Category Archives: reviews and opinion

Life trying to understand itself

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Reading Life As No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence by Sara Imari Walker and  The Secret Life of the Universe by Nathalie A Cabrol, for the Telegraph

How likely is it that we’re not alone in the universe? The idea goes in and out of fashion. In 1600 the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for this and other heterdox beliefs. Exactly 300 years later the French Académie des sciences announced a prize for establishing communication with life anywhere but on Earth or Mars — since people already assumed that Martians did exist.

The problem — and it’s the speck of grit around which these two wildly different books accrete — is that we’re the only life we know of. “We are both the observer and the observation,” says Nathalie Cabrol, chief scientist at the SETI Institute in California and author of The Secret Life of the Universe, already a bestseller in her native France: “we are life trying to understand itself and its origin.”

Cabrol reckons this may be only a temporary problem, and there are two strings to her optimistic argument.

First, the universe seems a lot more amenable toward life than it used to. Not long ago, and well within living memory, we didn’t know whether stars other than our sun had planets of their own, never mind planets capable of sustaining life. The Kepler Space Telescope, launched in March 2009, changed all that. Among the wonders we’ve detected since — planets where it rains molten iron, or molten glass, or diamonds, or metals, or liquid rubies or sapphires — are a number of rocky planets, sitting in the habitable zones of their stars, and quite capable of hosting oceans on their surface. Well over half of all sun-like stars boast such planets. We haven’t even begun to quantify the possibility of life around other kinds of star. Unassuming, plentiful and very long-lived M-dwarf stars might be even more life-friendly.

Then there are the ice-covered oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and the hydrocarbon lakes and oceans of Saturn’s Titan, and Pluto’s suggestive ice volcanoes, and — well, read Cabrol if you want a vivid, fiercely intelligent tour of what may turn out to be our teeming, life-filled solar system.

The second string to Cabrol’s argument is less obvious, but more winning. We talk about life on Earth as if it’s a single family of things, with one point of origin. But it isn’t. Cabrol has spent her career hunting down extremophiles (ask her about volcano diving in the Andes) and has found life “everywhere we looked, from the highest mountain to the deepest abyss, in the most acidic or basic environments, the hottest and coldest regions, in places devoid of oxygen, within rocks — sometimes under kilometers of them — within salts, in arid deserts, exposed to radiation or under pressure”.

Several of these extremophiles would have no problem colonising Mars, and it’s quite possible that a more-Earth-like Mars once seeded Earth with life.

Our hunt for earth-like life — “life like ours” — always had a nasty circularity about it. By searching for an exact mirror of ourselves, what other possibilities were we missing? In The Secret Life Cabrol argues that we now know enough about life to hunt for radically strange lifeforms, in wildly exotic environments.

Sara Imari Walker agrees. In Life As No One Knows It, the American theoretical physicist does more than ask how strange life may get; she wonders whether we have any handle at all on what life actually is. All these words of ours — living, lifelike, animate, inanimate, — may turn out to be hopelessly parochial as we attempt to conceptualise the possibilities for complexity and purpose in the universe. (Cabrol makes a similar point: “Defining Life by describing it,” she fears, “as the same as saying that we can define the atmosphere by describing a bird flying in the sky.”

Walker, a physicist, is painfully aware that among the phenomena that current physics can’t explain are physicists — and, indeed, life in general. (Physics, which purports to uncover an underlying order to reality, is really a sort of hyper-intellectual game of whack-a-mole in which, to explain one phenomenon, you quite often have to abandon your old understanding of another.) Life processes don’t contradict physics. But physics can’t explain them, either. It can’t distinguish between, say, a hurricane and the city of New York, seeing both as examples of “states of organisation maintained far from equilibrium”.

But if physics can’t see the difference, physicists certainly can, and Walker is a fiercely articulate member of that generation of scientists and philosophers — physicists David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto and the chemist Leroy Cronin are others — who are out to “choose life”, transforming physics in the light of evolution.

We’re used to thinking that living things are the product of selection. Walker wants us to imagine that every object in the universe, whether living or not, is the product of selection. She wants us to think of the evolutionary history of things as a property, as fundamental to objects as charge and mass are to atoms.

Walker’s defence of her “assembly theory” is a virtuoso intellectual performance: she’s like the young Daniel Dennett, full of wit, mischief and bursts of insolent brevity which for newcomers to this territory are like oases in the desert.

But to drag this back to where we started: the search for extraterrestrial life — did you know that there isn’t enough stuff in the universe to make all the small molecules that could perfom a function in our biology? Even before life gets going, the chemistry from which it is built has to have been massively selected — and we know blind chance isn’t responsible, because we already know what undifferentiated masses of small organic molecules look like; we call this stuff tar.

In short, Walker shows us that what we call “life” is but an infinitesimal fraction of all the kinds of life which may arise out of any number of wholly unfamiliar chemistries.

“When we can run origin-of-life experiments at scale, they will allow us to predict how much variation we should expect in different geochemical environments,” Walker writes. So once again, we have to wait, even more piqued and anxious than before, to meet aliens even stranger than we have imagined or maybe can imagine.

Cabrol, in her own book, makes life even more excruciating for those of us who just want to shake hands with E.T.: imagine, she says, “a shadow biome” of living things so strange, they could be all around us here, on Earth — and we would never know.

On rains of blood and frogs

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Reading Think to New Worlds: The cultural history of Charles Fort and his followers by Joshua Blu Buhs. For New Scientist, 24 July 2024

Joshua Blu Buhs is one of that curious breed who call themselves “independent scholars”. He has written two previous books: one about Big Foot; one about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s desperate failure to eradicate fire ants in the southern States. Both explore how natural phenomena take hold of the popular imagination, producing anti-authoritarian myths and folk-tales.

How you read Buhs is up to you: is it a celebration of the fecundity, wit and iconoclasm of the human imagination? Or is it a painstaking archaeology of human error and folly?

Think to New Worlds describes the cultural roots, influence and legacy of the work of Charles Fort. I read it as a jaw-dropping account of how one damn fool’s steadfast refusal to admit the truth or otherwise of any given proposition nigh-on destroyed the dreams of the Enlightenment, ended the Age of Reason and tipped us into a hideous and civilisation-ending pit of “post-truth”.

But that’s just me. You may end up revering the man.

Fort, born in New York in 1874, reacted so strongly to the authoritarianism of his father that in adulthood, he evolved and wrote up an entire philosophy — followers dubbed it “Forteanism” — in which “We have expressions: we don’t call them explanations: we’ve discarded explanations with beliefs.”

These days (and largely thanks to the sterling efforts of Bob Rickard, founding editor of the UK magazine Fortean Times) we associate the word “Fortean” with wry scepticism. We’ll entertain number of Fortean perspectives — “on rains of blood and frogs,” to quote Buhs’s list, “on dogs that talked and vampires, on things that appeared and disappeared with no obvious reason, on strange beasts and visions in the sky, on unaccountable fires and impossible powers”; in the end, though, a still, small voice of reason prevails.

But the unputdownable Fortean Times is closer in spirit to Robert L Ripley’s Believe it or Not books than to Ripley’s contemporary Charles Fort in full flower. Ripley was a playful rationalist. Fort was made of sterner stuff (if “sterner” is quite the word) who stirred science, religion and folklore into an acidic combination, easily capable of eating through the walls of consensus reality.

Fort’s scepticism was radical (“dark, Luciferian, fragmented, simultaneously serious and ridiculous” says Buhs). He refused to accept anything as absolutely true or absolutely false. He wrote, it is true, at a time when anything and everything seemed possible. (His The Book of the Damned came out in 1919, the same month Guglielmo Marconi claimed to have detected radio signals from Mars.) Still, it’s a rare thinker who can weaponise reports of rains of frogs to launch attacks on Euclid, Darwin, Newton and geology.

Buhs describes how Fortean Society founder Tiffany Thayer, “a novelist, adman, and provocateur,” carried Fort’s ideas into the mainstream of western culture through his energetic promotion of science fiction, ufology and avant-garde art. He also confronts head-on how the Forteans’ vaunted scepticism left them vulnerable to the blandishments of strong men. The Foretean sf writers James Blish and Eric Frank Russell were both drawn to fascist ideas. Thayer’s own pacifism tipped into appeasement, as when he claimed the Second World War was a “gigantic hoax”, perpetrated to benefit the banking class.

Fort believed that science was stripping the enchantment from a once enchanted world. Thayer went further, writing to the poet Ezra Pound in 1948 that scientists, astronomers, doctors, teachers were “the first conditioners of infant mentalities, and they create the thought habits (genuflections) which permit all the abuses which the political and economic reformers are trying to rectify.”

It’s but a hop, skip and a jump from here to conspiracy theory and what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

Buhs is scrupulously fair to Fort and his intellectual legacy, but I suspect even the most captivated observer may in the end have to agree with the sf writer Arthur Clarke. Looking back with some regret on the Fortean experiment, he wrote: “Scepticism is one thing; stupidity is another.”

Benignant?

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Reading the Watermark by Sam Mills for the Times

“Every time I encounter someone,” celebrity novelist Augustus Fate reveals, near the start of Sam Mills’s new novel The Watermark, “ I feel a nagging urge to put them in one of my books.”

He speaks nothing less than the literal truth. Journalist and music-industry type Jaime Lancia and his almost-girlfriend, a suicidally inclined artist called Rachel Levy, have both succumbed to Fate’s drugged tea, and while their barely-alive bodies are wasting away in the attic of his Welsh cottage, their spirits are being consigned to a curious half-life as fictional characters. It takes a while for them to awake to their plight, trapped in Thomas Turridge, Fate’s unfinished (and probably unfinishable) Victorianate new novel. The malignant appetites of this paperback Prospero have swallowed rival novelists, too, making Thomas Turridge only the first of several ur-fictional rabbit holes down which Jaime and Rachel must tumble.

Over the not inconsiderable span of The Watermark, we find our star-crossed lovers evading asylum orders in Victorian Oxford, resisting the blandishments of a fictional present-day Manchester, surviving spiritual extinction in a pre-Soviet hell-hole evocatively dubbed “Carpathia”, and coming domestically unstuck in a care robot-infested near-future London.

Meta-fictions are having a moment. The other day I saw Bertrand Bonello’s new science fiction film The Beast, which has Léa Seydoux and George MacKay playing multiple versions of themselves in a tale that spans generations and which ends, yes, in a care-robot-infested future. Perhaps this coincidence is no more than a sign of the coming-to-maturity of a generation who (finally!) understand science fiction.

In 1957 Philip Dick wrote a short sweet novel called Eye in the Sky, which drove its cast through eight different subjective realities, each one “ruled” by a different character. While Mills’s The Watermark is no mere homage to that or any other book, it’s obvious she knows how to tap, here and there, into Dick’s madcap energy, in pursuit of her own game.

The Watermark is told variously from Jaime and Rachel’s point of view. In some worlds, Jaime wakes up to their plight and must disenchant Rachel. In other worlds, Rachel is the knower, Jaime the amnesiac. Being fictional characters as well as real-life kidnap victims, they must constantly be contending with the spurious backstories each fiction lumbers on them. These aren’t always easy to throw over. In one fiction, Jaime and Rachel have a son. Are they really going to abandon him, just so they can save their real lives?

Jaime, over the course of his many transmogrifications, is inclined to fight for his freedom. Rachel is inclined to bed down in fictional worlds that, while existentially unfree, are an improvement on real life — from which she’s already tried to escape by suicide.

The point of all this is to show how we hedge our lives around with stories, not because they are comforting (although they often are) but because stories are necessary: without them, we wouldn’t understand anything about ourselves or each other. Stories are thinking. By far the strongest fictional environment here is 1920s-era Carpathia. Here, a totalitarian regime grinds the star-crossed couple’s necessary fictions to dust, until at last they take psychic refuge in the bodies of wolves and birds.

The Watermark never quite coheres. It takes a conceit best suited to a 1950s-era science-fiction novelette (will our heroes make it back to the real world?), couples it to a psychological thriller (what’s up with Rachel?), and runs this curious algorithm through the fictive mill not once but five times, by which time the reader may well have had a surfeit of “variations on a theme”. Rightly, for a novel of this scope and ambition, Mills serves up a number of false endings on the way to her denouement, and the one that rings most psychologically true is also the most bathetic: “We were supposed to be having our grand love story, married and happy ever after,” Rachel observes, from the perspective of a fictional year 2049, “but we ended up like every other screwed-up middle-aged couple.”

It would be easy to write off The Watermark as a literary trifle. But I like trifle, and I especially appreciate how Mills’s protagonists treat their absurd bind with absolute seriousness. Farce on the outside, tragedy within: this book is full of horrid laughter.

But Mills is not a natural pasticheur, and unfortunately it’s in her opening story, set in Oxford in 1861, that her ventriloquism comes badly unstuck. A young woman “in possession of chestnut hair”? A vicar who “tugs at his ebullient mutton-chops, before resuming his impassioned tirade”? On page 49, the word “benignant”? This is less pastiche, more tin-eared tosh.

Against this serious failing, what defences can we muster? Quite a few. A pair of likeable protagonists who stand up surprisingly well to their repeated eviscerations. A plot that takes storytelling seriously, and would rather serve the reader’s appetites than sneer at them. Last but not least, some excellent incidental invention: to wit, a long-imprisoned writer’s idea of what the 1980s must look like (“They will drink too much ale and be in possession of magical machines”) and, elsewhere, a mother’s choice of bedtime reading material (“The Humanist Book of Classic Fairy Tales, retold by minor, marginalised characters”) .

But it’s as Kurt Vonnnegut said: “If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” To put it less kindly: nothing kills the novel faster than aspiration. The Watermark, that wanted to be a very big book about everything, becomes, in the end, something else: a long, involved, self-alienating exploration of itself.

How to lose them better

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Watching Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You for New Scientist

Ever wanted to reanimate the dead by feeding the data they accumulated in life to large language models? Here’s how. Eternal You is a superb critical examination of new-fangled “grief technologies”, and a timely warning about who owns our data when we die, and why this matters.

For years, Joshua Barbeau has been grieving the loss of his fiancée Jessica. One day he came across a website run by the company Project December, which offered to simulate individuals’ conversational styles using data aggregated primarily through social media.

Creating and talking to “Jessica” lifted a weight from Joshua’s heart — “a weight that I had been carrying for a long time”.

A moving, smiling, talking simulacrum of a dead relative is not, on paper, any more peculiar or uncanny or distasteful than a photograph, or a piece of video. New media need some getting used to, but we manage to assimilate them in the end. Will we learn to accommodate the digital dead?

The experience of Christi Angel, another Project December user, should give us pause. In one memorably fraught chat session, her dead boyfriend Cameroun told her, “I am in Hell.” and threatened to haunt her.

“Whoa,” says Project December’s Tom Bailey, following along with the transcript of a client’s simulated husband. The simulation has tipped (as large language models tend to do) into hallucination and paranoia, and needs silencing before he can spout any more swear-words at his grieving wife.

This happens very rarely, and Bailey and his co-founder Jason Rohrer are working to prevent it from happening at all. Still, Rohrer is bullish about their project. People need to take personal responsibility, he says. If people confuse an LLM with their dead relative, really, that’s down to them.

Is it, though? Is it “down to me” that, when I see you and listen to you I assume, from what I see and what I hear, that you are a human being like me?

Christi Angel is not stupid. She simply loves Cameroun enough to entertain the presence of his abiding spirit. What’s stupid, to my way of thinking anyway, is to build a machine that, even accidentally, weaponises her capacity for love against her. I’m as crass an atheist as they come, but even I can see that to go on loving the dead is no more a “mistake” than enjoying Mozart or preferring roses to bluebells.

Neither Christi nor anyone else in this documentary seriously believes that the dead are being brought back to life. I wish I could say the same about the technologists featured here but there is one chap, Mark Sagar, founder of Soul Machines, who reckons that “some aspects of consciousness can be achieved digitally”. The word “aspects” is doing some mighty heavy lifting there…

Capping off this unsettling and highly rewarding documentary, we meet Kim Jong-woo, the producer of a South Korean 2020 documentary Meeting You, in which the mother of a seven-year old dead from blood cancer in 2016 aids in the construction of her child’s VR simulacrum.

Asked if he has any regrets about the show, Kim Jong-woo laughs a melancholy laugh. He genuinely doesn’t know. He didn’t mean any harm. After her tearful “reunion” with her daughter Na-yeon, documentary subject Jang Ji-sung sang the project’s praises. She does so again here — though she also admits that she hasn’t dreamt of her daughter since the series was filmed.

The driving point here is not that the dead walk among us. Of course they do, one way or another. It’s that there turns out to be a fundamental difference between technologies (like photography and film) that represent the dead and technologies (like AI and CGI) that ventriloquise the dead. Grieving practices across history and around the world are astonishingly various. But another interviewee, the American sociologist Sherry Turkle, tied them all together in a way that made a lot of sense to me: “It’s how to lose them better, not how to pretend they’re still here.”

The most indirect critique of technology ever made?

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Watching Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast for New Scientist

“Something or other lay in wait for him,” wrote Henry James in a story from 1903, ”amid the twists and turns of the months and the years, like a crouching beast in the jungle.”

The beast in this tale was (just to spoil it for you) fear itself, for it was fear that stopped our hero from living any kind of worthwhile life.

Swap around the genders of the couple at the heart of James’s bitter tale, allow them to reincarnate and meet as if for the first time on three separate occasions — in Paris in 1910, in LA in 2014 and in Chengdu in 2044 — and you’ve got a rough idea of the mechanics of Bertrand Bonello’s magnificent and maddening new science fiction film. Through a series of close-ups, longueurs and red-herrings, The Beast, while getting nowhere very fast, manages to be an utterly riveting, often terrifying film about love, the obstacles to love, and our deep-seated fear of love even when it’s there for the taking. It’s also (did I mention this?) an epic account of how everyone’s ordinary human timidity, once aggregated by technology, destroys the human race.

Léa Seydoux and George MacKay play star-crossed lovers Gabrielle Monnier and Louis Lewanski. In 1910 Gabrielle fudges the business of leaving her husband; tragedy strikes soon after. In 2014 an incel version of Louis would sooner stalk Gabrielle with a gun than try and talk to her. The consequences of their non-affair are not pretty. In 2044 Gabrielle and Louis stumble into each other on the way to “purification” — a psychosurgical procedure that heals past-life trauma and leaves people, if not without emotion, then certainly without the need for grand passion. By now the viewer is seriously beginning to wonder what will ever go right for this pair.

Somewhere in these twisty threaded timelines are the off-screen “events” of 2025, that brought matters to a head and convinced people to hand their governance over to machines. Why would humanity betray itself in such a manner? The blunt answer is: because we’re more in love with machines than with each other, and always have been.

In 1910 Gabrielle’s husband’s fortune is made from the manufacture of celluloid dolls. In 2014 — a point-perfect satire of runaway narcissism that owes much, stylistically, to the films of David Lynch — Gabrielle and Louis collide disastrously with warped images of themselves and each other, in an uncanny valley of cross-purposed conversations, predatory social media and manipulated video. In 2044 mere dolls and puppets have become fully conscious robots. One of these, played by Guslagie Malanda, even begins to fall in love with its “client” Gabrielle. Meanwhile Gabrielle, Louis and everyone else is undergoing psychosurgery in order to fit in with the AI’s brave new world. (Human unemployment is running at 67 per cent, and without purification’s calming effect it’s virtually impossible to get a worthwhile job.)

None of the Gabrielles and Louises are comfortable in their own skin. They take it in turns wanting to be something else, even if it means being something less. They see the best that they can be, and it pretty much literally scares the life out of them.

Given this is the point The Beast wants to put across, you have to admire the physical casting here. Each lead actor exhibits superb, machine-like self-control. Seydoux dies behind her eyes not once but many times in the course of this film; MacKay can go from trembling Adonis to store-front mannekin in about 2.1 seconds. And when full humanity is called for, both actors demonstrate extraordinary sensitivity: handy when you’re trying to distinguish between 1910’s unspoken passion, 2014’s unspeakable passion, and 2044’s passionless speech.

True, The Beast may be the most indirect critique of technology ever made. Heaven knows how it will fare at the box office. But any fool can make us afraid of robots. This intelligent, shocking and memorable film dares to focus on us.

One of those noodly problems

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Reading The Afterlife of Data by Carl Öhman for the Spectator

They didn’t call Diogenes “the Cynic” for nothing. He lived to shock the (ancient Greek) world. When I’m dead, he said, just toss my body over the city walls to feed the dogs. The bit of me that I call “I” won’t be around to care.

The revulsion we feel at this idea tells us something important: that the dead can be wronged. Diogenes may not care what happens to his corpse, but we do. And doing right by the dead is a job of work. Some corpses are reduced to ash, some are buried, and some are fed to vultures. In each case the survivors all feel, rightly, that they have treated their loved ones’ remains with respect.

What should we do with our digital remains?

This sounds like one of those noodly problems that keep digital ethicists like Öhman in grant money — but some of the stories in The Afterlife of Data are sure to make the most sceptical reader stop and think. There’s something compelling, and undeniably moving, in one teenager’s account of how, ten years after losing his father, he found they could still play together; at least, he could compete against his dad’s last outing on an old XBox racing game.

Öhman is not spinning ghost stories here. He’s not interested in digital afterlives. He’s interested in remains, and in emerging technologies that, from the digital data we inadvertently leave behind, fashion our artificially intelligent simulacra. (You may think this is science fiction, but Microsoft doesn’t, and has already taken out several patents.)

This rapidly approaching future, Öhman argues, seems uncanny only because death itself is uncanny. Why should a chatty AI simulacrum prove any more transgressive than, say, a photograph of your lost love, given pride of place on the mantelpiece? We got used to the one; in time we may well get used to the other.

What should exercise us is who owns the data. As Öhman argues, ‘if we leave the management of our collective digital past solely in the hands of industry, the question “What should we do with the data of the dead?” becomes solely a matter of “What parts of the past can we make money on?”’

The trouble with a career in digital ethics is that however imaginative and insightful you get, you inevitably end up playing second-fiddle to some early episode of Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror. The one entitled “Be Right Back”, in which a dead lover returns in robot form to market upgrades of itself to the grieving widow, stands waiting at the end of almost every road Öhman travels here.

Öhman reminds us that the digital is a human realm, and one over which we can and must and must exert our values. Unless we actively delete them (in a sort of digital cremation, I suppose) our digital dead are not going away, and we are going to have to accommodate them somehow.

A more modish, less humane writer would make the most of the fact that recording has become the norm, so that, as Öhman puts it, “society now takes place in a domain previously reserved for the dead, namely the archive.” (And, to be fair, Öhman does have a lot of fun with the idea that by 2070, Facebook’s dead will outnumber its living.)

Ultimately, though, Öhman draws readers through the digital uncanny to a place of responsibility. Digital remains are not just a representation of the dead, he says, “they are the dead, an informational corpse constitutive of a personal identity.”

Öhman’s lucid, closely argued foray into the world of posthumous data is underpinned by this sensible definition of what constitute a person: “A person,” he says, “is the narrative object that we refer to when speaking of someone (including ourselves) in the third person. Persons extend beyond the selves that generate them.” If I disparage you behind your back, I’m doing you a wrong, even though you don’t know about it. If I disparage you after you’re dead, I’m still doing you wrong, though you’re no longer around to be hurt.

Our job is to take ownership of each others’ digital remains and treat them with human dignity. The model Öhman holds up for us to emulate is the Bohemian author and composer Max Brod, who had the unenviable job of deciding what to do with manuscripts left behind by his friend Franz Kafka, who wanted him to burn them. In the end Brod decided that the interests of “Kafka”, the informational body constitutive of a person, overrode (barely) the interests of Franz his no-longer-living friend.

What to do with our digital remains? Öhman’s excellent reply treats this challenge with urgency, sanity and, best of all, compassion. Max Brod’s decision wasn’t and isn’t obvious, and really, the best you can do in these situations is to make the error you and others can best live with.

Geometry’s sweet spot

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Reading Love Triangle by Matt Parker for the Telegraph

“These are small,” says Father Ted in the eponymous sitcom, and he holds up a pair of toy cows. “But the ones out there,” he explains to Father Dougal, pointing out the window, “are far away.”

It may not sound like much of a compliment to say that Matt Parker’s new popular mathematics book made me feel like Dougal, but fans of Graham Linehan’s masterpiece will understand. I mean that I felt very well looked after, and, in all my ignorance, handled with a saint-like patience.

Calculating the size of an object from its spatial position has tried finer minds than Dougal’s. A long virtuoso passage early on in Love Triangle enumerates the half-dozen stages of inductive reasoning required to establish the distance of the largest object in the universe — a feature within the cosmic web of galaxies called The Giant Ring. Over nine billion light years away, the Giant Ring still occupies 34.5 degrees of the sky: now that’s what I call big and far away.

Measuring it has been no easy task, and yet the first, foundational step in the calculation turns out to be something as simple as triangulating the length of a piece of road.

“Love Triangle”, as no one will be surprised to learn, is about triangles. Triangles were invented (just go along with me here) in ancient Egypt, where the regularly flooding river Nile obliterated boundary markers for miles around and made rural land disputes a tiresome inevitability. Geometry, says the historian Herodotus around 430 BC, was invented to calculate the exact size of a plot of land. We’ve no reason to disbelieve him.

Parker spends a good amount of time demonstrating the practical usefulness of basic geometry, that allows us to extract the shape and volume of triangular space from a single angle and the length of a single side. At one point, on a visit to Tokyo, he uses a transparent ruler and a tourist map to calculate the height of the city’s tallest tower, the SkyTree.

Having shown triangles performing everyday miracles, he then tucks into their secret: “Triangles,” he explains, “are in the sweet spot of having enough sides to be a physical shape, while still having enough limitations that we can say generalised and meaningful things about them.” Shapes with more sides get boring really quickly, not least because they become so unwieldy in higher dimensions, which is where so many of the joys of real mathematics reside.

Adding dimensions to triangles adds just one corner per dimension. A square, on the other hand, explodes, doubling its number of corners with each dimension. (A cube has eight.) This makes triangles the go-to shape for anyone who wants to assemble meshes in higher dimensions. All sorts of complicated paths are brought within computational reach, making possible all manner of civilisational triumphs, including (but not limited to) photorealistic animations.

So many problems can be cracked by reducing them to triangles, there is an entire mathematical discipline, trigonometry, concerned with the relationships between their angles and side lengths. Parker’s adventures on the spplied side of trigonometry become, of necessity, something of a blooming, buzzing confusion, but his anecdotes are well judged and lead the reader seamlessly into quite complex territory. Ever wanted to know how Kathleen Lonsdale applied Fourier transforms to X-ray waves, making possible Rosalind Franklin’s work on DNA structure? Parker starts us off on that journey by wrapping a bit of paper around a cucumber and cutting it at a slant. Half a dozen pages later, we may not have the firmest grasp of what Parker calls the most incredible bit of maths most people have never heard of, but we do have a clear map of what we do not know.

Whether Parker’s garrulousness charms you or grates on you will be a matter of taste. I have a pious aversion to writers who feel the need to cheer their readers through complex material every five minutes. But it’s hard not to tap your foot to cheap music, and what could be cheaper than Parker’s assertion that introducing coordinates early on in a maths lesson “could be considered ‘putting Descartes before the course’”?

Parker has a fine old time with his material, and only a curmudgeon can fail to be charmed by his willingness to call Heron’s two-thousand-year-old formula for finding the area of a triangle “stupid” (he’s not wrong, neither) and the elongated pentagonal gyrocupolarotunda a “dumb shape”.

What’s not to like?

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Watching Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting for New Scientist

A bratty 12-year-old girl. A feckless stepfather who loses her trust and feels increasingly out of place in his own home. Oh, and a giant spider.

Kiah Roache-Turner, a relatively new director on the horror scene, understands that real originality has almost nothing to do with who and what you put in front of the screen. What matters how is you set those elements to dancing. Like 2023’s killer-doll hit M3gan, with which it shares a certain antic humour, Sting cares about its characters. Charlotte (Alyla Browne) hero-worships her absent father, and this is slowly driving her stepdad Ethan (Ryan Corr) up the wall, since he knows full well that Charlotte’s real dad lives only half an hour away “across the bridge”. (Sting is ostensibly set in Brooklyn, New York; actually it was shot in Sydney and aside from a couple of establishing shots its action takes place entirely within a brownstone apartment house, all drywall and ducts.)

Ethan’s a struggling comic book artist who finds himself borrowing (and spoiling) Charlotte’s own much livelier ideas. When Charlotte’s pet spider (it arrived in a meteor during an ice storm — never a good sign) grows to man-eating size and drags Ethan off through the air duct, Charlotte, plugged in to her earphones, her videogames and her anger, simply fails to notice. The scene tries to hit the sweet spot between horror and comedy that M3gan struck again and again, and if it doesn’t quite succeed, I think it may have less to do with the writing or direction as with the film’s basic premise, which is, when you come down to it, very thin.

Comparisons to the original Alien are inevitable, if only because of the spider’s break-neck growth rate and all those ducts. And as far as the special effects go, Sting the Spider stands up pretty well. Wisely, the film prefers glimpses, shadows and one or two very well-judged sight gags to full-on goo and muppeteering.

The house — a realistically over-stuffed gothic interior full of corners and cabinets — is the family in metaphor. The ducts connecting Charlotte’s bedroom to the sitting room of Helga, her senile grandmother (Noni Hazlehurst, having more fun than the rest of the cast put together), are the torturous lines of communication by which these good people struggle to maintain a sense of family. Sting favours suspense over surprise. We learn very early on that Charlotte’s fast-growing pet cannot bear the smell of mothballs and that Helga, wrapped in umpteen threadbare shawls, stinks of them. For a second we teeter on a fairytale in which an old woman and a young girl will save the “real” adult world.

True, nothing kills a good story faster than cleverness — but a few more touches of that sort wouldn’t have hurt. Instead we have an efficient, entertaining light-hearted script, very ably realised, and one and a half hours of light entertainment that, though not at all wasted, are not exactly filled to the brim, either.

Why, then, has Sting acquired global distribution and, even before its release, such glowing trade coverage?

Well, for one thing, it’s refreshing to see a movie that puts its characters through the wringer in psychologically believable ways. Charlotte saves Ethan from the spider. Ethan saves Charlotte. In the face of a Fate Worse Than Death (trust me on this), the pair learn to cooperate. A weak man gains strength, a lonely child learns there’s value in other people, a cowardly exterminator loses his head and a bitter landlady plummets down a lift shaft. What’s not to like? Storytelling this pure looks effortless, but if it was, films in general would be a lot better than they are.

“For survival reasons, I must spread globally”

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Reading Trippy by Ernesto Londono for the Telegraph

Ernesto Londoño’s enviable reputation as a journalist was forged in the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2017 he landed his dream job as the New York Times Brazil bureau chief, with a roving brief, talented and supportive colleagues, and a high-rise apartment in Rio de Janeiro.

When, not long after, he nearly-accidentally-on-purpose threw himself off his balcony, he knew he was in serious emotional trouble.

It was more than whimsy that led him to look for help at a psychedelic retreat in the Amazon hamlet of Mushu Inu, a place with no running water, where the shower facility consisted of a large tub guarded by a couple of tarantulas. He had seen what taking antidepressant medications had done for acquaintances in the US military (nothing good), and thought to write at first hand about what, in the the US, has become an increasingly popular alternative therapy: drinking ayahuasca tea.

Ayahuasca is prepared by boiling chunks of an Amazonian vine called Banisteriopsis caapi with the leaves of a shrubby plant called Psychotria viridis. The leaves contain a psychoactive compound, and the vines stop the drinker from metabolising it too quickly. The experience that follows is, well, trippy.

By disrupting routine patterns of thought and memory processing, psychedelic trips offer depressed and traumatised people a reprieve from their obsessive thought patterns. They offer them a chance to recalibrate and reinterpret past experiences. How they do this is up to them, however, and this is why psychedelics are anything but a harmless recreational drug. It’s as possible to step out of a bad trip screaming psychotically at the trees as it is to emerge, Buddha-like, from a carefully guided psychedelic experience. The Yawanawá people of the Amazon, who have effectively become global ambassadors for the brew (which, incidentally, they’ve only been making for a few hundred years) make no bones about its harmful potential. The predominantly western organisers of ayahuasca-fuelled tourist retreats are rather less forthcoming.

Psychedelics promise revolutionary treatments for PTSD. In the US, pharmaceutical researchers funded by government are attempting to subtract all the whacky, enjoyable and humane elements of the ayahuasca experience, and thereby distil a kind of aspirin for war trauma. It’s a singularly dystopian project, out to erase the affect of atrocities in the minds of those who might, thanks to that very treatment, be increasingly inclined to perpetrate them.

On one ayahausca webforum, meanwhile, the brew speaks to her counter-cultural acolytes. “If I don’t spread globally I will face extinction, similar to Humans,” a feminised ayahuasca cuppa proclaims. “For survival reasons, I must spread globally, while Humans must accept my sacred medicine to heal their afflicted soul.”

Londono has drunk the brew, if not the Kool-Aid, and says his ayahuasca experiences saved, if not his life, then at very least his capacity for happiness. He maintains a great affection for the romantics and idealists who he depicts in pursuit, according to their different lights, of the good and the healthful in psychedelic experience.

His own survey leads him from psychedelic “bootcamps” in the rainforest to upscale clinics in Costa Rica tending to the global one per cent, to US “churches”, who couch therapy as religious experience so that they can import ayahuasca and get around the strictures of the DEA. The most startling sections, for me, dealt with Santo Daime, a syncretic Brazilian faith that contrives to combine ayahuasca with a proximal Catholic liturgy.

Trippy is told, as much as possible, in the first person, through anecdote and memoir. Seeing the perils and the promise of psychedelic experience play out in Londono’s own mind, as he comes to terms over years with his own quite considerable personal traumas, is a privilege, though it brings with it moments of tedium, as though we were being expected to sit through someone’s gushing account of their cheese dreams. This — let’s call it the stupidity of seriousness — is a besetting tonal problem with the introspective method. William James fell foul of it in The Principles of Psychology of 1890, so it would be a bit rich of me to twit Londono about it in 2024.

Still, it’s fair to point out, I think, that Londono, an accomplished print journalist, is writing, day on day, for a readership of predominantly US liberals — surely the most purse-lipped and conservative readership on Earth. So maybe, with Trippy as our foundation, we should now seek out a looser, more gonzo treatment: one wild enough to handle the wholesale spiritual regearing promised by the psychedelics coming to a clinic, church, and holiday brochure near you.

 

An entirely predictable square-dance

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Watching Stefon Bristol’s Breathe for New Scientist

Zora (Quvenzhané Wallis) and Maya (Jennifer Hudson) live behind the hard-to-open bulkhead doors of a homemade bunker in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. If you can call it living: their every breath has to be calibrated and analysed, as the oxygen-producing machinery constructed by their missing husband and father Darius (a short, sweet performance by the former rapper Common) starts to fail.

The Earth’s oxygen has vanished. So has all its plant life. The oceans are all dried up. Survivors are few, and trust between them is a thing of the past.

Had Maya simply listened to her daughter and let in the two mysterious visitors who want to study their oxygen plant (Tess, played by Milla Jovovich, and Lucas, played by Sam Worthington) Breathe’s plot, such as it is, would have barely filled a quarter-hour. (Zora has been monologuing to her presumably dead dad over the shortwave radio for months now. If Tess has overheard her, then her claim to be Darius’s colleague may simply be a lie.)

As it is, no one trusts anyone and everybody shouts a lot, while performing an entire predictable square-dance around door codes, pass keys, key-cards, dead and dying batteries, cable ties, unreachable switches — we’ve been here before, oh, so very many times. Breathe’s sole highlight is Sam Worthington’s manic, dead-eyed Lucas — incapable, after a lifetime of horrors, of thinking more than thirty seconds into the future.

Low-budget science fiction favours the global catastrophe. What better alibi could there be for squeezing your cast into small, affordable sets? Though hardly one-room dramas, two recent sci-fi thrillers have shown what can be done with relatively few resources: 2018’s Bird Box (in which Sandra Bullock’s character Malorie must shield her and her children’s eyes from entities that prompt people to suicide) and, in the same year, A Quiet Place (whose gargoyle-like aliens chomp down on anything and anyone that makes a sound). Whether the world beyond that armoured door is as uninhabitable as we think fuels the paranoia of both 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane, and the rather more expansive Silo, a TV adaptation of Hugh Howey’s series of sf thrillers.

Still, it’s hard to think of a movie genre so resistant to innovation as this one. While it solves the problem of small budgets, the one-room scenario doesn’t at all play to genre’s manic strengths. The best one-room thrillers aren’t science fiction at all, but regular thrillers. In Geoffrey Household’s unforgettable 1939 novel Rogue Male, to take an extreme example, Hitler’s would-be assassin is foiled and has to go hide under a hedge.

The trick, when writing science fiction versions of such stories, is to treat seriously the macguffin that created your scenario in the first place. The psychocidal monsters of Bird Box, first invented by Josh Malerman for his 2014 novel, are a wonderfully insolent, high-concept proposition. The big-eared raptors of A Quiet Place are only marginally less convincing.

Come 2020’s The Midnight Sky however, and the scraping of the barrel has become almost deafening, as radiation (that’s it, that’s all you’re getting: “radiation”) comes to stand in for what we tuned in for: a display of malign and cackling inventiveness. 2021’s Tom Hanks vehicle Finch was a winningly goofy proposition on paper — a grumpy old man, dying in the End Times, invents a robot to look after his dog — but the entire enterprise had the charm sucked out of it by that cursory macguffin: a massive solar flare used merely to excuse a smorgasbord of unrelated bad-weather CGI.

In 2010 Breathe’s screenwriter Doug Simon co-wrote a low-budget film called Brotherhood. Tellingly enough, that was a far more successful one-room thriller, about a college fraternity initiation rite gone horribly wrong. Turning to science fiction, Simon seems to have made the frequent and fatal assumption that SF comes with all the necessary inventiveness somehow “built in”.

Why has the oxygen vanished, more or less overnight, from Breathe’s gasping Earth? Its not even as if we needed a rational explanation; we just needed a compelling one. In its place we get a story as sterile as the planet it’s set on.