Month: March 2021

 Time to catch up on some of my recent reading!

::  Maphead by Ken Jennings is about maps and the people who like maps. More than that, it’s about people who love maps. Some people love maps so much they end up seeming a bit odd, but that’s fine! And who better to write about such strange people, committed to esoteric knowledge, than Ken Jennings, trivia champion extraordinaire?

It’s safe to say that Jennings’s authorial career would not have taken flight had he not put together that wonderful winning streak on Jeopardy! back in the Aughts, but now that he’s writing, I hope he keeps doing it for a long, long time. He seems to be a cheerier version of Bill Bryson, able to write engagingly about topics that don’t often get written about (I love Bryson, but his work often has something of a dark tinge to it), and in this book especially Jennings is able to write both about maps and the entire subculture that has sprung up about maps.

Along the way in Maphead, Jennings visits the London Map Fair, an event I never knew existed. I’ve read a lot about book collectors, though, and this little world intersects that of people who seek out First Folios very neatly. I also learned about things like road geeks, who learn about specific odd details you’ll find on America’s roadways if you look closely (like a traffic light in Syracuse where the green light is on top of the fixture!) and who nurse grudges against people like a Pennsylvania Congressman who used his power to insist that a new section of Interstate Highway in that state be numbered I-99, even though that number is in violation of federal highway numbering guidelines.

Jennings visits the map collection at the Library of Congress, relating stories of how international incidents have actually been settled by other countries referring to maps in the LoC’s collection, and he writes about the National Geography Bee, which is exactly what it sounds like: an event like a spelling bee, where the goal is not to answer questions like “How do you spell chiaroscurist?” but rather questions like “What is the local name given to the katabatic winds in southern France that can cause damage to crops in the Rhone Valley?” (The answer is “mistral”. No, I don’t know what any of that means, and I am taking Jennings at his word here.)

My favorite chapter, though, as a writer of fantastic tales myself, is the chapter on maps of places that don’t exist. Some people create elaborate maps of fictional locales as a hobby in themselves. but Jennings also discusses the role of maps in fantasy and science fiction novels, helpfully enlisting his former college roommate, bestselling fantasist Brandon Sanderson, to provide some comment. I personally get a bit antsy when I try to read an epic fantasy novel that has no map, and I’ve read a few advance copies of epic fantasies over the last few years that had blank pages where the eventual map would go. This always bugs me. Some readers are fine with no maps, but if you give me an imaginary world, I have to be able to see how its locales fit together. Jennings writes:

It’s the importance of place to the genre, not just slavish imitation of Tolkien, that explaisn why todays’ fantasy authors still make sure maps are front and center. David Eddings, one of epic fantasy’s most popular writers, went so far as to put maps on the covers of his books. (Eddings’s nation of Aloria was born the same way Stevenson created Treasure Islans: he doodled the map first, and the map inspired the adventure.) The maps are certainly functional too; many fantasy novels are episodic quests, and a map is an easy way to plot that course for a reader–it’s no accident that the word “plot” can refer to the contents of both a chart and a narrative. But Brandon’s tried hard to get away from the quest narrative in his own books, most of which take place in contained urban settings, yet he still makes sure his books have maps. His latest novel–the first volume in a projected ten-books series–is called The Way of Kings, and it includes no fewer than nine maps.

I haven’t read The Way of Kings yet (in a genre that tends to long books, Way is a doorstop of doorstops), but it does contain a lot of artistic ephemera, including maps. I never re-read Tolkien without constantly referring to his maps, and I’ve rejected owning several editions of The Lord of the Rings (primarily in mass paperback) because the maps are printed so badly as to be illegible. What I love most about Tolkien’s maps isn’t just how detailed they are (I admit to being frustrated by fantasy books that give me a giant world and yet the map is basically a blob with three or four place names on it), but also how much wider they are than the story! Just look at the map of Middle Earth as it appears in LOTR: most of the places depicted aren’t places the story ever goes! I love that. (And no, I don’t care that the geology makes no sense. It’s a world of dark lords, great wizards, elves, and magic rings. In the midst of all that, I think I can make room in my brain for the right angles formed by the mountains surrounding Mordor.)

Jennings also takes some time to explore the degree to which love of maps, and knowledge of geography itself, has been pushed out of the realm of things we expect everyone to know and into that of self-applied geekdom. We’ve all seen the results of quizzes and polls showing how few Americans can identify a given percentage of the states. Jennings writes:

There are obvious ways to explain an ongoing drop in geographic literacy. Geographers like to blame the curriculum revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the clear-cut history and geography classes of grade schools were replaced by a wishy-washy amalgam called “social studies”. The adoption of social studies was the well-intentioned result of academics in a wide variety of social sciences hoping to expose kids to their pet fields: anthropology, economics, political science, and so on. But, as a side effect of the new curriculum, classes specifically devoted to geography virtually disappeared from the nation’s schools. The United States is now the only country in the developed world where a student can go from preschool to grad school without ever cracking a geography text.

I can attest to this. I remember my social studies classrooms, decorated with lots of maps…to which my teachers (and these were good teachers! I enjoyed just about all of those classes) almost never referred or made the basis of a lesson. This didn’t stop me, of course, from learning about them. In fact, the maps on the walls often became my refuge in the midst of the occasional boring lecture.

And it seems, from reading Maphead, that I am far from alone in this.

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 I generally try to avoid reading grief memoirs, for various reasons that mainly boil down to…well, I’ve had enough grief in my life already and I know that more is on the way someday*, and it’s a subject I don’t much enjoy plumbing any more than I have to. But sometimes I find a grief memoir that piques my interest and I read it anyway. Smallest Lights is such a book, and I am very glad that I read it. It’s so much more than a grief memoir, really. It’s about science and love and life and death and love again and parenthood and dealing with autism.

It’s also beautifully written.

Not every planet has a star. Some aren’t part of a solar system. They are alone. We call them rogue planets.

Because rogue planets aren’t the subjects of stars, they aren’t anchored in space. They don’t orbit. Rogue planets waner, drifting in the current of an endless ocean. They have neither the light nor the heat that stars provide. We know of one rogue planet, PSO J318.5-22–right now, it’s up there, it’s out there–lurching across the galaxy like a rudderless ship, wrapped in perpetual darkness. Its surface is swept by constant storms. It likely rains on PSO J318.5-22, but it wouldn’t rain water there. Its black skies would more likely unleash bands of molten iron.

It can be hard to picture, a planet where it rains liquid metal in the dark, but rogue planets aren’t science fiction. We haven’t imagined them or dreamed them. Astrophysicists like me have found them. They are real places on our celestial maps. There might be thousands of billions of more conventional exoplanets–planets that orbit stars other than the sun–in the Milky Way alone, circling our galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars. But amid that nearly infinite, perfect order, in the emptiness between countless pushes and pulls, there are also the lost ones: rogue planets. PSO J318.5-22 is as real as Earth.

There were days when I woke up and couldn’t see much difference between there and here.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist at MIT whose main body of work involves exoplanets, their discovery around other stars, and analyzing them for signs of life. Among other things, if you wonder how on Earth (literally!) we can look for life on planets lightyears away that nobody in our lifetime (or, likely, in our great-grandchildrens’ lifetimes) will ever see directly, this book will give you some hints as to how that search is currently going. (It involves ingenious analysis of light coming from those planets. It really is amazing, when you think about it, the degree to which light energy is the main carrier of information in this universe of ours.)

In her book, Seager discusses her own work and the degree to which her work has shaped her personal life, and how her personal life has shaped her work in return. Her first husband was a man of considerable energy, whom she met on a canoeing trip; their courtship progressed on more canoeing trips all over the place. But he developed cancer, which eventually killed him at a terribly and unfairly young age. Thus this brilliant astrophysicist, whose work is an important part of the current growth of human knowledge of our universe, finds herself a single parent attending meetings of the local widow’s club, figuring out the nature of this new world she’s been thrust into. It’s the cruelest of ironies, I suppose, that this woman whose life’s work is understanding the universe and seeking other worlds suddenly finds herself in a new world, one that’s familiar to people who have known deep grief, where everything is the same and yet everything is deeply different.

Throughout Seager’s book, I found myself frequently hit in the heart by some of her observations:

:: Everybody dies instantly. It’s the dying that happens either quickly or over a long period of time. Mike spent a long time dying: eighteen months separated his diagnosis and his death.

:: There have been lessons I have chosen not to teach. Not all knowledge is power; not all things are worth knowing. Max and Alex [her sons] never saw Mike’s body. They did not see him leave the house. 

:: [On the Widow’s club] All of our children had become friends. They didn’t gather because their fathers had died; they gathered because it was fun. There is a reason every children’s book is written from the perspective of the child. Children don’t care about adult concerns. We think of children as helpless when they are the embodiment of resilience, more impervious to outside forces than we could ever be again. Despite their suffering, our kids still knew pure joy. 

:: Sometimes you need darkness to see. Sometimes you need light.

:: I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s a mirror at the heart of every telescope. If we want to find another Earth, that means we want to find another us. We think we’re worth knowing. We want to be a light in somebody else’s sky. And so long as we keep looking for each other, we will never be alone.

I love that last one (which actually closes the book, so apologies for the ‘spoiler’). Seager casts loneliness not in terms of presence but in terms of action: we’re only truly lonely when we accept that we are alone and stop seeking others to enrich our lives. True loneliness, really being alone, comes of a permanent turning inward, of looking down and not up. And really, how else would someone who loves the stars see things?

The Smallest Lights in the Universe is a wonderful book that stands in stark contrast, it seems to me, to the view of science as cold and mechanical and mathematical, an enterprise that somehow forgets about emotion and wonder. No less a genius than Walt Whitman expressed this view, in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”. But the numbers and the proofs surely don’t have to get in the way of the wonder; rather they inform it and give it focus. Science is not an impediment to love and life. Science is a part of those things. Sara Seager’s book shows us how.

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