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Get Out Your Monocle! Exploring the Past in the Public Domain

Switzerland, by Sir Frank Fox. 

Originally published by Adam and Charles Black in 1914. Published by Project Gutenberg for Kindle and in other file types. Free.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

If you limit yourself to reading just the ebooks available for free on the internet, as I have been doing lately, you wind up inhabiting the world prior to 1923. American copyright laws are complicated, but books published before that magical year, 90 years prior to this one, are in the public domain. It's about as close to time travel as you can reasonably get.

To really immerse yourself in the era, you can read the travelogues of Sir Frank Fox, a kind of early-twentieth century Bill Bryson. An Australian journalist who spent much of his life reporting for newspapers in London, he wrote books about the natural history, geography, and ethnography of various lands, and there are five of them—on Australia, Bulgaria, England, the Balkan Peninsula, and Switzerland—available at Project Gutenberg for free. For this review, I read Switzerland, published in 1914.

As a rule, one of the risks of inhabiting this pre-1923 world is drowning in a sea of unnecessary words. Today the fashion is to write with extreme clarity, projecting each scene into the reader's mind as if he or she were watching a movie, and to snip out all excess verbiage. Not a hundred years ago—reading Fox is a bit like codebreaking, with sentences that sometimes encompass eleven or twelve clauses and words that aren't used much anymore, like “waggish” and “beneficient.” His very first chapter includes a hilariously lengthy Socratic dialogue rebutting the idea that mountain people are more virtuous and vigorous than lowlanders, owing to some magical quality of the mountain air—not the introduction that a modern writer would use, but curiously charming nevertheless, once you adjust your ear to his style.

It's worth noting, too, that this pre-1923 world as represented by its literature is a pretty Anglocentric one. Fox's readers were British subjects, or former British subjects, so perhaps it's no surprise that he is eager to caricature “the Swiss race” and make his own sweeping generalizations about why they are the way they are, while simultaneously tearing down other sentimental depictions. And the chapter on Swiss prehistory is threaded with regular assertions that human society is on an ever-upward trend, with pathetic (yet noble) nomads at the bottom and the 1914 European at the crest.

But it's an interesting experience, revisiting the literary fashions and the inherited wisdom of a time not so long ago. To the modern reader interested in geography and ethnography, and not afraid to put on a monocle and go along for the ride, Switzerland is fun reading. The prehistory chapter includes a great summary of what was known about the villages-on-stilts that fringed many Swiss lakes in Celtic times. The chapter on local writers includes an anecdote about the time Byron, visiting the fashionable salons along Lake Geneva, attempted to scandalize polite society as he had in Britain, and failed. Apparently the Swiss found him tedious. And the chapter on the Alps, along with a compact treatise on the formation and decay of mountains, includes this note:

“M. Charles Rabot [a geographer and mountaineer] asserts that the glaciers in Argentina are also retreating, and surmises, from data perhaps not so well established, that there has been a general retreat of glaciers during the last half of the nineteenth century throughout Spitzenbergen, Iceland, Cetnral Asia, and Alaska. He suggests that the cause is a present tendency towards equalisation of the earth's temperature. Others more boldly affirm that the Swiss glaciers, as well as other great ice masses existing on the globe, are remnants of the last Ice Age, and are all doomed to disappear as the cycle works round for the full heat of the next Warm Age. But the disappearance, if it is to come, will not come quickly, and the doom of ice-climbing in Switzerland is too remote a threat to disturb the Alpinist.”

That passage falls with quite a different meaning on our ears today, and one of the great pleasures of reading Fox is looking for these harmonies and dissonances, the moments that reveal how much has stayed the same and how much has changed. If that sounds like fun to you, then there's a cache of free ebooks waiting for you on Fox's Gutenberg author page.

Happy time-traveling.

 

 

Veronique Greenwood is a former staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors, and her work has appeared in Scientific American, TIME.com, TheAtlantic.com, and others. Follow her on Twitter here.

 

eBooks and the democratization of crackpottery

Self-publishing to avoid peer review is now available to just about everyone.  Indivisible Earth nicely demonstrates a lot of what can go wrong.

 

Indivisible Earth: Consequences of Earth's Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant, by J. Marvin Herndon, edited by Lynn Margulis. Published by Thinker Media. Available for Kindle for $3.99.

Reviewed by John Timmer.

 Peer review is an inherently conservative process.  New ideas are compared to what we think we already know and, if they don't match up well, then the ideas' proponents can be in for a very rough time. Those on the fringes of science, who may struggle for years to get a single paper published by a journal, will often paint peer review as a stifling process that does little more than enforce a mindless orthodoxy. 

If you wanted to do an end-run on peer review and put your ideas out for public consideration, your options used to be pretty limited: pay a lot of money to self-publish a book that no one would buy. 

Digital media has changed that. Web pages are cheap, and can make psedoscience seem very polished. (Just look at the Electric Universe site, where a bunch of "comparative mythologists" will try to convince you that gravity has little to do with the large-scale structure of the cosmos.). And, as Amazon (and later Apple) opened the door to self-published eBooks, anyone with an idea that isn't getting respect via peer review could now place it before the a large potential audience.

J. Marvin Herndon has done just that.  Herndon is a physicist by training who, after spending time in the private sector, has turned his attention to planetary science. He has some ideas that, to put it mildly, are pretty fanciful. But, thanks to eBooks, he's now able to let those ideas float free of the burden of peer review. Indivisible Earth is one of several of the books Herndon has on offer, and its subtitle lays out why the scientific peerage might not greet it kindly: "Consequences of Earth's Early Formation as a Jupiter-Like Gas Giant."

The number of established scientific ideas Herndon would like to overthrow is staggering. Current models of planet formation (both rocky and gas giant)? Completely incompatible with Indivisible Earth. The formation of our Moon via collision? Presumably never happened (the Moon is never mentioned in the book).  The composition of the Earth? We've got it all wrong.  Plate tectonics?  A big mistake. The mantle convection that drives the plates and volcanic hot spots like Hawaii? Doesn't exist. The plate motion that creates earthquakes? There is no plate motion, silly.

Oh, yes, and most of the Earth's uranium has sunk to the core, where it's acting as a massive reactor, powering the planet's magnetic field. Herndon doesn't think small.

The writing itself is fine, in that it's easy to follow these ideas. It's just that the scientific reasoning has gaps you could drive an aircraft carrier through. I'll give just a few examples.

At some point in the past, Herndon realized that certain measurements of the Earth's properties matched up well with those of a class of meteorites called enstatite chondrites. Therefore, he concludes, Earth must have formed by the aggregation of these materials. To back this up, he shows a graph of the properties of enstatite chondrites vs. ordinary chondrites. 

But the graph itself makes one thing very obvious: ordinary chondrites, as their name implies, are much, much more common than enstatites. Suggesting the Earth somehow selectively aggregated from rare meteorites would, I would think, seem to demand some mechanism by which that selectivity took place. Herndon, apparently, considers mechanisms optional.

That's just warming up — he's still got all of plate tectonics to get rid of. 

Current models of gas giant formation indicate that these giant planets require a rocky core with a mass about 20 times that of Earth's before they can start a runaway accumulation of gas. Rather significantly, the Kepler planet-hunting telescope has recently found empirical evidence that these models are correct: gas giants only seem to form when there's a lot of rocky material around. Herndon thinks the early Earth must have been part of a gas giant and, to get there, he's forced to rely on a model that was state-of-the-art  in 1944. Everything we've learned since is simply ignored.

Once the Earth was at the center of a gas giant, Herndon thinks the intense pressure of the massive atmosphere compressed the gas giant's rocky core so that it shrunk to the point where its surface was completely covered by what we now call continental plates. In other words, the entire surface of our present planet was once much smaller, and all land mass.

I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of this, figuring out the radius of a sphere that would have the same surface area as our current land mass. It was only half the planet's present size. Using that radius to calculate the sphere's volume, it's possible to figure out the density (assuming a roughly current mass).  That produced a figure six times higher than the Earth's current density — and about three times that of pure lead. I realize that a lot of the material in the Earth can be compressed under pressure, but I'm pretty skeptical that it can compress that much. And, more importantly, if Herndon wants to convince anyone that it did, this density difference is probably the sort of thing he should be addressing. He's not bothered; the idea that the continents once covered the surface of the Earth was put forward in 1933, and that's good enough for him.

To get rid of the gas, Herndon posits that our Sun went through what's called a T Tauri phase, where the process of gravitational collapse drives a strong stellar wind that could blast off the gas giant's atmosphere. But that phase often takes place before planet formation (half the T Tauri stars we know about still have protoplanetary disks). Did our own Sun go through this phase after planet formation was complete? Who knows — Herndon certainly doesn't feel compelled to provide any evidence.

With the gas gone and its pressure relieved, the Earth could expand, with the continents separating out as it did.  This, for Herndon, creates the illusion of continental drift.  The mid-ocean rifts? They're just cracks left over from this expansion. The subduction zones deep in the ocean? Same thing. The former subduction zones that have ended up being driven to the surface by tectonic action?  Well, those would be hard to place within Herndon's model, so they never get mentioned.

There are so many issues like that that it's not even clear that Indivisible Earth belongs at Download the Universe —we're focused on science eBooks, and this clearly isn't part of the scientific process that most of us recognize. At the same time, crackpots and fringe ideas have been a part of the social activity we call science for so long that I suspect they predate the use of the term. In that way, the book could provide a valuable example: This is what crackpottery looks like, and shows why peer review is important.

It's also an interesting footnote in the history of fringe ideas. For reasons that aren't at all clear (given that she was ostensibly a biologist), the book was edited by the late Lynn Margulis. Margulis is rightly famous for taking a fringe idea — eukaryotic cells contain compartments that were once free-living cells — and, with the backing of data she and others generated, making it a central part of modern biology.

Armed with the prestige that she rightly earned, however, Margulis spent much of the rest of her career poking her thumbs in the eyes of the establishment that had given her a hard time, pushing forward fringe ideas even when they were obviously incompatible with data we already had. She suggested that HIV might not be infectious and pushed through a paper that suggested insects have an evolutionary history that's is impossible to square with what we know of their genomes. Her willingness to advance the clearly off-target ideas in Indivisible Earth is a classic example of Margulis in action, and provides an interesting case study in that sense.

She wasn't alone in helping Herndon, though, as the book is credited to a publisher, Thinker Media, Inc.  As near as I can tell, Thinker has a nice Facebook page, but hasn't bothered to actually set up a company website yet (see update below). The company claims to provide various services to authors for a cut of the profits, rather than for a payment from the author, as is the case with traditional vanity presses. 

If its business model has been updated for the digital age, the services the company provides haven't. On some levels, Indivisible Earth fails as an ebook. It's got a number of color diagrams and images, all of which have extensive captions.  But its primary platform appears to be the Amazon Kindle, which means it really should be readable on a black-and-white e-ink screen. The diagrams are not, and their captions are displayed in a light grey that's nearly impossible to make out on the screens.  I ended up having to download it onto my phone to complete the review.

Indivisible Earth is thus a bad ebook with bad scientific content. But for someone wanting a glimpse into what goes on at the far fringes of the scientific endeavor, it might be worth the low cost of entry.

UPDATE: Someone who works with Thinker Media informed me that they recently changed their domain name, and that the company's new site is up and running. 

John Timmer spent 15 years doing scientific research before deciding he'd rather write about it. He's now the science editor of the technology news site  Ars Technica. He received a Kindle on the day Amazon first introduced them, and has been following eBook and eReader technology ever since.

Wonders of Geology: Getting High On Mountains

Wonders of Geology; An Aerial View of America's Mountains by Michael Collier. Published by Mikaya Press. iPad (iOS4.2 or later required), $12.99.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

“All true paths lead through mountains.” When I was growing up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, this line from the poems of Gary Snyder was a family touchstone. It probably came via my dad, who is mountain-obsessed, a chaser of summits and cirques who has hiked and trekked on five continents and now lives in the Alps. I've felt vaguely uneasy the past eight years or so, living here among the extremely low hills of the Eastern United States, and the photographs of Michael Collier, in the Wonders of Geology app, bring it all back: Yes, mountains really are where it's at.

The app was written and narrated by Collier, a geologist and physician who has been taking photographs from the cockpit of his 1955 Cessna professionally for more than 40 years. Based on his book Over the Mountains (An Aerial View of Geology), it is laid out in several sections that first teach you how to read a landscape's history from geological cues, then lead you through various American ranges to see for yourself how the mountains were formed.

$12.99 might seem steep, when there are plenty of ebooks out there for a buck. But this app is worth it. You'll be revisiting it for a long time, even after you've absorbed its lessons.

Most of the information comes to you in Collier's own rich, craggy voice. He describes the Earth's inner workings while a seemingly endless parade of fantastic scenes slips by--dunes, alluvial fans, thick, crystalline glaciers. The images are stunning, saturated with color and full of light. In one of my favorites, a Sierra valley cradles a string of glacial lakes that reflect a fierce gray-blue sky. In another, a peak in Morro Bay is bathed in the soft pink of a sunrise, and you can zoom in to see the ripples of the surf.

Collier is a deft and expressive narrator, peppering his explanations with charming turns of phrase. Tectonic plates bomb around the Earth's surface like “irresponsible bumper cars”; ridges caused by spreading centers ring the planet “like the stitches on a baseball.” He shifts expertly from the profound to the colloquial. “Plate tectonic theory has ushered in a new consciousness of the Earth's age,” he says, with grave wonder. Then his voice slips into a smile, and he quips: “How much time we talkin' bout? Lots.”

In fact, Wonders of Geology is less an ebook than a kind of hand-held, interactive exhibit, with ever-present audio guide. Photos and explanatory graphics outnumber pages of text many times over. When you do come across a page of prose, it's almost an interruption. I found myself thinking petulantly, Wait, I have to read this? Why aren't you reading it to me?!

Occasional textual interruptions aside, the app is a delight. I particularly enjoyed seeing glamor shots of mountains I know well, like the Panamints of Death Valley and the sere Eastern Sierra, where I learned to core bristlecone pines as a high school kid. The app includes so many ranges that any fan of North American mountains should be able to find their own familiar faces.

To be honest, though, I don't remember these mountains ever reaching quite the height of gorgeousness evident in Collier's photographs. Maybe you have to be several hundred feet up in a 57-year old biplane to get this level of insight. Maybe, it occurs to me, this is how my dad experiences them: intoxicatingly beautiful, mountains as drug.

 

Veronique Greenwood is a staff writer at DISCOVER Magazine. She writes about everything from caffeine chemistry to cold cures to Jelly Belly flavors. Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, TheAtlantic.com, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter .

A Time Machine for the Face of Earth

Fragile Earth. Published by HarperCollins. iTunes, $3.95.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Infinity can be cruel. Tablet computers have become so powerful that it's practically impossible to reach the limits of what you can do while creating an ebook. You can embed videos, sprinkle music and voices here and there, let people post a book-inspired thought to Twitter, manipulate a simulated bat, incorporate an encyclopedia of information about chemistry, and on and on. Unfortunately, this virtual infinity of possibilities may leave ebook creators with a virtual infinity of work. Some science ebooks we've reviewed rise to that challenge. They sport a well-integrated collection of features. Other ebooks seem like wild acts of desperation. And others still are acts of wise self-restraint. Yes, you could make a science ebook that does many things poorly. Or you could make a science ebook that does one thing well. One such ebook is Fragile Earth.

Fragile Earth got its start in 2006 as a beautifully disturbing coffee table book published by Collins, filled with satellite images showing how humanity is reworking the planet. "Before" and "after" photographed were paired to show how deforestation, climate change, and other factors have changed the face of Earth. Now Collins has turned it into an app. The Youtube video below gives you a good run-through of its features. The most important one is that instead of putting images side by side, the app does what a book cannot: it lays them on top of each other. You can then use a screen button to slide one picture away to reveal the other one underneath. I'm not quite sure of the visual neuroscience behind this effect, but it works very well. Seeing the same landscape in Alaska covered by glaciers a few decades ago now turned to mostly bare Earth is a sobering experience.

Fragile Earth is not perfect, though. The book and the app alike are presented as a way to see how we're changing the planet. But the app is loaded with other images that show natural changes, such as the devastation caused by the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Combining these images together makes no thematic sense; the only thing that joins them together is an elegant slider. There's no introduction where you might find an explanation for what a volcano and the deforested Amazon have in common. Instead, Fragile Earth has short caption that describe the specifics of each set of images but leave you wanting more.

That's too bad, because Fragile Earth illustrates on a profoundly important fact about our species. In 2005, Bruce Wilkinson, a University of Michigan geologist, published a paper called, "Humans as geologic agents: A deep-time perspective." [free pdf] "Humans are now an order of magnitude more important at moving sediment than the sum of all other natural processes operating on the surface of the planet," Wilkinson concluded. We're also having other huge effects on the planet--acidifying the oceans faster than at any time in the last 300 million years, for example. Humanity isn't just leaving a mark on the Earth you can see from space. It's a mark that will be preserved in the fossil record for millions of years to come.

Before and after pictures can go a long way to showing the magnitude of that change. But without context, they can also oversimplify it. If you were to select a before and after pair of pictures of glaciers in the Himalayas, for example, you would not see a frightening retreat over the past decade. In fact, you might not see any change at all. Such specific cases are ripe for cherry-picking by global warming denialists. The reason that this one case does not refute global warming because of the overwhelming evidence of changes caused by global warming on a planetary scale--such as the overall loss of ice from the entire Arctic Ocean.

Fragile Earth would thus be a better app if its pictures had more context and a more coherent point. But I'm also glad that its creators didn't try to grasp for infinity.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including A Planet of Viruses

Slog of the Dinosaurs

March of the Dinosaurs. 2011 by Touch Press. iPad. App webpage.

Reviewed by Brian Switek

Dinosaurs have changed a hell of a lot since I was a kid. My beloved “Brontosaurus” was beheaded and recast as Apatosaurus, Torosaurus might just be the spectacular mature form of Triceratops, and we now know that many dinosaurs were covered in lavish, colorful plumage. I like it. There are plenty of complaints about how paleontologists are ruining cherished childhood memories by altering our understanding of dinosaur lives, but all the immature whining misses the grander point. We know more about dinosaurs lives than ever before, and the more we learn, the stranger and more wonderful the creatures become.

Dinosaurs trodding through the snow is one of my favorite new images. For as long as I can remember, Stegosaurus and company were presented as inhabitants of steaming jungles choked with ferns, cycads, and horsetails. Rudolph Zallinger’s gorgeous mural The Age of Reptiles at Yale and the short, dinosaur-filled segment of Disney’s Fantasia left no doubt in my young mind that dinosaurs lived in a seemingly endless global summer. But this was a holdover from the idea that dinosaurs were sluggish ectotherms that required considerable heat to start up every morning. Not only have such swamp-bound monsters been given a makeover, but a better understanding of the habitats dinosaurs occupied has altered our previous understanding of the world tyrannosaurs, ceratopsians, and their ilk lived in.

Continuing research in Alaska, for example, has even turned up dinosaurs which lived within the Arctic circle. These dinosaurs were not outcasts or vacationers, but part of complex communities which permanently made their homes up north, including everything from the svelte tyrannosaur Gorgosaurus to the feathered, switchblade-clawed raptor Troodon and plenty of Pachyrhinosaurus – a magnificent horned dinosaur with bony hooks jutting from its frill and a big, lumpy boss on its nose. And while prehistoric Alaska was a titch watmer than today, there was still snow and many months of darkness. Here, dinosaurs once slogged through Cretaceous snowstorms.

A paleo drama about these chilled archosaurs – titled March of the Dinosaurs – was released by Impossible Pictures last year. It was another Walking With Dinosaurs wannabe – all computer-generated violence, very little science. I love a feather-covered, acrobatic Albertosaurus sailing through the air with claws extended as much as anyone else, but, without any explanation of how we have come to know of this animal’s existence, the dinosaur is just another special effect. But when fellow Download the Universe contributor Deborah Blum told me there was a March of the Dinosaurs app for the iPad, I felt a stirring of hope. Maybe, with the interactivity an iPad allows, some of the glossy effects might be combined with some scientific explanation.

Have I Got A Moon Rock For You...

The Case of the Missing Moon Rocks, written and illustrated by Joe Kloc. The Atavist, 2012 (Atavist app for iPhone or iPad,/Kindle/Nook/iBook/Kobo)

The sheer noise and spray of rhetorical fæces produced by the swarms of pygmy wretches infecting the U.S. political system these days makes it hard, sometimes, to reconstruct the full metal weirdness of the state of the nation way back when.  That would have been my teen years, in the ‘70s, that time when those of us who aspired to the writing life had to buy our slates and no. 2 chisels directly from actual carbon-based life forms.  We did so while watching the triumph and collapse of the King Rat of crazed, feral politicians, the 37^th of his office, our own unindicted co-conspirator, Richard Milhouse Nixon.  (Cue this number.)

It’s truly hard to convey just how evil, absurd, and oddly grand Nixon was to those who have only experienced the banal corruptions and miseries of the current scene, but the trademark Nixonian mix of paranoia, calculation, and genuine aspiration to statesmanship produced public theater the likes of which I do not think we’ll see again in my lifetime.  Just how odd?  Well, to get a taste, just a hint of the nooks and crannies of history into which even Tricky Dickie’s most trivial by-blows could lead, check out Joe Kloc’s tale of one man’s pursuit of what might be termed Nixon’s moon-struck folly.

Dazzling Material, Lackluster Story

Gems and Jewels, by Lance Grande and Allison Augustyn. Touch Press, 2011. (For iPad)

Reviewed by Virginia Hughes (guest reviewer)

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I found myself atop a dirt mound, surrounded on all sides by green hills and trees, watching a man in a pit.

Wearing a blue hardhat and matching shirt, he was slowly, steadily, tediously swinging a shovel into the muddy walls around him, paying no mind to the gawking tourists above. All of his attention was fixed on unearthing some shiny yellow nuggets: imperial topaz.

The gemstone, which can range in color from dingy champagne to deep tangerine, is found almost exclusively here in Minas Gerais (Portuguese for “general mines”), Brazil. My tour guide said it fetches some $2,000 per carat. 

For all I learned that day about the country’s landscape, economy and the harsh business of mining, I didn’t entirely grasp the natural science behind these sparkling commodities. What created the imperial topaz? Why is it so rare? Why is it sometimes yellow and sometimes red? When I got home, I turned to the Gems and Jewels app on my iPad to fill in the blanks.

Doomsday Deflected

Planet Killers:  A Spine-Tingling Look at Near Earth Objects, Mass Extinctions, and the Controversial Science of Planetary Defense, by Tad Friend, Byliner Originals, 2011. ($0.99: iTunes, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google, Sony, Kobo)

            One of the joys of borrowing a stranger’s cabin comes from the serendipity of someone else’s taste in books.  Years ago, in a corner of the hills east of Lake Winnipesaukee, I picked up a Stephen King anthology.  I’ve long since forgotten most of what I read there, but King’s introduction stuck in my mind.  The novella, he wrote, (I paraphrase from battered memory) was not so much a literary form as a kind of writer’s banana republic, a treacherous, alien territory into which innocents pass, never to escape unscathed.  How and when to turn the plot; the number of characters one can develop; the pace; the amount of exposition the piece can tolerate – all these tasks shift as the writer moves from either the expansive canvas of a full book or the utter economy short stories demand.  And until you’ve actually entered into that strange country, Novella, King warned, you have no idea how twisted are its paths.

            Tad Friend dares such dangers in what amounts to a non-fiction novella, Planet Killers, published in the Byliner Originals series.    It tells of the threat posed by crud from space that could strike the earth, and of attempts by a few scientists and engineers to figure out how to dodge such bullets.  That'’s a fine premise, certainly, and of course anything that brings together dinosaurs, great balls of fire, and wild but plausible schemes with names like “gravity tractors” has got all the elements of a riveting read. 

There's a bit of a wobble right at the start, though, as Friend recalls a tequila-fueled milliennial New Year’s Eve spent waiting for sunrise on the Yucatan Peninsula before leaping, abruptly, to the scene  65 million years ago, when it was a skosh more exciting in those parts, what with the dinosaur-destoying asteroid splashing down just offshore. From that rather jolting beginning, we settle into a story built on two pillars: a character sketch of the always enjoyable Rusty Schweikart, the Apollo astronaut, as Friend reports, most likely to show up at a New Age conference; and a loose narrative of a two day meeting by a NASA advisory committee debating strategies for “planetary defense” – basically how to avoid getting whacked by a major earth-crossing asteroid in the future.

Those two threads unreel rather calmly, given that our spines are supposed to be tingled.  Schweickart and his co-conspirators fear that most decisions makers (and everyone else) are simply unaware of the existential threat posed by a major impact, and of the probabilities involved.  Friend detours briefly into a natural history of asteroids and impacts.  We get hints of the science involved – a mention of complex orbits; brief discussions of the technologies that might deflect really big rocks – that gravity tractor, for one, a spaceship that comes to rest close enough to a dangerous rock long enough before any predicted collision to permit the probe’s gravity to nudge the object onto a safe trajectory.  In his best set piece, Friend manages to get inside his hero’s head– capturing Schweickart’s evolution from fighter pilot to save-the-earth crusader, in a process that began on his untethered space walk, when he suddenly felt the fragility of “pale blue dot” below him.  Such anecdotes ornament Friend's reporting on the NASA committee deliberations, which culminate in a modest plan for planetary defense:  spend 3 billion dollars over the next decade; launch a new space telescope designed to detection of potentially dangerous asteroids, and test the most promising couple of non-nuclear deflection technologies. 

That recommendation comes as something of an anti-climax, but that’s par for the course for apocalyptic non-fiction, honestly told:  what can be done is often less thrilling than what may happen if we do nothing.  But the deeper disappointment with Planet Killers comes its own uncertainty about what it wants to be -- and that literary neurosis, in turn, derives from one of the less obvious challenges that come with writing into  e-media.

    That is: Planet Killers is an example of one of the two distinct species of works evolving in the midst of the e-book transformation.  The gaudier one comes with the application of computing to the text.  Think iPad apps, which allow creators to construct works that offer readers the ability to perform actions on and through the words and images of conventional tales.  See, for example, Deborah Blum’s review of The Elements, something of a type-specimen of the form.  From the scribbler’s point of view, app books also entail new models of working that move towards the ways movies are made, in which the writer is only one, and not always the central creative authority.

The other enabling e-technology preserves the author’s pride and power.  Digitization and the ‘net combine to provide plain e-texts with a new channel for publication and distribution of what remain conventional works made up of words and plain images.  The cost of such distribution is effectively zero – and while that’s so obvious it hardly bears noting, it still adds up to a genuinely new opportunity for writers. You may remember that dim, distant past of, say, six or seven years ago, when the length at which a writer could tell a story was fixed by the venue, a few thousand words for a magazine, many more for a book, with almost nothing possible in between.  If you wanted to treat a subject that might not sustain between hard covers, yet offered more richness than could fit into two-pages-plus-the-jump of a magazine…too bad.  

 Now?  The ‘net doesn’t care if it has to gulp down 5,000 words, 10,000, 25,000 -- whatever it takes to do justice to the material at hand. But there’s a catch.  A 15,000 word piece is not simply a magazine feature at three or four times the usual length.  It’s not a baby book either.  Rather, such works demand formal structures of their own, with particular demands of organization, of narrative depth, of pace, and so on.  Before you know it, you’ve drifted across the border that King warned about.  You’ve entered (non-fiction) Novella, and, if you are unwary, it’s terribly easy to wander down the wrong path.

            Which, by the long road home, brings us back to Planet Killers.  The problem?  There just isn’t that much there, there.  Stripped to its narrative scaffold, all you really get are three steps on a short journey:  the book begins with the threat of a big rock falling from the sky.  We learn that some folks are working on it, without gaining any real depth on what those characters actually did to come up with their ideas.  And then we are baldly told that there’s some agreement on an, incomplete response to the challenge. No great obstacles face any of Friend’s people; no event happens within the story that provides any sense of risk or danger; there are no ideas sufficiently developed within the text that yield some thrill, an Aha! that lingers for more than minutes after the last swipe across the screen.  In the end, Planet Hunters reads not like a work written to the length it told its author it needed to be, and much more like a magazine article blown up to the dignity of an independent e-text.

            Thus the fate of the unwary who venture into the Republic of Novella.  The rise of the e-text makes getting there a doddle.  Getting out, though? No easier than it’s ever been.  

Image:  August Müller, The Diary Entry, by 1885.

Tom Levenson writes books (most recently Newton and the Counterfeiter) and makes films, about science, its history, and whatever else catches his magpie's love of shiny bits.  His work has been honored by a Peabody, a National Academies Science Communication and an AAAS Science Journalism Award, among others.  By day he professes at MIT, where he directs the Graduate Program in Science Writing.