Spy fiction is mostly a gently conservative genre. The reader is usually asked to sympathize with the status quo and against those attempting to radically alter it; when a government is portrayed as behaving badly, it is generally also portrayed as malfunctioning. The genre also has a conservative relationship with realism. Since so much of spying happens behind closed doors, hidden by design from the general public, it is hard to know what counts as verisimilitude or plausibility, or even whether and in what way this might matter. In tandem, there has always been a permeable membrane between spying, spies, and writers of spy fiction. The two undisputed giants of the genre, John Le Carré and Graham Greene, were also, famously, practicing intelligence officers before becoming writers, and a great deal of Le Carré’s invented spylish—“mole,” “honeytrap,” “lamplighter”—has entered the vernacular of actual espionage practitioners. Kim Philby, the most famous double agent of all time (and the author of his own intriguing spy memoir) was nicknamed after the protagonist of Rudyard Kipling’s 1901 novel Kim, arguably the first spy novel to be recognizable as such. Something about espionage and writing attract the same sort of people, or at least some of the same people. Again, it is hard to know what this means in practice. Le Carré declared his novels to be deliberately unrealistic; Ian Fleming, another espionage alum, wrote James Bond with no particular relationship to actually existing intelligence operations in mind at all.
Though no one may be around to hear when a tree falls in the forest, countless critters take note. Dormant fungi within the tree awaken to feast on it, joined by others that creep up from the soil. Bacteria pitch in, some sliding along strands of fungi to get deeper into the log. Termites alert their colony mates, which gather en masse to gobble up wood. Bit by bit, deadwood is decomposed, feeding new life along the way.
Yet breaking down wood — one of the toughest organic materials — is easier said than done, and scientists still have much to learn about the vital ecological process. Some are studying the tricks fungi and other microbes use to digest wood, and the ways that animals harness this skill for their own benefit. Others are tallying deadwood’s roles in recycling organic matter and stabilizing the global climate. What they’re learning is beginning to lay bare the complex interactions playing out inside expired trees.
It can be easy to take our maps, images and story of the Moon for granted. But over the past six decades, our cultural and scientific relationship with the Moon has been radically altered. Multiple robots landed on the Moon last year, and more are on the way. The Moon is a place and a destination – but this was not always the case.
My very first memory takes place at the local Blockbuster store, where I went one night with my father to rent a movie. I was four or five years old. He let me run ahead of him through the aisles, and I remember a rare, if not completely novel, feeling of independence. Turning a corner, I saw a man wearing glasses and light-wash jeans, with a brown beard and brown hair, standing with his back toward me, facing the shelves. He looked exactly like my father. I hugged him around his legs. When the man turned around, I realized that he was not my father but rather another man, a stranger, whom I had mistaken for my father. And the stranger seemed displeased with my affection. I exploded into tears. This is not only my first memory but also my first experience of terror.
There is nobody alive writing sex like this. McBride is able to capture the often indistinguishable line between agony and pleasure, the way one can be known totally and known not at all from one moment to the next. I read this book in the flayed aftermath of a break-up, still in that state where it seems unlikely that I’ll ever touch anyone again. The execution of these scenes was so powerful that it felt as if they were recalling painful memories of my own, instead of those belonging to fictional characters. What a glorious achievement, to make life instead of merely describing it.