Читать книгу The Starship and the Canoe - Kenneth Brower - Страница 6

In the tenth chapter of Kenneth Brower’s The Starship and the Canoe, George Dyson—who, to that point, has been introduced as a curious, solitary, tree-dwelling delinquent and wanderer—speaks. Brower quotes three paragraphs from an account, written by George, describing a sea voyage he undertook circa 1970 in a newly christened vessel he had helped build. Brower introduces the passage gingerly, making mention of George’s Victorian prose style. Decades ago, when I first read this—before I had met George—my immediate reaction was to wish that I could see a great deal more in the same vein, on almost any topic, from the younger Dyson. Despite, or perhaps because of, his difficult and quite brief relationship with the apparatus of formal education, George had obviously taught himself how to write. And in the same way as he made choices around tools, materials, clothing, and lifestyle—namely, picking what worked best for the purpose, regardless of what anyone else might think—he had settled on a prose style that did its job as well as a chisel cuts wood, and as such needed no improvement.

Later, at the head of Chapter 18, Brower quotes George again, describing himself as one who adopts a slender form little influenced by wind and waves. It is ostensibly about how to paddle a kayak in rough conditions, but clearly has a more general significance. At that point (the book dates to the late 1970s) George seems as elusive, to curious readers of Brower’s fascinating and sui generis book, as that passage implies. Less than a decade later, though, George began to tell his own story in Baidarka: The Kayak, and ten years after that he published Darwin Among the Machines, the first in a series of books usually billed as “history of science,” though this doesn’t quite capture what they are. Baidarka is nominally an exploration of Russo-Aleut boat building translated into modern materials, so you must read between the lines and look closely at the beautiful photography of Ann Yow (who later married George) for clues about the enigmatic figure, the innovative boats, and the famous treehouse described by Brower.

In like manner, George’s history of science books, though they are as meticulously researched as any academic publications, are nominally about figures such as Leibniz, Darwin, von Neumann, Ted Taylor, and Freeman. But they are also about George in the sense that only George could, or would, have written them. Only he has access to, and the implicit trust of, some of the people he is writing about; and a man capable of living alone in a treehouse has the leeway to write what he thinks without concern for, or even awareness of, the fads and perverse incentives that dominate the lives of academics.

Freeman too has found more of a public voice in the decades since the first publication of The Starship and the Canoe. It was, for a long time, vaguely known that the British war machine had put his brain to work on something related to bombers during the Second World War. Brower alludes to this, relating a story that Freeman once, without any explanation, sent George a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece about the firebombing of Dresden. The true nature of that wartime research was finally explained by Freeman himself in a Technology Review article published in 2006. This was, as you would expect, quite interesting on a technical level. But it also bore the hallmark of Freeman’s best nonacademic writing in what it said about the culture and psychology of bomber crews and the brass who sent them into harm’s way. It has much to teach us about the difficulties that the human mind has with thinking statistically, even when one’s life depends upon it.

More recently Freeman has published Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters, in which among many other things he retells the story from the end of Starship in which George, assisted by Brower, saves the lives of two boaters by dint of keen perception, awareness of nautical hazards, and decisive action. Along the way (the book spans the years from 1941 to 1978) we are treated to a wide range of anecdotes and reflections, many of which are quite personal given that the book consists of letters Freeman wrote to his family. There is much here that is remarkable, one example being Freeman’s Zelig-like knack of turning up at important moments in history. To name just one example, he stumbles into the Civil Rights March of 1963 by pure luck and personally witnesses Martin Luther King, Jr., delivering the “I Have a Dream” speech.

In the forty years since Ken Brower drew our attention to Freeman and George Dyson in The Starship and the Canoe, both father and son have, therefore, become accessible to readers in a way that was not possible when George was living alone in a treehouse and Freeman was mostly writing papers for scientific journals. It is rewarding to reread Brower’s book in light of all that has happened since. His depiction of a time and place—mostly the Pacific Coast of Canada and Alaska in the 1970s—is beautifully crafted, terse prose that often flourishes into poetry. The curious dynamic between the father and the son, which left the reader in suspense forty years ago, is all the more satisfying now that we know it all came out well in the end.

In the summer 2017 issue of California, the Berkeley alumni magazine, Ken Brower looked back on the intervening decades. The result is a long and wide-ranging article that reads as a worthy sequel. The themes and story revealed in the book are still both interesting in their own right, and relevant to larger concerns very much in the forefront of the mind of anyone who pays attention to what is happening now around global climate change and other environmental concerns. Today’s political and environmental climate provides, Brower writes, “An ideal temperature for asking again a question posed by my book: To what should we be adapting? To this blue-green sphere down here, with its single sun, good for only 5 billion more years, or to the glittery firmament above? . . .”

The conservation message in Starship is not strident, but it’s potent, and even more important today than when this book came out in the era of Earth Day and the Whole Earth Catalog. Not enough has changed.

—Neal Stephenson

February 2020

Neal Stephenson is known for his speculative fiction exploring areas such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He is the author or coauthor of more than fifteen books, including Anathem, Snow Crash, and most recently Fall, or Dodge in Hell.