Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 3. Flow of Blood

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Light Apparel (reviewed earlier), Flow of Blood (reviewed here), Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

 

In Flow of Blood, the science is not impossible, as was the case with the two previous stories. It is about a viral fever killing people in Africa, including graduate students trying to stop it. As I write these words, the ebola virus is spreading almost uncontrolled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Perhaps the most important plot component of this story is racism. The white male grad student was raised to be a racist, until he meets and loves a black female grad student from Africa. He goes with her to study and fight the disease in her birth village. He becomes ill, and she goes back to Kansas to be with him. His family at first rejects her, thinking that Africa is where all viral diseases come from. But they have just suffered another loss: another son has died of a viral fever, but this time it was the American hantavirus. This shared experience of death brings them together.

Medical science is not just about germs and medicine, but about the struggles and perils of real people. And sometimes it takes a medical tragedy to bridge the gulf of racism.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, part two. Light Apparel

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles (reviewed earlier), Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

In Light Apparel, a physicist, Hadley, discovers how to weave light into a fabric from which clothing could be made. People could now go naked but look like they were clothed, and this was very popular in a globally-warmed world. At least they appeared clothed to everyone except Hadley; he could use his equations to make spectacles that could unscramble the light and reveal their nakedness. Hadley lived in an endless fantasy world.

The only person who rejected this light-apparel was a young Christian woman, Xan, who wore cloth. She stood out among the naked bodies as surely as if she were the only naked person. Hadley was attracted to her, as she tried to save his soul. But her parents sneaked into his room and stole his secrets. The father was ready to destroy Hadley’s financial empire, until Xan shoots her father.

The question that this story raises—but does not answer, since it is just a story—is, why do humans wear clothing? Is it for modesty? Is it to curb unbridled sexual lust? You can think of an almost limitless number of reasons these cannot be the reasons. Some tribes and nudists manage to have modesty despite nakedness. Instead, from an evolutionary biology viewpoint, clothes are power, sometimes hiding, sometimes revealing, sometimes emphasizing, what people want others to see. In the history of every culture, clothing is much too complicated and ornate to simply serve as a covering against nakedness or to keep warm. Clothing is a product of cultural evolution in our species of otherwise naked apes.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science. Story 1: The Man Who Could Work Miracles

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

 

The stories in this book are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air. I will post an essay about each story in this blog. All of his fiction books can be found on his author website, where the fiction books are at the bottom.

The first story, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, is also a short story by H. G. Wells. And as in the Wells story, the main character ends up destroying the world—almost. At the last minute, in both stories, the main character rejects his miracle-working ability. No human being is good or smart enough to have this ability.

Rice’s twist on this situation is that the main character, Irwin, only has the ability to work miracles—and then only one at a time—when the odometer on his old car lines up with the same number at least five times. Then, his miracles can only alter the laws of probability, no other natural laws. When Irwin sent the arrogant co-worker to Hell, it was something that was going to eventually happen anyway. When Irwin got incredibly rich from lotteries and investments, it was something that would have happened to someone anyway. Irwin’s patient girlfriend found out where his powers came from, and Irwin used his ability to make her forget what she had learned about him—but he did not expect this would cause her to have a stroke and become brain-dead. But she would have eventually had a stroke anyway, right? But this was enough to make him revoke his ability just seconds before his old car would have collided with a truck in the opposite lane.

When the protagonist revokes his ability in Wells’s novel, it saves the world. In Rice’s novel, it saves only the people Irwin knows. He realizes all he needs is a job and his devoted girlfriend.

Human intelligence evolved only to deal with local, immediate circumstances, and then only imperfectly. It did not evolve to give humans—any humans—the ability to understand the world and control it. Sometimes I wonder if God could allow some of us to do just a few little miracles to make life easier, but I then realize that this is a slippery slope that would lead to everybody doing everything by miracle. Or maybe not. God could set limits and know everyone’s motivations, couldn’t He? Just sayin.’

A Visit to the Jules Verne House

Jules Verne lived, in the latter part of his life, in Amiens, north of Paris. I live in France now, but do not have a car. But I can get from Strasbourg to Amiens by train, some of it really high speed—something that would have fascinated Jules Verne, though not quite as much as the digital camera on which I made this video.

For those few of you who do not already know it, Jules Verne was one of the greatest French writers. He is often considered the father of science fiction or science adventure. This is certainly the case with his most famous novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. The English translation was one of the first books I read that was not a little kid book, when I was in sixth grade. I was fascinated by all of the things Professor Arronax saw while on board the submarine Nautilus. I was also fascinated by the complex psychology of Captain Nemo (nemo means nobody) who used his submarine as a weapon against all of civilized mankind. The ending was so gripping that I had to read it three times. He also wrote From the Earth to the Moon. This is also easy to classify as science fiction. He also wrote some speculative fiction, such as Paris in the Twentieth Century, a work that did not see the light of day until it was found in a locked drawer after his death.

But readers were and are puzzled by some of his topics. How to explain, for example, Carpathian Castle? A lovelorn youth yearned for a beautiful woman who sang beautifully. When he climbed up to a mysterious castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania (Transylvania, in fact), he saw her, and heard her singing. Science fiction? Only in the sense that he was seeing a slide projection of her and hearing her voice on a phonograph, both of which were existing technologies when Verne wrote the novel.

While moon rockets and submarines were technological fiction from Verne’s imaginary future, other things were well in the past. People have puzzled at the novel Michael Strogoff about the czar’s courier carrying a message across Siberia. Adventure, yes, but not new technology, just as montgolfière balloons were not new when he wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon. But Michael Strogoff and Five Weeks fit right in with the other books in being an adventure that filled in big empty spaces on the map.

In each of his novels, most of which are still in circulation, his adventures were driven by character and struggle—like most other novels. What made Verne’s stand out is that the adventure was not all human drama: Verne added in the wonders of nature as well. The world is full of marvels, not just human struggles.

But these adventures had to be believable. The one exception to this pattern that I have found is Master of the World, in which an incredibly brilliant and evil man invented a machine that was a fast car when on land, an airplane while in the air, and a submarine while underwater. At least, I did not find this compelling, nor did the possible handful of other people who have read it.

I got to see Verne’s writing desk, at which he labored for many hours every day. I saw his telescope and globe. What I remember most, however, is his card file. I had one of those when I was in graduate school. In case you don’t know it, that is what we used as an information retrieval system before the interweb.

Verne was incredibly famous during his life. But movies were just becoming popular when he died. He could not have imagined how many movies, in how many countries, were made from his writings.

For the readers of this religion blog, I will add that Jules Verne was strongly affected by the American civil war, and by the emancipation of slaves. Some of his lesser-known novels are about abolitionism, and one of the heroes of Mysterious Island was a runaway slave named Neb.

Visiting the Jules Verne house and museum was one of the things on my short bucket list. But it is amazing only to those of us who grew up admiring Jules Verne.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part three

This novel, which I introduced previously, is a kind of novel only a practicing and experienced scientist could write.

Rice explains all the science in the book, even high-performance liquid chromatography, so that anyone can understand it. He does a particularly good job of explaining evolutionary biology, which is not surprising since he is the author of nonfiction books about evolution such as Encyclopedia of Evolution. One example is when one of the characters explains the evolutionary basis of the human aversion to incest. But what Rea’s stepfather tried to do—rape her—is not biological incest, since she is genetically unrelated to him.

The characters all have a healthy sense of humor—except Earl, of course. For math teachers Conway and Thurman, the sense of humor is an unstoppable spring. Science offers lots of opportunities for humor, especially the Meeh coefficient and the way Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton used trigonometry to measure the buttocks of an African woman rather than to touch her. The Meeh coefficient, the wacky mathematicians insist, requires the measurement of the surface area of a naked human body. Rice takes his fellow scientists no more seriously than did the British humorist David Lodge, author of novels such as Small World: An Academic Romance. The academic world is a place where you can be weird.

Unlike some of Rice’s other novels, this one does not have a lot of religion in it. But, like probably all Rice’s novels, it addresses the meaning of life. As Rea tells her audience at the end, “A happy life consists of doing ordinary things in a grateful manner.”

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously, introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part one.

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.