Mark O’Connell (2017)

A review of transhumanist ideas by an avowed sceptic.

Transhumanism is a difficult belief system to tackle. At its more extreme end it rests on the idea of the “singularity”, the point at which scientific and technological problem-solving become so advanced that any solvable problem is solvable quickly – which of course includes the “problems” of sickness, death, brain uploading, and a host of other radical ideas. (In recent years the singularity is assumed to involve super-intelligent AI, although that wasn’t originally the conception, and such AI could be regarded as a consequence rather than a cause of the singularity.)

It’s an easy notion to ridicule, which this book sets out to do, and does well. But the long-term notion of accelerating progress isn’t as fragile as it can be made to appear. The ideas deserve a better exploration than this book attempts. It’s good for laughs and for making the participants sound like either idiots or charlatans – and maybe they are, but there’s also some interesting and solid science going on that goes beyond these stereotypes, beyond those seeking publicity rather than knowledge.

3/5. Finished Saturday 15 May, 2021.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

I just made a new release of epydemic.

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Today I re-started work on my other book.

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Robert Macfarlane (2012)

A beautiful and poignant volume that’s hard to categorise: part travelogue, part biography of the poet Edward Thomas, part meditation, part exploration. Macfarlane traces old footpaths, from the South Downs to the Hebrides to Palestine, reading the landscape and the marks that people have left on it. He follows the diversions as he encounters them, musing about the “pathways” in the sea that are clear and long-lived despite being written in the water, formed from the ways in which current and wind interact to lay down the “natural” route to travel before powered craft. He spends night under the stars, including a rather unnerving and supernatural encounter while sleeping (ill-advisedly, as he puts it) in a neolithic ring. And he brings out literary gems, such as the relationship between Thomas (whose work I’ve now been inspired to read) and Robert Frost’s poem The road not taken. Altogether a delight to read.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 4 May, 2021.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (1982)

A scholarly study of the occult ideas that emerged in Germany and (especially) Austria in the year leading up to and after the First World War. It raises many ideas, most of them disquieting – not least the similarities with modern-day tendencies to believe in hidden plots and secret societies controlling the world’s destiny. Perhaps this is a common reaction to feelings of social and economic dislocation, but it’s worrying nonetheless.

Goodrick-Clarke is entirely honest about his inability to definitively establish a causal chain from the Thule Society and like-minded groups to the Nazis. He presents two hypotheses: that the members and hanger-on of the Thule did indeed have some influence, notably over Heinrich Himmler’s view of the SS as a revenant mediaeval order of chivalry; and that the ideas were simply “in the air”, a symptom of the times than were independently picked up and developed by the Nazis.

It’d be easy for a book on this theme to become lost in fables, and indeed many other works have done so. (Goodrick-Clarke devotes an appendix to dismantling these “crypto-histories”.) You never get the feeling, reading him, that he’s in the slightest bit a believer, even as he recounts the (probably and putatively sincere) beliefs of his subjects. That many of these beliefs can be traced back definitively to works of late-nineteenth-century fiction (notably to the books of Edward Bulwer-Lytton) makes their attraction all the more surprising, even given that the belief was always a niche one.

4/5. Finished Monday 3 May, 2021.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)