Of Sheep and Scientists
Mar. 28th, 2012 03:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselSep 2011
Bellwether - Connie Willis - Bantam, 1997
* * * *
Of the 150 or so books that I have read since I started this blog, Passage is the one that haunts me the most. Its atmosphere and terrifying theme have stuck in my mind like no other and I am almost afraid to read it again in case it turns out to be less good than I remember. It is hard to imagine that Willis has written a better book, and this one certainly is not. However, like Passage, it is about academics and the way they work, and to me that is always interesting.
Sandra Foster is a woman working for HiTek, a dodgy multinational which, like British Nuclear Fuels in the 1990s, is trying to improve its image by sponsoring some academic research (and may I say how grateful I am to BNFL that they did - they paid for much of my DPhil and a two-year post-doc). Her area of study is fads in popular culture, in particular the mystery of why women started bobbing their hair in the 1920s. Her researches are impeded by a gum-chewing care-nothing lab assistant called Flick, whose misdelivery of a parcel causes Sandra to come into contact with Bennett O’Reilly, a biologist studying information diffusion in primates and someone who seems curiously immune to the fads that Sandra sees rising and falling all around her. This is just the start of a train of events that leads to - well - something unexpected.
To be honest, there are more than a few elements of self-indulgence. Willis clearly had a great deal of fun researching the fads on which Sandra works (each chapter starts with an occasionally laugh-out-loud summary of one), and there are repeated references to workplace smoking, library book stocking policies, management speak and other topics that are clearly close to the author’s heart. The development of the relationships between the main characters is relentlessly predictable in story terms (although one of the points the book tries to make is how improbable they actually are), and the repeated jokes and situations do get a bit laboured.
But all this is forgiveable, because at its heart this is a book about the way that academics think and work, and the things that Willis has to say are wise and and may very well be true. Sandra and Bennett join the small pantheon of scientist characters in books who are also likeable human beings, and the connection between the processes leading to game-changing discoveries and the chaotic and flibbertigibbet nature of social fads is deftly made. I don't entirely agree with Willis’ depiction of the nature of scientific progress - there is an understandable over-emphasis on Kuhnian inspiration rather than Popperian perspiration - but there is definitely food for thought in her observations. Especially for managers in knowledge-based institutions.
Bellwether - Connie Willis - Bantam, 1997
* * * *
Of the 150 or so books that I have read since I started this blog, Passage is the one that haunts me the most. Its atmosphere and terrifying theme have stuck in my mind like no other and I am almost afraid to read it again in case it turns out to be less good than I remember. It is hard to imagine that Willis has written a better book, and this one certainly is not. However, like Passage, it is about academics and the way they work, and to me that is always interesting.
Sandra Foster is a woman working for HiTek, a dodgy multinational which, like British Nuclear Fuels in the 1990s, is trying to improve its image by sponsoring some academic research (and may I say how grateful I am to BNFL that they did - they paid for much of my DPhil and a two-year post-doc). Her area of study is fads in popular culture, in particular the mystery of why women started bobbing their hair in the 1920s. Her researches are impeded by a gum-chewing care-nothing lab assistant called Flick, whose misdelivery of a parcel causes Sandra to come into contact with Bennett O’Reilly, a biologist studying information diffusion in primates and someone who seems curiously immune to the fads that Sandra sees rising and falling all around her. This is just the start of a train of events that leads to - well - something unexpected.
To be honest, there are more than a few elements of self-indulgence. Willis clearly had a great deal of fun researching the fads on which Sandra works (each chapter starts with an occasionally laugh-out-loud summary of one), and there are repeated references to workplace smoking, library book stocking policies, management speak and other topics that are clearly close to the author’s heart. The development of the relationships between the main characters is relentlessly predictable in story terms (although one of the points the book tries to make is how improbable they actually are), and the repeated jokes and situations do get a bit laboured.
But all this is forgiveable, because at its heart this is a book about the way that academics think and work, and the things that Willis has to say are wise and and may very well be true. Sandra and Bennett join the small pantheon of scientist characters in books who are also likeable human beings, and the connection between the processes leading to game-changing discoveries and the chaotic and flibbertigibbet nature of social fads is deftly made. I don't entirely agree with Willis’ depiction of the nature of scientific progress - there is an understandable over-emphasis on Kuhnian inspiration rather than Popperian perspiration - but there is definitely food for thought in her observations. Especially for managers in knowledge-based institutions.