IS there room on the shelf for more than one history of reading? James
O’Donnell proves there is with his Avatars of the Word. His
entertaining anecdotal style and easy movement between past and present is
reminiscent of Alberto Manguel’s earlier work A History of Reading
(HarperCollins, 1996). Of course, O’Donnell comes at the subject from a
different angle—this is a history of reading rooted far more in the
university library than the bookshop.

O’Donnell is concerned with the changes in what and how we read brought about
by the computer revolution. Mostly he wants to blow away the cobwebs of myth and
misunderstanding. Doom-laden predictions of the demise of books and reading are
dismissed with reference to other revolutionary moments in the history of
reading: the invention of the library, the move from scroll to codex, the
invention of printing. Each of these generated fears that proved groundless, but
initiated unpredicted changes.

The introduction of printing by Gutenberg, Caxton and their fellows, for
instance, did not spell immediate redundancy for the copyists who earned their
living writing out books by hand; it actually brought them more work for a while
as extracts from printed books were copied out to be passed on to others or to
make up private anthologies. And such anthologies, O’Donnell suggests (one of
the delights of this book is the way one idea slides seamlessly into the next),
might well provide a model for the way we will deal with the overload of
information that electronic publishing is going to make available.

As professor of classical studies and vice-provost for information systems
and computing at the University of Pennsylvania, O’Donnell can write as
authoritatively about St Augustine or St Jerome as he does about the Web. Thus a
Californian university’s experiment in creating a “virtual library” prompts him
to suggest that all libraries have been “virtual”, right back to the time of
Cassiodorus. If, as is argued, cyberspace and free access to all literature via
the Web is going to kill off libraries, this is to misinterpret their role as
simply a depository for books. In fact, O’Donnell argues, their role throughout
history has been as much about organising and accessing information as storing
it, and that function is going to be more important than ever in cyberspace.

But whenever he talks about modern libraries O’Donnell means university
libraries and whenever he talks about electronic publishing he is referring to
academic journals. Thus we begin to glimpse his hidden agenda, which finally
becomes clear in a chapter helpfully headed: “(For Professors Only)”. There is,
it appears, a war going on between those who are teaching students merely to
pass exams and those who believe that it is more important that they understand
and explore ideas; this book is a blast from the liberal side.

All of a sudden, Avatars of the Word seems to change direction. The
final third may have some urgent and cogent arguments for those in the battle,
but there is a danger that it might fatally unbalance the book. So let us not
forget, as the discussion becomes partial and partisan, that behind it all is a
fascinating and important glimpse of a reading revolution that may affect us
all.

Life Signs by Robert and Susan Jenkins, HarperCollins, $22, ISBN
0060191546 (June in US)

ONE of the things that science fiction can do is dramatise science—take
a theory, a new technology or a blue-sky idea and put it into practice. This
way, it can make play with the practical, social, cultural or ethical
consequences. What it can’t do is develop an idea further. It is, after all,
fiction; it is not reportage, nor a science lab, nor even, really, a thought
experiment.

Above all, it is not prediction, despite a passing assertion to the contrary
in Star Trek on the Brain by Robert Sekuler and Randolph Blake. To
support the idea that it is, the authors cite three tenuous examples, including
Arthur C. Clarke’s prediction of communications satellites—made in a
serious science article, not a fiction. What they forget to mention are the
thousands of times in which science fiction got it wrong. Science fiction’s hit
rate should have been better than this, if it had any pretence to be a
predictive literature. Despite appearances, science fiction is not really about
the future, it is about the present. As Sekuler and Blake say: “These characters
are us, and their qualities are ours.”

Given all that, is there anything that science fiction can actually tell us
about science? To judge from publishing schedules over the past few years, it
must be quite a lot. The trend began with Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of
Star Trek, but since then there has been a steady stream of books exploring
the science in popular science fiction, usually based on Star Trek or
The X-Files. Now, after the physics, it’s the turn of biology in
Star Trek on the Brain and Life Signs.

Are these two books genuinely trying to tell us that Vulcans and Klingons and
Ferengi and the rest have anything valuable to say about human biology? With a
lot of umming and aahing and shuffling of feet on the part of the authors, the
answer is yes. And are they right? With a lot of umming and aahing and shuffling
of feet on my part, I have to agree.

Of course, despite the enthusiasm of the authors and the extensive quotations
in both books from Star Trek: The Original Series, The Next
Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and umpteen Star
Trek films, the true ancestors of these books are not Krauss and his like,
but rather Oliver Sacks and Stephen Jay Gould and a host of popular science
writers who have used dramatic stories and case histories to make research
palatable to the general reader. Thus we may start with a question about Data’s
emotions, Captain Kirk’s split personality or Spock’s interspecies origins, but
we quickly leave these behind to explore what science can tell us today, with a
few tentative forward extrapolations to the time of the Star Trek
universe.

Given their subject matter, there is inevitably a lot of overlap between the
two books, especially since Star Trek on the Brain, despite its title,
covers far more general biology than just the philosophical questions of the
workings of the mind. However, from the same starting point they do tend to head
off in totally different directions.

Take, for example, the prevalence of bipedal humanoids in the Star
Trek universe. Cynics might assume that this simply makes life easier for
make-up artists and actors. Not a bit of it. This is fruitful ground for
discussion, which both books exploit to the full. Admittedly, in the end they
both have to accept the Star Trek explanation that the planets were
seeded by an ancient, star-travelling race known as the Preservers. (There is
always an ancient star-travelling race in science fiction that roams the
galaxies, as if we’re afraid of there not being some sort of primum
mobile.) Both sets of authors seem a little embarrassed by having to settle
for this explanation, and Sekuler and Blake go to great lengths to demonstrate
how unlikely such a process is. Curiously, neither makes any mention of
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe’s notion of proteins hitching a lift on
passing asteroids, which seems as likely as the Preservers.

From this starting point, however, Robert and Susan Jenkins in Life
Signs turn to look at things such as the chemistry of life: why, for
instance, life anywhere in the Universe is most likely to be carbon-based. Their
discussion of the advantages of carbon-based life, the possibilities of
silicon-based life and the unlikelihood of any other chemical basis for life is
one of the most lucid and interesting parts of what is, I have to say, a rather
thin and lightweight book.

Sekuler and Blake, on the other hand, whose book appears more substantial
(and they are better writers), go from the Preservers into a wide-ranging
discussion of cultural and racial difference, sexual attraction and the
possibilities of interspecies reproduction. This last echoes a chapter in
Life Signs to a remarkable extent, largely because they illustrate the
discussion with the same limited number of examples from the series, sometimes
using the same quotations from the scripts, and draw exactly the same
conclusions from this material.

Like a lot of science fiction, Star Trek is coy when it comes to
that biological basic, sex. Oh, we see or hear about courtship procedures
galore, and Starfleet seems to be largely populated with the curious offspring
of mixed-species relationships. There’s enough here for both Life Signs
and Star Trek on the Brain to devote a considerable proportion of their
pages to sex in its many forms, real and imaginary. But we never see any of
these mating rituals. So when they come to discuss the question of whether Tasha
Yar did have sex with the android Data in the episode “The Naked Now”, Sekuler
and Blake fall back on a quotation from the actress who played Yar. Now, I know
this is a little tongue in cheek, but come on. Star Trek is fiction,
these are not real people. It’s an obvious point, but it needs repeating. There
is a tendency in both books to forget the distinction.

And therein lies one of the problems with this approach. Fiction works by
leaving things out, particularly in an ongoing television series where
galaxy-threatening drama has to be fitted into 50 minutes a week, and the
leading characters have to be essentially unchanged by the end of the episode
ready for next week. There is, inevitably, massive simplification. This means
that individual issues can stand out in stark highlight, which is useful for
projects such as these, but forget how much is left out and you miss the
complexity that would lie around and behind the issue in real life. It is
significant, I think, that neither book once mentions a scriptwriter; quotations
are scattered through the books as though they come from the mouths of real
characters.

There’s a lot of interesting material here. Starting from current issues such
as cloning, genetic engineering and the Human Genome Project (all of which get
reasonable coverage in both), anyone prepared to extrapolate to consider what
the biological sciences might come up with over the next few centuries is bound
to produce a book that intrigues and enthrals. But in sticking so resolutely to
Star Trek for their examples, both these books feel as though they are
written by fans, for fans. One has to wonder whether anyone from outside the
world of Trekkies would be likely to even pick the books up, and if so whether
there would be enough general interest to reward the effort.