I am a victim of the science age

I like reading books that show an active mind on the page. I'm not talking about novels of ideas, but books which show an informed, applied intelligence, not artfully arranged combinations of cliches. And though I love detail work, this is separate from getting the details precisely right. It's the difference between enjoying a director and enjoying the set design.

Needless to say, it's why I find so much current fiction not worth my time.

The magazine Cycle World has a circulation of over three hundred thousand. Perhaps ten times as many people read it. It's a motorcycle magazine. It also has perhaps the best technology writer in the business, Kevin Cameron. This is what he serves those subliterate motorheads and gear freaks.

Cameron recounts an evening he spent with the late New Zealand designer John Britten:

We had dinner together early in Speed Week. As Britten speaks, his words fall behind his thinking. He speaks faster to catch up, but the race is soon lost. Words trip on fresh thoughts. He stops speaking, looking slightly distressed. He pauses with great intensity, then begins again.

I asked him if he were an avid, lifelong motorcyclist.

"No, I'm really not. Actually, my background is in fine arts -- decorative glassware, in fact."

The arts? Decorative glassware? Racing motorcycles? Where is the connection? I remembered a conversation we had had a year ago at the Speedway. I had remarked to Britten then that his V-1000 crankcase had an organic shape; not a thing of ribs and gussets, it resembles instead the stresses acting on it, the flow of cylinder head bolt tension downward, into the case, to loop around the main-bearing saddles, holding the engine together against combustion and inertia forces. It looks most like a tree trunk.

"Yes!" he had said then with sudden heat. "I propose that idea to people in the industry, to journalists, but get back nothing but polite nods. Things have shapes for real reasons. A tree..."

Our dinner conversation began to eclipse the food. Britten talked about his conviction that engineering, the science, the arts are all connected tightly together. What is it, he asks, that causes an aesthetic to exist in every area of human endeavor? Physicists admire an elegant experiment, mathematicians seek beautiful proofs, engineers seek simplicity. We seek a rightness that is beyond the merely adequate. And in literature, writers seek a parallel rightness that is beyond bare-bones data transmission. What is this rightness, he asks, but a kind of innate sensibility about things? Even the most abstract branches of mathematics, sooner or later, are found to describe something real. Aesthetics, similarly, only appear abstract, but are actually about real things.

He believes that our aesthetic sense is derived from things in common experience -- such as trees and other living things -- and so is not limited to one field or another. Such a sense of values ought to relate to everything -- a woman's shirtwaist dress, a rocket motor exhaust skirt, a Greek oil amphora of 20 centuries ago. Consider structures: The Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi designed breathtakingly curved shells of ferroconcrete, but declined the praise of art critics, saying, "I have no aesthetic -- only mathematics." The simplest form, requiring the least description, is so often the best.

I especially don't read much science fiction anymore. No point.

Comments

[Doug M.]

You know, I was going to surprise you with a subscription to Asimov's for your birthday.

On second thought, maybe not.

Doug M.

[Nich Hills]

Carlos quoting Kevin cameron and John Britten:

* * * *

It looks most like a tree trunk.

"Yes!" he had said then with sudden heat. "I propose that idea to people in the industry, to journalists, but get back nothing but polite nods. Things have shapes for real reasons. A tree..."

* * * *

Forms possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality?

Plato. It's all in Plato. What are they teaching in schools these days?

But well done Cycle World for having a columnist with such glorious prose and such a passion for good design.

[King-Walters]

Would you mind recommending some fiction that does, in your opinion, show a lively mind at work?

[King-Walters]

I probably should have written a "please" or "thanks" in in my last comment, shouldn't I?

[Dennis Brennan]

Hemingway used to write fishing articles for Sports Illustrated.

[Will Baird]

Hey Carlos,

I have another Boneyard carnival hosting coming up (next sat). Any chance I can get that cycad toxicity post?

[Charlie Stross]

Doug: Asimov's SF is dying, slowly. Too many earnest MFA grads counting coup, not enough vision, never mind insight.

[King-Walters]

Hmmm. You know, Carlos - not to sound bitchy or anything - this is the fifth or sixth time I've asked you for a book recommendation, and the fifth or sixth time I have received no response. Am I doing something wrong, is it just a coincidence, or is there something more to it? Would you please let me know - this isn't doing my paranoia any good.

[Carlos]

Doug, you are a mensch for thinking about that on *YOUR* birthday. (I put up some less intimidating suggestions in the usual place. I, on the other hand, am crass.)

Nich, the strange thing is, Cycle World has two columnists that good. Peter Egan is the other one.

Will, sorry, busy week coming. I do have some Russian/Ukrainian stuff I was planning on posting for you though.

Charlie, um. As Doug is fond of saying, Hell has many circles. The insularity of SF written by fans is pretty far down there. It takes some doing to make earnest MFA grads look expansive and innovative, but y'all have managed it.

KW, um. I don't know you, I have no idea what your tastes are like, and it's the weekend. You know?

Just a general note. I write here because it's my pleasure. If it becomes a chore, or if people start thinking I am here to amuse them or spoon-feed them... well. I don't have to write here at all.

[King-Walters]

I understand what you're saying, but I've being asking about your tastes, rather than aiming to satisfy mine. I'm sorry I haven't been making that clear, and if you think answering would accomplish nothing, or you simply don't want to say, I have no problem with that.

Rest assured I don't see it as your job to amuse me - I was simply interested, that is all.

[Noel Maurer]

I apologize, but I have to ask this.

Charlie, assuming that you are, in fact, reading this: do you watch the Wire?

If not, what did you think Carlos's videoclip was trying to say?

[Josh]

This is what he serves those subliterate motorheads and gear freaks.

Hey! Not *all* of us are subliterate!

(Cameron really is a treasure. He did some work for the New York Times a while back, but that seems to have been a flash in the pan.)

[Robert P.]

For some reason, the quote from Cameron reminded me of Peter Galison's book _Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps_ - a tour de force of historical synthesis that completely changed my perspective on late-19th and early-20th century physics.

[Will Baird]

Bummer about the paleochem, Carlos, but I am looking forward to the Russian/Ukrainian post.