Ever since the Renaissance, the sciences have dealt human beings a steady stream of humiliations. The Copernican revolution dismantled the idea that humanity stood at the center of the universe. A cascade of discoveries from the late-18th to the early-20th centuries showed that humanity was a lot less significant than some of us had imagined. The revelation of the geological timescale stacked millions and billions of years atop our little cultural narratives, crumbling all of human history to dust. The revelation that we enjoy an evolutionary kinship to fish, bugs, and filth eroded the in-God’s-image stuff. The disclosure of the size of the galaxy—and our position on a randomly located infinitesimal dot in it—was another hit to human specialness. Then came relativity and quantum mechanics, and the realization that the way we see and hear the world bears no relation to the bizarre swarming of its intrinsic nature.
Literature began to taste and probe these discoveries. By the 19th century, some writers had already hit upon the theme—meaninglessness—that would come to dominate the 20th century in a thousand scintillating variations, from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories to Samuel Beckett’s plays. But by the turn of the new millennium, it has become clear that this sense of meaninglessness is no longer up-to-date.
And then this year, winter never came. I watered the trees in our yard in early February. On April Fool’s Day, I hiked to 11,000 feet without snowshoes. A friend and her husband, who were planning a spring trip to Montana, said they wanted to scope it out as a place to live. “We can’t have all our money tied up in property in a place that’s going to run out of water!” she told me.
I began to worry, too, that after a long and frequently distant romance, I’d married us to a town without reckoning with the particulars of its future. How likely is this place to become barren? How soon? Will we have the tools to endure it? We’d eloped.
Now, in this rapaciously dry year, a quiet question grew louder: What are we doing here? I felt a sudden need to understand what Colin and I stood to lose as the heat intensified and the world dried out. And I wondered if we should leave.
Devotees of fanfiction will sometimes tell you that it’s one of the oldest writing forms in the world. Seen with this generous eye, the art of writing stories using other people’s creations hails from long before our awareness of Twilight-fanfic-turned-BDSM romance Fifty Shades of Grey: perhaps Virgil, when he picked up where Homer left off with the story of Aeneas, or Shakespeare’s retelling of Arthur Brookes’s 1562 The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet. What most of us would recognise as fanfiction began in the 1960s, when Star Trek fans started creating zines about Spock and Captain Kirk’s adventures. Thirty years later, the internet arrived, which made sharing stories set in other people’s worlds – be they Harry Potter, Spider-Man, or anything and everything in between – easier. Fanfiction has always been out there, if you knew where to look. Now, it’s almost impossible to miss.
To solve these little mysteries, Glazer recently assembled a team of sleuths from across the branches: Chatham Square, in Chinatown; the Jefferson Market, in Greenwich Village; the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, near the Flatiron Building; and the Mulberry Street branch, in Nolita. At lunchtime on a recent Wednesday, they were gathered in that computer lab in the library’s offices—across the street from the soaring, spectacular Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (the Main Branch)—to nibble on homemade lemon rosemary cookies and apple, carrot, zucchini bread while they clattered away on their keyboards. Other members of the team participated remotely. The “Title Quest” hackathon was underway.
Throughout this outstanding collection, there is the sense of an elsewhere, at once tantalisingly close and unreachable.
Quammen doesn’t just give us stories of solitary toil and triumph. Every discovery is couched in a life with its particular constraints and spurs — not least the power (or catastrophe) of personality. For all Woese’s brilliance, it can be argued that he stood in the way of his success; he was a disinterested lecturer, a collector of petty grievances. We see how women scientists in the field were mocked and marginalized — even those with some standing, like Lynn Margulis, whose groundbreaking theory revealed how eukaryotic cells (which include most cells in the human body), developed symbiotically with bacteria. She was blunt about the professional and personal burdens on women: “It’s not humanly possible to be a good wife, a good mother and a first-class scientist.” She eventually opted for the latter two.