The Philip K. Dick papers reside on the third floor of the Pollak Library at Cal State Fullerton, not far from where the science fiction writer spent his final decade. The space is nondescript: a small room with a few institutional tables and a door through which to request materials from an archive that stretches out of view. It’s a setting one imagines Dick might have loved when he was living here in Orange County in the 1970s, after his retreat from Northern California following a break-in at his Marin County home.
“I came home one evening and found rubble and ruin, my locked files blown open, papers of every sort gone, stereo gone, virtually everything gone, windows and doors smashed,” he wrote of that experience. “To this day I don’t know who did it. Robbery was not the motive; too many valueless items were taken, too much care to take correspondence and business records … the police to a certain extent favored the theory that I had done it myself. I didn’t. I to a certain extent favored the theory that they had done it.”
The account is pure Dick, with its swirls of conjecture and contradiction, its uncertainty about reality itself.
The premise behind the Myth Adventures series is charmingly simple — and its simplicity is one of its strengths. Skeeve is a young magician's apprentice in a pseudo-medieval, backwater world whose mentor dies in the first few pages of the series' debut installment, 1978's Another Fine Myth. A clueless lad with vague aspirations toward using his burgeoning magic (or magik, as it's known in the Myth world) to become a thief, Skeeve quickly lands up to his neck in world-shaking intrigue thanks to the appearance of Aahz, a green-scaled demon and acquaintance of Skeeve's former master.
In 1888, astronomer Simon Newcomb proclaimed, “We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know.” At the time, it was believed that the universe comprised some 6,000 stars — a vast expansion of the heavens previously charted by Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler, who had, in turn, radically overhauled the authority of Aristotle’s celestial projections. As a man of his era, Newcomb had a point. Having seen farther into the sky than previous generations ever could have imagined, and having settled on a way to explain what we saw there, how much more could we expect to learn?
A lot, of course. The struggle to see past what we think we already know gives Richard Panek the theme of his new book, “The Trouble With Gravity.” “Nobody knows what gravity is, and almost nobody knows that nobody knows what gravity is,” he writes — that’s the trouble. And though the subtitle is “Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet,” no new mysteries were solved in the making of this book. Instead, by unfolding the succession of visions and revisions that led to our current cosmic understanding, Panek sets out to demonstrate how fundamental, and how fundamentally strange, gravity really is.
Mudlarks are river scavengers, but Lara Maiklem is more like a time traveller. Using old maps as guides to London’s former boatyards, quaysides, bridges, causeways, jetties and great houses – all those places where the rubbish was once dumped – she scours the foreshore of the Thames looking for links to another life: Roman brooches, clay pipes, Victorian shoe buckles, Mesolithic flints. A vast and mobile archaeological site, the Thames is uniquely suited to mudlarks because it is tidal, which means that every day, as Maiklem explains, it grants access to its contents, “which shift and change as the water ebbs and flows, to reveal the story of a city, its people and their relationship with a natural force”.