The uncanny elements of speculative fiction are able to effectively articulate these feelings as well as the sense that there is no stable ground, that things that were once familiar to us are now deeply unfamiliar. Freud’s understanding of the uncanny, however, offers an alternative: the things that are terrifying to us in their seeming unfamiliarity actually do stem from things that are familiar to us. The world of 2020 is still the world of 2019, no matter how much more terrifying things seem now. While recent events have highlighted a staggering string of systemic failures, this is still the same world as before, which means that these systemic failures have always existed, even if they were pushed below the surface for many. The broader awareness of the uncanny thus offers an opportunity for change.
“I love new proofs of old theorems for the same reason I love new roads and shortcuts to places I’ve already been,” said Sophia Restad, a graduate student at Kansas State University. These new paths provide mathematicians with a figurative sense of place for intellectual activity.
In November, the last time I was on an airplane, it was a rainy day in the Northeast. As the plane picked up speed along the runway, we were pressed against the seats in a sensation I always associate with sex. I inhaled and held my good-luck rock. The moment when the whole heft of the airplane leaves the surface of the earth is a moment of enormous erotic charge. The rise and press and all-at-once feeling of elsewhere, a temporary reprieve from the regular pull. In liftoff, in the erotic moment, we are freed of something.
Fake entries, or mountweazels, have often been used by compilers of reference works as a way to check for breaches of copyright: a plagiarist will unknowingly repeat the errors along with the rest. To Williams this is not merely an intriguing curiosity, but a testing ground for the notion of authority and its relation to our partial, creative, eccentric selves. Invented words are her way into those ever-fertile debates about how far language should be fixed or constantly remade. “Surely compiling a dictionary,” muses Mallory, is “like conceiving of a sieve for stars”. As the image suggests, she is romantic about words: longing to catch them, humbly awed by their power to spin free. She and Peter are hard-working logophiles who devote themselves to ordering the language inherited from others – but that’s precisely why they appreciate the power of occasional subversion. It’s why they care about coining words to match their own as-yet-undefined experiences.
This attention to sentence-by-sentence pleasure is an undervalued, even disdained, skill among thriller writers, too many of whom excuse a clunky, utilitarian style as “unvarnished.” They sacrifice style at the altar of momentum. But a precision-cut sentence can quicken the reader’s pulse as reliably as a surprise twist or a character’s excruciating dilemma. When a novel delivers all of the above — as “Love and Theft” ultimately does, its racecar engine revving to a smooth and satisfying purr — it can feel to the reader like a kind of miracle. In a word: thrilling.
Underlying most of these problems is a common issue: the fact that science, as he readily concedes, is “a social construct.” Its ideals are lofty, but it’s an enterprise conducted by humans, with all their foibles.
when my son is young I make him
kale popsicles: one pound of kale
shredded ginger lemon squeezed apples & water blended
he eats them two in hand as fast as they come