A handshake across the great divide

By Daniel Batten & David Eggleton, November 28, 2006 @ 2 am

Lock up ten celebrated Kiwi scientists with ten eminent writers and what do you get? Are Angels OK?, a book about our universe. Poet David Eggleton and biotech entrepreneur Daniel Batten examine the result

Are Angels OK? The Parallel Universes of New Zealand Writers and Scientists

Edited by Paul Callaghan and Bill Manhire
Victoria University Press, 2006. $29.95

Dylan Horrocks’ cartoon-strip cover sets the tone for Are Angels OK? In an anthology generated by creative writers’ responses to the high concept end of the science spectrum—in other words to the discoveries of theoretical physics—Horrocks’s illustrations of ‘Entropy’, ‘the Big Bang’, ‘Relativity’ and so on evoke the mixture of exclamatory wonder, chuckling bemusement and low-level anxiety most people feel when they confront the latest scientific discoveries about the universe.

Such discoveries are of course already part of the fabric of pop culture—part of mass media imagery—and science fiction is an acknowledged influence in all kinds of literature: modernist literature, for example, from James Joyce to Salman Rushdie, is indebted to relativity, entropy and similar notions.

So Are Angels OK? is best seen as a PR exercise—not so much out to demystify the baffling language of physics but more to make its abstractions touchy-feely: a handshake across the great divide, where local writers get master classes in science and local scientists think about turning mathematical formulae into poetry.

The danger is that such exercises, written to a brief, come across as just that: writing exercises. Poems by Chris Price and Vincent O’Sullivan want to tell us what their authors have swotted up on. Their works are mini-lectures presented in verse form, as if to disguise the didactic and dutiful nature of the message.

By contrast, Glenn Colquhoun’s poems about the characteristics of electromagnetic fields are ingenious and often very funny. He wittily introduces sexual differentiation—the binary opposition of male and female—as a way of understanding force fields.

Jo Randerson, too, strives to make science accessible, but her whizz-bang patter generates more heat than light. She has, though, the entertaining bluster of a flea circus ringmaster singing the praises of fleas invisible to the naked eye.

Lloyd Jones, in pursuit of lost time, offers a confusing slideshow of personal anecdotes. Elizabeth Knox goes back to the future with a time-travel tale that relies on a mishmash of wormholes, string theory and anti-gravity. It left me with motion sickness.

However, Catherine Chidgey, writing about gravity, weaves a story about a competitive young weightlifter that is highly accomplished, managing to cleverly resolve all its conflicting elements.

The long story by Witi Ihimaera has two different endings, neither of which give closure. Nevertheless, his baggage-heavy journey to the centre of the universe is an amazing trip, almost desperately inventive as he strives to reconcile advice from physicists with his space opera scenario.

The most affecting piece of writing here though is a short essay in the endnotes by Margaret Mahy, where she recalls her childhood excitement gazing at the pinpoint prickle of far-off stars through a home-made telescope in a backyard in Whakatane. Her piece of writing, vivid, sparkling, crystal-clear, is doing what creative writing does best: suggest something of the sheer wonder of being alive in a universe that boggles the mind to comprehend.

– David Eggleton

Boldly going where no genre has gone before

This whole book is an experiment, and the writing is, well, experimental. Don’t read Are Angels OK? expecting smooth narratives by writers familiar with the form. If ‘matter’ were an artist who finds a form that sells, and then churns out variations on a theme without extending their own or the public’s horizons, then this book could be anti-matter.

The juxtaposition of art and science inevitably jars at times, to the point it jolted me out of my suspension of disbelief too often. Reading Witi Ihimaera write “When Venus II transits in front of HUDF-JD2-BH1 … gravitational waves will send out the largest seismic warping event in the space-time continuum” is like watching Arnie star in a Woody Allen film. But this is the guy who writes about riding whales. Ihimaera’s story—and indeed Manhire’s project as a whole—has more interest and impact through its risk-taking.

There is much evidence of Kiwi self-confidence throughout the book. Only pages in, we discover that the world’s first time-traveller will come from Mahoe: a piece of unapologetically New Zealand-centric bit of sci-fi unseen since Bruno Lawrence scratched his naked back in The Quiet Earth.

“Reading Witi Ihimaera write “When Venus II transits in front of HUDF-JD2-BH1 … gravitational waves will send out the largest seismic warping event in the space-time continuum” is like watching Arnie star in a Woody Allen film.”

The book is least captivating when the writers fall into ‘explaining’ science to the layperson. And like any compilation, some items are more alluring to personal taste than others. Catherine Chidgey’s ‘The Deadlift’ brought some welcome heart to a cerebral book while Stuart Hoar’s ‘Rap For The Anti-hydrogen Atom’ wasn’t my cup of primordial soup. Glenn Colquhoun’s poem ‘I=R’ was a very clever reflection on reflection; the poem on page 83, with a calculation-title that would make any typesetter choke, had me yearning for the daffodils.

For the most part, these criticisms are the forgivable consequences of boldly going where no genre has gone before. The only omission that frustrated me was that Bill Manhire, having laid out the parameters and documented the results, didn’t include a conclusion. What does it all mean? What is new? Does it meet your expectations? Any common themes? Yes I know, that’s the reader’s (and critic’s) job, but this project was a self-professed experiment and experiments need a conclusion. This absence left me feeling like a ten-year old who has been given a wormhole simulator—batteries not included. Bugger.

So in lieu of Manhire’s conclusion, here’s mine: the ambition to do this risky project and the skill of its execution are a welcome bit of Kiwi self-confidence.

Science and fiction have flirted before, to spawn science fiction. But this baby, despite its inevitable teething-pains, is at times even better. First, just as a game is more interesting to watch when it has rules, the stories are more interesting because the artistic imagination has been asked to work within the rules of some angelic New Zealand scientists. Second, the stories have more culture than sci-fi. They’re entertaining and exciting proof that New Zealand art and science can go together like a pukeko in a ponga tree.

– Daniel Batten