Through The Sandglass

New book review by Andrew Goudie

Well, sometimes you just have to throw modesty to the dusty winds and shamelessly take on a little self-promotion. The desert book was just reviewed for The Geological Society by Andrew Goudie, Emeritus Professor in Geography at Oxford, a leading international authority on arid lands. The review is available online (it will be published in Geoscientist in a couple of months), but here it is:

This handsome book is informative, well-illustrated, broad-ranging, and clever. The author, a geologist and professional writer, who in 2009 wrote a well-received book, ‘Sand: A Journey through Science and the Imagination’, has managed to weave together a whole array of different strands that serve to make deserts what they are. 

Using some of his own field experiences, coupled with a wide reading of the literature, he has succeeded in covering the science of deserts (including climate, geomorphology, and wildlife), while at the same time discussing the human inhabitants of deserts, art and literature, and some of the arresting characters who risked their lives in discovering and traversing the world’s dryands.

It aims, as the author explains, to ‘provide an evocation, a celebration, a consideration of our response to the desert, the idea of the desert’, for ‘deserts are landscapes of the mind as much as physical realities, places of metaphor and myth.’ Using examples from central Australia, the Namib, the Gobi, the Sahara, the Mojave and the Atacama, it examines such landscapes in the context of their place in history, as birthplaces of civilizations, evolutionary adaptations, art, ideology and philosophy. To be sure, it does not cover everything relating to this vast topic, but it provides a superb introduction to what makes deserts so fascinating and alluring.

To give an example of how different material is cleverly combined, consider his treatment of flash floods. The climatic and geomorphological conditions that produce them are described, there are some graphic descriptions from the literature, but there is also a description of an explorer who was killed by a flash flood in the Algerian Sahara, Isabelle Eberhardt. We learn that she probably had syphilis, was illegitimate, was a habitual user of drugs, was highly promiscuous, and cut her hair like a man.

Equally, some pervasive surface features - stone pavements - are explained scientifically, but are also placed in the context of the disturbance of desert surfaces in the Libyan Deserts by the narrow tyres of the Model T Fords used by great desert explorers like Ralph Alger Bagnold. Similarly, dust storms are introduced by a consideration of the life and writings of Mildred Cable and her colleagues in the Gobi, but this is followed seamlessly by a discussion of how the global importance of dust storms has been revealed by the latest satellite-borne sensors.

Lovers of deserts will love this book and will also learn much from it.

Reviewed by Andrew Goudie, University of Oxford.

 

[Image from NASA: A dust storm was blowing large quantities of dust out over the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea on Saturday, December 13, 2003. In this true-color composite scene, acquired by the Terra and AquaModerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments, the dust storm (light brown pixels) can be seen extending from the Arabian Peninsula (left) eastward over the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman toward the Arabian Sea. Parts of southern Afghanistan and much of Pakistan are also covered by airborne dust.]

The Desert: Lands of Lost Borders

 

The book is now available in the UK and the US! I have to say that the publishers, Reaktion Books (and the University of Chicago Press in the US), have done a beautiful job – they accepted all my illustrations and they are spread, largely in colour, through the text. On Amazon, there’s the “look inside” feature, so you can get a sense of what I mean. I only hope that the reader will feel that the words live up to the visuals. The quality of the printing does, however, make for a rather weighty tome…

Anyway, as a taster, here’s an extract from the preface, starting with a quote from that brilliant chronicler of the US south-western deserts (and, some would say, the original “eco-terrorist”), Edward Abbey:

But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite . . . Since you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets, I have tried to create a world of words in which the desert figures more as a medium than as material . . . evocation has been the goal.

I am no Edward Abbey, but this resonates. I am, after all, a geologist, and this book will contain plenty of material on the desert as a fundamental player in the workings of our planet. But my interest in the desert extends far beyond the science, and it is my hope that this book will also provide an evocation, a celebration, a consideration of our response to the desert, the idea of the desert. And not only ours, the outsiders, but the responses and ideas of our billion companions for whom the arid lands are home.

There is a Tuareg saying, ‘there are lands full of water for the well-being of the body, and lands full of sand for the well-being of the soul.’ The desert is a place of contrasts, of extremes, a place of staggering beauty and unimaginable violence, a place where the margins between success and failure, between life and death are slim, a place of timelessness and ephemerality, a place of good and evil. The desert is a place, in reality and in our minds, of tension, of conflict between civilization and the wilderness. Arid lands have always been – and continue to be – a challenge, both to those who would ‘conquer’ them and those who would make a living within them. Historically, culturally and politically, the desert has played a leading role in, and not simply provided the stage or the backdrop for, dramas of nations, species and individuals.

The next book

The Greek word for 'desert' is eremos, from which comes 'hermit,' and that is exactly what I have been for quite a while. The word is appropriate because I have been chained to the word processor and surrounded by piles of research materials working on a book on the desert – or, more accurately, ‘The Desert.’

It is now more than two years since I was approached, while still working in Indonesia, by an independent UK publisher for a book on deserts. I explained that I did not want to do another coffee-table book of glorious photographs of landscapes and strange critters (although they are, in moderation, inevitable), and, thankfully, that was not what they were interested in either. What intrigued me was the idea of ‘The Desert’ in our imagination and reality and the conflicts between the views of the outsiders (us and Western ‘civilization’ in general) and those of the the insiders, the people for whom our planet’s arid lands are home. As an environment that participates intimately and dramatically in the earth system, the desert’s geological and geomorphological processes create the stage and the backdrop against which ecosystems and cultures have evolved, and there is a fair amount of earth science in the book. But there is much more and, as I continued to think this through and research, the scale of the ‘much more’ threatened to become overwhelming. I knew that I had taken on a herculean – albeit fascinating – task, but as the ideas, the characters, and the topics began to explode, the challenge of creating a coherent narrative became exhausting. However, summoning extraordinary self-discipline, resigning myself to an eremitic existence for months, and setting a target of 2,000 words per day, meant that I have now completed and submitted the ‘manuscript’ (total word-count somewhat in excess of that originally envisioned). There’s a lot of editing work still to do (compiling the index looms ominously), but it is now my intention to re-engage with what I believe to be the real world, post more regularly and catch up with the geoblogosphere that the hermit had more or less abandoned for the duration. I understand that the book (whose exact title has yet to be decided) will be published in the autumn of this year, and more details will be forthcoming.

Writing the book has been a roller-coaster ride, at the same time draining and stimulating. I have learned an incredible amount and encountered extraordinary characters, some of whom I had known about, some of whom were new to me. In particular, among the extensive reading that has been involved, I have enjoyed the luminous writing of Mary Austin (1868-1934) on the American southwest, its landscapes and denizens. I became fascinated by her description of the ‘lost borders’ of the desert, a concept that resonates with so many aspects of the nature of the environment. In The Land of Little Rain, her opening words are as follows:

East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.

Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.

And here, as a taster, is the summary of the book from the original proposal:

Arid environments cover a quarter of our planet’s land area and are home to some half a billion people. They are landscapes of extremes and contrasts, constant change, metaphors and myths, landscapes of the mind as well as physical reality. “The desert” as an idea has long captured the Western imagination, but in ways that too often fail to capture the true scope and diversity of the reality or the viewpoint of peoples for whom the desert is home. This book attempts to bridge the gaps, both scientific and cultural, between perception and reality, while celebrating the fascination, the excitement, the contrasts, and the importance of arid lands and their inhabitants. It is intended that the book will be entertaining as well as informative – and surprising.

A book about the desert is, as much as anything, a book about water. Of course, “arid” implies an absence of water, but that absence is rarely absolute. Unlike forests or the ocean, the desert has no borders, but rather transitions over which the relative absence of water changes, imperceptibly but vitally. It is these lost borders, these desert margins, that provide the stage for great changes – human, environmental, ecological, geological – today and throughout the history of the planet and its life. The desert margins are in a constant state of flux; periods in which the hyper-arid desert cores have shrunk have offered corridors where previously there were only barriers, permitting the great journeys of human evolution and migration. The ebb and flow of aridity, the changing availability of water, continues to play a vital role in today’s social, political, and environmental arenas.

The extremes and contrasts of our planet’s deserts are both inorganic and organic, and work on all scales. The geological processes whereby the diversity of the desert landscape is sculpted operate with sudden violence and with indiscernible slowness. Desert life, from the microbial to the mammalian, has adapted to deal with extremes of temperature and aridity, often in extraordinary ways. And it is the scale of the desert, the “infinite presence”, that has captured imaginations and created theologies.

There is an intimate relationship between the desert and our environmental and cultural heritage, but that relationship varies profoundly according to the context. The desert as conceived and viewed from the “concrete deserts” of Chicago or Milan is a very different place to that of the Bedouin or the nomads of the Gobi, and this book attempts to capture and illustrate those contrasts. Western desert stories are about exploration of the exotic and the hostile, and the making of maps, but the stories of peoples for whom the desert is home are about water and their maps are songlines. And yet, despite these differences, the fascination of the desert has long been a source of inspiration in the imaginations of both outsiders and insiders, albeit expressed in different ways. The beauty and romance of the desert may not be exactly that of the Western imagination, but it is nevertheless a powerful concept that has stimulated a wealth of art and literature across cultures and throughout history, from Deuteronomy to The English Patient, from Aboriginal dreaming to Dali.

Arid and infertile though deserts may be, they have, nevertheless, been the birthplaces of critical evolutionary adaptations, civilisations, agricultural and social progress – and ideologies. And difficult though they may be to define, the active roles that changing deserts play in the evolution of our climate and society demonstrate that thinking about arid lands and their future requires a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary approach, through time and space. This book attempts to at least tell the stories that illustrate the basis for such an approach.

 

George Steinmetz

This is a glorious, spectacular book.

Steinmetz's images from a paraglider provide a unique view of some of our planet's most beautiful landscapes, somehow a link between satellite views and "ground truth." I don't do commercials on this blog, but I can only recommend this - it's remarkably good value for the quality of the images and the stunning scope.

Suna

 
The calligraphy above translates from the Japanese as “sand sand sand sand.” Why my sudden interest in suna, as the Japanese word is transcribed? Simply because I very much appreciate that the first (and, so far, only) foreign translation of the book has now been published, and, being back in London, I now have the pleasure of holding a copy in my hands. And what a strange experience that is – something so intimately familiar, yet so inaccessibly alien:

 
It is a beautifully produced hardback publication (translated by Yumiko Hayashi and published by Tsukiji-Shokan), more compact than the US or UK editions. And it has what is now the third different cover graphic, and a separate wrap-around:

It, of course, starts from what is, for us, the back, a flip through the pages yielding only the occasional glimpse of familiarity – the illustrations:

And, having flipped for the first time, a sudden sense of alarm arose – where are the plates? A second flip revealed that they are indeed there, but all bound in at the very beginning (the back), before anything else.

So there it is, a fascinating symbol, an elegant example of Japanese script with its calligraphic variations. This instantly reminded me of one of the many personal discoveries made during the research for Sand, the strange, often surreal, yet compelling book by Kono Abe and film by Hiroshi Teshigahara, Suna no onna, “Woman of the Dunes.” Sometimes translated as “Woman in the Dunes,” the original title is, more accurately, simply “Sand Woman.”  

Here’s what I briefly wrote in Chapter 5:

Woman in the Dunes, the 1964 film by Hiroshi Teshigahara, won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for two Oscars. Based on the novel by Kobo Abe, the setting is the sweeping wilderness of sand dunes along the Japanese coast at Tottori. An amateur insect collector finds himself abducted and consigned to cohabit with a woman whose crumbling house lies at the bottom of a deep depression in the dunes; she exists “only for the purpose of clearing away the sand.” The sand constantly threatens the house, an outpost on the edge of a village, “already corroded by the sand,” whose way of life is defined by fighting the dunes and selling the salt-tainted sand—illegally—to construction companies. In both the book and the film, sand is the enemy but also the central character. The meticulous cinematography and Abe’s writing beautifully document sand grains and their movement: liquid avalanches descending on the house, windblown grains, and the forms of shifting dunes. The book is a lesson in the behaviors of granular materials. And, inevitably, the sand is a powerful metaphor for time: “Monotonous weeks of sand and night had gone by.”

Looking at various original film posters and book covers, there it is, in yet further variations, the symbol that I have now become quite fascinated by:

So, my thanks to the Japanese publishers – and their readers – for their interest and my novel experience. And, if any readers of this blog could provide me with a translation of what, in particular, the wrap-around says, I would be most interested!

A book I look forward to reading

I have referred several times in the past to Orrin H. Pilkey, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology at Duke University. Now, together with colleagues from the US and Northern Ireland, he has published what promises to be an informative, entertaining, and provocative read - The World's Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shoreline. 

I haven't, of course, got my hands on a copy yet, but a review in the New York Times simply confirms that anything by Pilkey is required reading. The review is titled "Shorelines, Sandy or Otherwise, That May Not Last." The conclusion echoes the issue that I posted on a couple of months ago:

But, the authors conclude, unless society chooses beaches over buildings the result will be a world in which parks like the National Seashores retain natural beaches, but beach resorts elsewhere are “heavily walled and beachless.” Rising seas will make sand-pumping operations “untenable,” they predict, and tourists will amuse themselves by “promenading on top of a seawall” — already the principal activity in too many coastal resorts.

If they are right, by then the beaches this book describes will be a nostalgic memory.

The book is published by the University of California Press, to whom I will ever be grateful for publishing mine, and the New York Times review is by Cornelia Dean, whose own book, "Against the Tide: the Battle for America's Beaches," also falls into the required reading category.

It's a sandpile world

 
One of the – many – entertaining research themes for my book was the role that sand plays in the imagery of our imaginations. Large numbers, very small things, ephemerality and change, time and eternity – and unpredictability. The icon of this blog, the sandglass, is an immediately accessible laboratory for thinking about many of these things – I always take along one from my collection when I’m giving a talk, a deceptively simple illustration of complex things. The most interesting part of a sandglass is, of course, the lower chamber, the growing pile of sand, the tumbling of a single grain, the sudden avalanches. Sandpiles provided, both literally and figuratively, the basis for the extraordinary book by the physicist, Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality; in an earlier post, I wrote a little about this book and the idea that our brains operate in the realm of self-organized criticality, cascades of neuronal activity behaving like avalanches down a pile of sand. And so, when I saw an article from the Seed Magazine website titled “On adapting to sandpiles,” I was naturally intrigued.

The article is, I discovered, an interview with Joshua Cooper Ramo, discussing the thesis of his book, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It (2009). Ramo is a widely respected “strategic thinker” about the state of the world; he was Foreign Editor at Time Magazine before taking up his current role as Managing Director of Kissinger Associates, one of those global business/politics/strategy advisory organisations, founded by the eponymous Henry, whose day-to-day activities and clients are distinctly inscrutable (the only website I could find for “Kissinger Associates” is for a software company in Pennsylvania, owned by Darrell K.). The cast of characters at the New York consulting Kissinger Associates is lengthy and illustrious and their activities the subject of some discussion, but that’s not my point here. As the editorial review on Amazon states, Ramo’s book (which I will readily admit I haven’t read) addresses the idea that:

The traditional physics of power has been replaced by something radically different. In The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Cooper Ramo puts forth a revelatory new model for understanding our dangerously unpredictable world. Drawing upon history, economics, complexity theory, psychology, immunology, and the science of networks, he describes a new landscape of inherent unpredictability--and remarkable, wonderful possibility.

The introduction to the Seed interview runs as follows:

Joshua Cooper Ramo, managing director of Kissinger Associates, believes that we live in a “revolutionary age” defined by problems whose complexity, unpredictability, and interconnectedness increasingly defy our efforts at control. Global threats such as terrorism, pandemics, financial meltdown, and climate change, according to Ramo, demand a systems perspective that draws upon chaos science, complexity theory, and the theory of disruptive innovation. In his 2009 book, The Age of the Unthinkable, he calls for nothing less than a “complete reinvention of our ideas of security,” even the reversal of a “couple of millennia of Western intellectual habits.”

My immediate reaction to this is “fine, but ever since the popularisation of the strict science of chaos theory, far too much has been made of its potential applicability to almost everything, particularly by endless business gurus.” The imagery is seductive, but fidelity to the science is questionable at best.

But then imagery is an immensely potent stimulator of thinking and a powerful means of generating alternative ways of doing it. And, naturally, I’m all for sand imagery, so where is Ramo going with this? Here’s the relevant section from the interview:

You’ve often invoked a pile of sand as a metaphor for today’s complex world. What do you mean by that?
Think of a pile of sand, with additional grains being added every second or so. Scientists say such a pile is “organized into criticality,” since at any moment it can have a little avalanche as the sides get steeper. But the system is so complex that it can’t be modeled completely and—this is important—it’s nonlinear in that it can suffer a change in state under both big blows and tiny hits, like the addition of a single new grain of sand. That’s our world: Every second it gets more complex, like a sandpile. New financial instruments, terror groups, viruses, and innovations are ceaselessly falling onto our pile, making it really complex to model and basically impossible to predict. Small things—home mortgages—can have huge impacts. Usually by surprise. One thing I learned from writing the book and hanging out with people ranging from Hizb’allah terrorists to the guys who started Google is that it is possible to use this sort of cascading power to make tremendous changes. And since this kind of dynamic is inevitable, the challenge is to make positive avalanches.

Small things having huge impacts – the infamous flap of the butterfly’s wings. This imagery has always been compelling (and has always had at least some basis in the science – we do, after all, live in a world of power laws, long tails, and black swans). Watch the pile of sand in the sandglass and there is no way of predicting when the fall of one grain will precipitate a major avalanche.

And, although the book was published a couple of years ago, I can’t help but wonder if Seed’s publishing the interview now is a reflection of recent events in North Africa that were simply unimagined but a few weeks ago – a tragic, but nevertheless small, event in Tunisia triggering huge and profound change. The header for the piece reads “ In an era defined by instability, society must remain imminently flexible and turn disruption into a force for good” – an aspiration that must be applauded. 

So does Ramo have any suggestions as to how this might be accomplished? Well, here’s his response to the question “How should global leaders adapt to a sandpile world? Where do you see our major weaknesses today?”:

There are two key adaptations we need to make. The first is understanding that the very things we want and need to be modern—biotech, communications networks, more efficient financial markets—make the world more dangerous and expose us all to risk. Which means that sandpile events—things like 9/11 or the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its implications—are now inevitable. So we need to accept that we will constantly be hit by the manifestations of an unstable world and focus less on trying to prevent them and more on boosting our own resilience. Second, we need to change how we make policy. Right now we make big decisions as if we were pulling a lever. But decision making has to be a persistent project: We need to constantly update and revise our thinking as if we were making software or iPods. Today we do “health care reform” or “Afghanistan policy” and then move on. That’s lethal. Policy has to be flexible and constantly adapted to fit a changing environment.

This is, I think, serious food for thought. But this is not a geopolitical blog – it’s just interesting to see yet another example of the stimulating properties of sand.

Mark Twain the geologist

 

Mark Twain died one hundred years ago today

“The Old Oolitic Silurian” – my father used to periodically quote this to me to illustrate his familiarity with geological terminology and to remind me of the connections between his own field, American Literature, and my own. Twain was one of my Dad’s favourite writers, and he worked extensively on Twain’s reception in Europe (enthusiastic – Charles Darwin, for example, was a great fan), and his relationships with his English publishers. This led me to appreciate how often, amongst his prolific and highly entertaining observations, Twain wrote about geology – and yes, sand. My Dad’s quotation comes from Life on the Mississippi and ends with one his classic comments:

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Twain seemed to have a particular fondness for the Old Red Sandstone, the gigantic piles of sand and other sediments that poured off the growing mountain chains of Europe and North America 400 million years ago. These are the rocks that contain the testaments to the remarkable evolution of fishes and the first footprints of life on the land. Twain wrote the following, in his 1903 essay “Was the World Made for Man?”:

So the Old Silurian seas were opened up to breed the fish in, and at the same time the great work of building Old Red Sandstone mountains eighty thousand feet high to cold-storage their fossils in was begun. This latter was quite indispensable, for there would be no end of failures again, no end of extinctions—millions of them—and it would be cheaper and less trouble to can them in the rocks than to keep tally of them in a book.

Elsewhere, he wrote of “that poor, decrepit, bald-headed, played-out, antediluvian Old Red Sandstone formation which they call the Smithsonian Institute.”

 

Unfortunately, here Twain got his geology wrong – the original Smithsonian building was constructed from the New Red Sandstone, the sediments that filled the rift valleys as Europe and North America began drifting apart 200 million years ago.

Twain also wrote of desert sandstorms and the commercial possibilities of sand. In Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom, Huck Finn, and Jim take off on a Jules Verne–like voyage in “the boat,” a science-fiction hot air balloon. Sailing over the Sahara, they watch a camel caravan plodding over the dunes below them:

Pretty soon we see something coming that stood up like an amazing wide wall, and reached from the Desert up into the sky and hid the sun, and it was coming like the nation, too. Then a little faint breeze struck us, and then it come harder, and grains of sand begun to sift against our faces and sting like fire, and Tom sung out:

“It’s a sand-storm—turn your backs to it!”

We done it; and in another minute it was blowing a gale, and the sand beat against us by the shovelful, and the air was so thick with it we couldn’t see a thing. In five minutes the boat was level full, and we was setting on the lockers buried up to the chin in sand, and only our heads out and could hardly breathe.

Then the storm thinned, and we see that monstrous wall go a-sailing off across the desert, awful to look at, I tell you. We dug ourselves out and looked down, and where the caravan was before there wasn’t anything but just the sand ocean now, and all still and quiet. All them people and camels was smothered and dead and buried—buried under ten foot of sand, we reckoned, and Tom allowed it might be years before the wind uncovered them, and all that time their friends wouldn’t ever know what become of that caravan.

Realizing that “the boat” (apparently defying the laws of physics) contains several tons of “genuwyne sand from the genuwyne desert of the Sahara,” they consider the commercial potential of putting it into vials and selling it back home (presumably to early arenophiles), “because it’s over four million square miles of sand at ten cents a vial.” But the scale of the operation—and that of the duties they would have to pay—leads them to abandon the idea.

When Twain was 17 or 18 years old, he worked as a part-time typesetter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, still the city’s primary newspaper. Still being marooned in Philadelphia, the Inquirer is my daily paper, and it was their article that drew my attention to the centenary of Twain’s death. He wrote to his brother that “Unlike New York, I like this Philadelphia amazingly, and the people in it.” On the whole, I agree with him – but I do love New York. Reading the newspaper article, I came across a comment that leads to me concluding this with a political viewpoint (something that I generally try to avoid on this blog). The article included the following comment:

Twain is a strange figure to hold up as a national hero. No writer ever sang this country so well – but none ever lanced the boils of its hypocrisy with such needlepoint precision, either.

Isn’t that exactly the kind of national hero every country needs, someone who is equally skilled and perceptive at singing its praises and  lancing its boils?

[Smithsonian image from http://www.american-architecture.info/USA/USA-Washington/DC-019.htm; header photo of the piles of Old Red Sandstone in Greenland courtesy of Dr. Peter Friend] 

An alarming announcement at Barnes and Noble

I have a habit, more often than not masochistic, of dropping into book stores to see whether my efforts are on the shelves. Wandering around the upper Westside of New York a couple of days ago, I spotted a reasonably large Barnes and Noble store and indulged my habit. I was delighted to find two copies of the book on the shelf (the bottom one - the continuing penalty of having a name at the end of the alphabet), but I was also alarmed to find that, next to my book, was a message: "NATURE ENDS HERE."

I recalled the controversial work of Francis Fukuyama from some twenty years ago declaring the end of history, but this seemed far more disastrous. Do Barnes and Noble know something that the rest of us don't? Is this a metaphysical statement placed there by some member of staff embroiled in the angst of a philosophy course at nearby Columbia University? Would there be further clues glued to other shelves in the store? Could it possibly be that some supernatural being uses this communication method instead of tablets and revelations? Is the rapture upon us - but, if so, why would it commence in a New York book store?

I fled in terror but your explanations will be much appreciated.

Thoughts on writing a popular science book (3): the tedious but important stuff

 Let's face it, the research and writing are the fun parts of producing a book, and then there's the other stuff that is much less enjoyable but vital. Here are a few thoughts:

1. Editing. I've mentioned a writer's "darlings" in a previous post, and in some ways the whole book is the author's darling - it's your idea and you have slaved over the stories, the translation of science into an accessible and exciting form, and you've crafted the words, the phrases, the paragraphs. You have probably (hopefully) tried out your translations on friends, family and others (ideally those that have some kind of vested interest in the thing's success); you accept the comments along the lines of "this is not easy to understand - why don't you try something along the lines of...." But suggestions that whole sections don't work, don't belong where they are, or don't belong in the book at all, are tough. I was lucky - my wife is a devoted and critical reader (and used to teach English), and I was blessed with a great editor from the publishers. I can only think of a couple of isolated instances, one or two darlings that I was determined to hold on to as a matter of principle as much as anything (the silver bullet principle), where I ended up not doing what they suggested - but the rest went and the book was profoundly improved as a result. So listen, sleep on it, and, in the cold light of day, do what these people say - you, after all, can't approach the book from the perspective of a reader. And cut. Cut the adverbs, the metaphors, the fascinating but irrelevant meanderings. I know that my wife will laugh when she reads such advice coming from me, since I have a natural tendency to meander and to construct long and convoluted sentences - but, in the end, I followed this advice (mostly).

2. Proofreading. This is a very distinct exercise from editing: it's the administration of the mechanics of the writing. Every publisher will have a particular manual of style that they want followed; for UCP it was the Chicago Manual of Style, a dry and weighty tome that is also available online (as a subscription). This is stuff that I readily admit I have little patience with, a bad attitude compounded by having divided my life between the UK and the US and having no working recollection of the differences in punctuation etc. But I had help, a taskmistress: as I wrote in the acknowledgments, "I am under instructions to say little about the role of my wife, Carol, but little is precisely what this book would have been without her. Researcher, contributor, proofreader, and interrogator of the Chicago Manual of Style, she took on all the tasks that allowed me to write the book, including, with not quite perfect consistency, having a Job-like level of patience." (There were a couple of memorable occasions on which "the f...ing book" was referred to with vigour  - and justification).

Then, as the production process got underway, the publishers provided the services of a professional proofreader (a job that, to me, seems like another definition of hell). And was she ever professional and rigorous. However thoroughly you or your partner think that they have proofread the manuscript, there will always be things you missed. And, even after the professional treatment, little demons slip through: "depradation" appeared in both hardback editions until it was noted by a friend (to the immense irritation of my wife), and finally corrected for the paperback.

Then the page proofs arrive: pay as close attention to them as you can bear - they're your last chance. Because your readers are intelligent and critical folk - put yourself in their shoes and remember how a poorly edited and proofread book detracts substantially from its credibility.

3. References/further reading. Again, put yourself in the reader's shoes - how many times do you come across a topic in a book that is dealt with briefly but that you would like to explore further? This section is important (and several readers and reviewers of my book have said that they appreciate it). Of course, for a popular science book, it doesn't have to be as rigorous and comprehensive as an academic text, and there's certainly no point in including papers from academic journals that will be difficult for the reader to find. And one other note: in today's world, websites are important sources to list, but make sure that only those that are reputable and therefore likely to endure are included. The "page cannot be found" notice is frustrating for me and I worked on the principle that it would be equally frustrating for a reader.

4. The index. I automatically dislike a book with no index, or a poor index, but I know from friends who have tried to do it themselves that it's a soul-destroying task. Most publishers will provide the services of a professional indexer - but you will pay for it. It cost me $1450 (and needed improvement) and this cost came straight out of the first (and so far, only) royalty payment. After this, the subtraction of the advance, and the agent's percentage, there was enough for a not particularly gastronomic dinner out. But remember: you're not in this for the money.

5. Permissions. I was astonished to find that these were entirely my responsibility - and, along with the responsibility comes the legal liability. So I became somewhat paranoid and compulsive about this. The experience was very variable. For illustrations that I could not provide myself, it was generally the case that the copyright owners were only too pleased to provide the image for free, or, for institutions, a modest fee that would cover all future print editions (take care in all this to read the terms carefully - they often apply only to a particular edition and have to be done again for a paperback or a different publisher, and they rarely apply to electronic editions). For quotations, the experience was more difficult (and expensive). I liked to include epigraphs at the top of each chapter, and some of these, along with quotations in the text, were from illustrious writers and musicians. The pleasure of putting a few words from Jimi Hendrix against a quote from an ancient Greek philosopher, was somewhat undermined by what it cost me (Hendrix, not Heraclitus). I had toyed with great quotes from Dylan and others, but could never have afforded them. Using those eleven words from Hendrix has, so far, and after negotiation, cost me $700 - I keep reminding myself that I'm not in this for the money.

Most publishers' contracts will include a provision for some reimbursement of permissions costs, but chances are you'll still be out of pocket - avoid musicians!

Oh, and then there's the concept (at least in the US) of "fair use." Limited quotations can be used without needing to seek permission, and it's tempting to resort to this as a way of saving time (and money). But the concept is unfathomable and risky when you look at it in detail - the US Copyright Office website declares that "The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission." Helpful, huh?

6. The subtitle. I'll finish here with an amusement. The subtitle for a book is important - it should give the potential reader an idea of what the book's about, or at least provide a "hook." There was a long debate that used up considerable time and creative energy (but also generated much humour), around what followed the obvious, "Sand." We settled on "the never-ending story" because it suggested that it was a story, hinted at the durability of sand as a planetary materials, and reflected the symbolism of a single grain of sand that was important in Michael Ende's book (and the film) of that name. So far, so good. Until I came across the online writing of a New York Times reviewer. She expressed her irritation with a single-subject-titled book (I won't name it) on a particularly obscure and, in her opinion, uninteresting subject, and proceeded to bemoan the genre of such titles. Unfortunately, my book seems to have landed simultaneously on her desk; rather than just ignoring it, she cited it (self-respect requires me to assume that it remained unopened) as another tedious example - "Sand: the Never-Ending Story," she wrote, "I'll say!"

Oh, how I laughed. Well, at least I do now.

This interpretation had never occurred to me - or to anyone else involved. As you might have noticed, Oxford University Press changed the subtitle to "A Journey Through Science and the Imagination" - more pedestrian, but less susceptible to wit.