The bookshelves at the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project are chaotic. Not everyone who volunteers there is a big reader, so sometimes people don’t know where a book might belong. But the bigger problem is with books themselves. Most — especially the good ones — are about more than one thing.
The shelves have vague categories to make it easier to find a book that’ll be enjoyed by, say, a prisoner who wants to read about Norse mythology, or about classic cars, or about gardening, etc. But many books could reasonably fit in several different places. I always use the rule of thumb, “Where would I look for this if I was filling a package for somebody who’d love it?”, but, even then, somebody else’s brain might leap to different ideas after reading the exact same inmate’s letter.
Last week, for instance, a few of us spent a minute arguing about Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. Not a real argument, mind you, just the kind of friendly debate that people use to distract themselves from feeling sad about the fact that they’re filling a package for a 32-year-old dude who’s been in jail since he turned 19 for possession of small amounts of cocaine. A little levity helps sometimes.
So, Cat’s Cradle? I say “literary fiction.” Second choice, “classics.” But another well-read volunteer said, “sci fi.” She forwarded the evidence of “ice-9,” a special type of water crystal that could destroy the world.
The book is definitely speculative. You don’t need to worry that someone will drop a small seed crystal of ice-9 into the ocean and cause everyone to freeze. But it’s very mildly speculative, I’d say. Less so that the imaginary drugs in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, for instance, or the elevators in Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, or even the packing density of folded paper in Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age. All of those, to my knowledge, are very rarely considered to be science fiction.
Not only does Cat’s Cradle seem to be less speculative than any of those, but it also features some of my favorite writing about how the general populace interacts with scientific findings. Consider this passage from early in the book, where the narrator has gone to investigate a famous recently-deceased scientist.
“He was supposed to be our commencement speaker,” said Sandra.
“Who was?” I asked.
“Dr. Hoenikker–the old man.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t show up.”
“So you didn’t get a commencement address?”
“Oh, we got one. Dr. Breed, the one you’re gonna see tomorrow, he showed up, all out of breath, and he gave some kind of talk.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he hoped a lot of us would have careers in science,” she said. She didn’t see anything funny in that. She was remembering a lesson that had impressed her. She was repeating it gropingly, dutifully. “He said, the trouble with the world was…”
She had to stop and think.
“The trouble with the world was,” she continued hesitatingly, “that people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He was if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.”
“He said science was going to discover the basic secret of life someday,” the bartender put in. He scratched his head and frowned. “Didn’t I read in the paper the other day where they’d finally found out what it was?”
“I missed that,” I murmured.
“I saw that,” said Sandra. “About two days ago.”
“That’s right,” said the bartender.
“What is the secret of life?” I asked.
“I forget,” said Sandra.
“Protein,” the bartender declared. “They found out something about protein.”
“Yeah,” said Sandra, “that’s it.”
Vonnegut beautifully captures the way science is often treated in the popular press. Exceedingly important, graced with insight about the secret of life… and yet still the purvey of weirdos. Other people. For the masses, it’s enough to read that scientists have discovered something or other, forget the details, and carry on with their lives.
I mean, I do this too. I read an article that there might be another planet in our solar system — five or so other astronomical objects have peculiar orbits, suggesting that they’ve been influenced by a heavy, perhaps planet-sized, object — nodded, murmured “That’s nice,” but didn’t feel a thing.
Or there was — and this is even closer to the “secret of life” gag in Vonnegut’s passage — the time when I read that astronomers had tallied the Doppler shifts for many distant objects and decided that our universe will not be collapsing in on itself. The current best guess for how the universe will end is that expanding space will push everything apart faster and faster until emptiness abounds. The universe will be dark, every particle lonely and cold.
I read about all that, thought, “Whoa, that’s heavy,” and drew a comic strip. That’s all, though. Unveiled secrets of the universe didn’t change how I live my life.
So, the science behind ice-9? It’s pretty standard thermodynamics. When water freezes, there are several different configurations it might solidify into, and each of these has a slightly different stability. Vonnegut’s ice-9 is a hypothetical configuration that is very stable but difficult to form.
Describing this to math and numbers people — to scientists — is pretty easy. I’d draw a graph that shows a deep valley hidden by a mountain. I’d say “this is the energy level diagram for ice-9, and even though water would be happiest in its lowest-energy state, it can’t get there because it’d pass through such a high-energy transition state.” If you were a scientist, you’d nod sagely — “yes yes, we learned all this as undergraduates.” If you’re not, I can only assume that your eyes would glaze over with boredom.
So here’s an analogy instead: qwerty computer keyboards are ridiculous. They were designed to make people type slowly. A world in which everyone used an efficient keyboard layout would be better. But the process of changing everything would be aggravating. Having to remember two different layouts — because the computers at the public library would presumably still have qwerty keyboards long after you’d upgraded your rig at home — would make our fingers slow and sloppy.
Or those early white settlers traveling westward through America. If they could reach California, they’d be living easy. The weather’s nice, the soil fertile. But there were dangerous mountains in the way. While crossing those mountains (my information here comes solely from the Oregon Trail computer game), people were dropping left & right (and having naughty words engraved on their tombstones) from dysentery.
Vonnegut proposed, though, that a seed crystal of ice-9 would lower the energy barrier of that transition state. This is a pretty common phenomenon, actually. Ice-9 works the same way as mad cow disease. Prions are a protein configuration more stable than the functional form but difficult to reach. Once a small amount of the protein assumes that new configuration, though, it can catalyze the mis-folding of all the rest in your brain.
Just like the suddenly-solid oceans at the end of Cat’s Cradle, prions freeze up the brain. Then the brain stops working. Then you’re all done being alive.
Just you, though. Ice-9 killed everybody. So, sure, Cat’s Cradle is sci-fi-esque. But quite realistic. Plus — and I suppose this is the biggest reason why I wouldn’t call it science fiction — Vonnegut wastes little time explaining how his speculations work. You can believe him or not — yes, his ideas are reasonable, but he feels no imperative to prove that to you. Instead he introduces the mild speculation as a way to investigate how people behave.
Vonnegut winks at his readers. At the beginning of the book his character dutifully recites that if everyone studied science more, the world’s troubles would be over. But Vonnegut himself glosses over the science of his world, instead lavishly describing the philosophies that arose in response to the discovery of ice-9.
I think the dude’s priorities are in the right place. I mean, look at our society. We’re spending huge amounts of money investigating rare childhood diseases, or the routine maladies of age… but we spend a pittance on childhood nutrition, which would benefit people far more. Our society’s biggest problems are philosophical. We don’t help those children: they earned their fate by choosing to be born poor.
Frank Brown Cloud 