Something magical happens when a scientist writes with chalk on a blackboard. Hollywood directors know this, and have harnessed it in films from A Beautiful Mind to Oppenheimer. But no one appreciates the power of this venerable technology better than physicists and mathematicians, who infinitely prefer the humble blackboard to its high-tech rivals. The question is, why? What does slate-and-chalk offer, which cannot be simulated by paper or plastic?
For Pico, humanism, science and magic were one and the same. Though they may not know it or deny the fact, 21st-century Silicon Valley techno-futurists are his heirs. The implication of Grafton’s mind-changing book is that our age of science may be one of the most extreme periods of magical thinking in history.
People love stories of turning points, wake-up calls, sudden conversions, breakthroughs, the stuff about changes that happen in a flash. Movies love them as love at first sight, dramatic speeches that change everything, trouble that can be terminated by shooting one bad guy, and other easy fixes and definitive victories. Old-school radicals love them as the kind of revolution that they imagine will change everything suddenly, even though a change of regime isn’t a change of culture and consciousness.
Maybe religion loves them too, as conversion, revelation, and sudden awakening.
It took years to learn that both my body and stories deserve to exist—the body regardless of its shape, the stories regardless of their origin.
The novel elicits questions of what it means to preserve humanity, and evokes a haunting future if the earth were not cared for properly. Scarier than the betrayal humans freely dish out to one another and the planet is a sense that a future generation could truly live in a time when all food is manufactured into existence, left only for the richest.
This is the sort of moral ambiguity that seems to fascinate Carpenter, the way living a double life and every day making your cover, that critical and deeply embedded lie, feels real to everyone around you. It’s also what makes “Ilium” such an unexpectedly moving novel.
In the end, Whittock cannot answer definitively the question he starts with, but he has produced a deeply researched and engrossing book that fully explores the multiple dimensions of the Viking story in the Northern hemisphere. Any reader who wants to know more about their legacy will find Whittock’s book full of anecdotes and insights.