch some vegetables, Mr Smith kisses the lodger. He develops a purely descriptive theory, “thanks to which one can know in advance which position will be taken by the two upper bodies when the loqwer one finds itself in the lowest position.”
Newton enters. “He declares that the bodies’ behaviour depends on their mutual attraction.”
So it goes on. Heisenberg notices some indeterminacy in their behaviour: “For instance, in the state of kissing, Mr Smith’s arms do not always occupy the same position.”
And on. And on. Mathematics comes unstuck in the ensuing complexity, where “a neural equivalent of an act of sneezing would be a volume whose cover would have to be lifted with a crane.”
Science is steadily pushing us into a Goethian cul-de-sac in which, the more accurate our theory, the closer it comes to the phenomenon itself, in all its ambiguity, strangeness, and inexplicability. At this point, Lem says, analysis must be abandoned in favour of creative activity — “imitological practice.” as he would have it, “considering the phenomenon itself its most perfect representation.”
There are nested ironies here, and it’s the devil’s work to unpick them all. Then again, any reader of Lem will have guessed this from the off, and will relish the opportunity afforded by this English translation – incredibly, for a book written in 1964 by a literary celebrity and reasonably well translated elsewhere, the first in the English language. Summa’s translator is Joanna Zylinska, a professor of new media and communications at Goldsmiths. Her work is diligent, imaginative, painstakingly precise; sometimes one wishes, in the later chapters, that she would be a little more slapdash and cut to the chase a little more, but this is Lem’s fault, not hers.
Lem was a garrulous old sod who said Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version of his novel Solaris should have been renamed “Love in Outer Space” and put up a sign outside his house warning of “ferocious dogs” (in truth, five friendly dachshunds). Though he had some important intellectual training, Lem ploughed his own furrow, conjuring with ideas that would not become common currency for another half-century:  (virtual reality, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, technological singularity…) When he succumbs to the autodidact’s anxiety, his prose is not pretty.
But then, Lem always worked at the edge of aesthetic possibility — which is to say, he was a science fiction writer. Science fiction is notorious for biting the hand that feeds it, for deliberately running counter to all expectation, and getting lost for decades at a time in the contested, often ugly territory where the humanities leave off and the sciences begin. Science fiction prides itself on crashing and burning, again and again, against the walls of narrative expectation and good taste. It’s the Gully Foyle of literature, fearsome and deranged and perilous in its promise: a Prometheus figure shoving fire in your face. “Catch this!”
This is what the Summa throws up: a vision of intelligence as cul-de-sac. Intelligence carries conscious beings to a point where their theories are no longer useful to them, where their hard-won objectivity drowns in a glut of complexity, and the only way to forward is for them to grow into the fabric of the world.
Fermi’s paradox: “If we are alive and intelligent and making some noise, where, in all the cosmos, is everybody else?”
Lem’s answer: Look at the rocks. Intelligence is a stepping stone on a circular path back to brute is-ness.
So much for cosmic irony; there’s a local, political irony here too, which needs some more exploration.
You see, after the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland, Lem was banned from Polytechnic study owing to his “bourgeois origin”. His father pulled strings to get him accepted on a course in medicine at Lwów University in 1940, but this brought him up against the quack theories of Stalin’s intellectual poster-boy, the agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Lem satirized Lysenko in a science magazine and soon abandoned his medical studies.
A word about Lysenko. With the blood of millions already on his hands from collectivisation – not to mention the wholesale eradication of countless varieties of domesticated plant – Josef Stalin needed to feed what was left of his nation. He wanted food and he wanted it now. Enter Trofim Denisovich, peddling an idea of evolution already two centuries out of date. Lysenko said things change their form in response to the environment, and pass any changes directly to their offspring. No element of chance. No randomness in selection. No genetic code to learn. Giraffes have long necks because their parents stretch.
And there is no brake on this process, neither, according to Lysenko. No natural conservatism. Things want to change. They just need some kindly direction. Spin your wheel and stick in your thumbs: the living world is clay. Oats will turn to wild oats, pines to firs, sunflowers to zinnias. Animal cells will turn into plant cells. Plants into animals! Cells from soup! “How can there be hereditary diseases in a socialist society?” From the nonliving will come the living.
Fast forward twenty years, and we have the Summa, and the Summa says,
“We cannot therefore catalogue Nature, our finitude being one of the reasons for this. Yet we can turn Nature’s infinity against it, so to speak by working, as Technologists…”
And what, exactly, will this work look like? (Bear in mind here that Lysenko cited the brilliant fruit-tree specialist Ivan Michurin as his intellectual forebear):
“A scientist wants an algorithm, wheras the technologist is more like a gardener who plants a tree, picks apples, and is not bothered about “how the tree did it.” A scientist considers such a narrow, utiliterian and pragmatic approach a sin against the laws of Full Knowledge. It seems that those attitudes will change in the future.”
The Summa is not just Lem’s vision of the future; it is Lysenko’s.
Of course this (irony of ironies) doesn’t mean that the vision is merely mischevious, a bitter political joke (though I think it is that). Perhaps Lem thinks Lysenko was simply ahead of his time, reaching for a plasticity in nature that it will take another century of biological research to effect.
Predictably, from a writer who seems permanently dangling off the edge of everyone else’s intellectual curve, Lem’s minatory vision is being explored and independently invented in the oddest places. Never mind the blandishments of the Kurzweilians and the extropians: Lem calls them “homunculists”, an inspired expression of contempt. What about Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus? What about that animate yet unliving black goo that can bring life to sterile planets, in all its savagery, appetite and guile? What about that unsmiling species of near-Gods who, having mastered birth (the sexism is deliberate and important), sets life at its own neck in the service of some unnamed Next Project? Lem would have hated it. But then, Lem was an inveterate ironist who describes the Summa itself, that most cherished project, as a “slightly modernised… version of the famous Ars Magna, which clever Lullus presented quite a long time ago, that is, the the year 1300, and which was rightly mocked by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels.”
It is not that the ironies get in the way. It’s that the world itself is ironical, and Lem, with his vision-of-the-future-that-is-no-future, is its John the Baptist. Even as you follow him, watch him rip out the signposts. Even as you beg for water, watch him defecate in each and every roadside well. Gawp in dismay as he assembles Potemkin villages on the barren skyline only to kick them into the dust. Then: walk on. (It’s not like you have any choice.) The path looks straight. You know it’s anything but. You know, God help you, that you will come by this place again.