Anyone who has tried writing for such a wide audience knows just how
difficult it can be, even when the material is well within one’s grasp.
Strathern’s background is in philosophy and mathematics. Though he is clearly
happiest when combining the two, the content in all the titles seems fairly
sound. But however admirably cheap and cheerful a series may be, no publisher
should skimp on copy editing, checking or proofreading. I found some alarming
deficiencies here. The overuse of brackets is merely irritating—and
perhaps typical for a mathematician—but much worse are misstatements and
literals in such number as to cause concern.

For example, in Einstein and Relativity(ISBN 0099237326),
particles are “discreet”; Albert Einstein “now grasped the mettle”; and his
famous equation “was literally earth-shattering”. On page 49 of Crick
(ISBN 0099237243) an unforgivably sexist view of Rosalind Franklin is presented.
In Hawking and Black Holes (ISBN 0099237725), the subject’s
biographer is “John Gribben” throughout. In all the books, unqualified hyperbole
is too often given as fact: for example, Linus Pauling’s The Nature of the
Chemical Bondis “the greatest chemistry textbook ever written”. I could go
on. And on . . .

All that said, these little books have the great merit of being readable and
interesting—in between the jolts—and there is scarcely a page of
tedium. Each great innovator is placed in historical context and treated fairly,
warts and all. Hagiography this is not. Delicate readers will possibly gain the
impression that the principal requirements for forming a mathematical genius
include a lousy childhood and hostility to the school curriculum, followed by an
adult life dogged with marital or sexual problems and irrational behaviour often
verging on the insane.

Newton’s pathological vindictiveness, for example, is well illustrated before
the author signs him off in typically unabashed fashion as “the finest scientist
who ever lived”. (Among Britons, I would myself argue for Michael Faraday.) The
totally lunatic pseudo-religion invented by Pythagoras also receives the full
treatment. Pythagoras and His Theorem (ISBN 0099237520) is worth buying
just to learn the real reason why he banned his disciples from eating beans.

Each book has a short bibliography but no index. Inevitably, and there is no
demerit in it, Strathern leans on the biographies and autobiographies, most
sensitively in the case of Alan Turing, but also for Francis Crick and James
Watson—who, their friends might care to know, stand out as islands of
stability among the surrounding mathematicians. In Turing and the
Computer (ISBN 0099237822), there is a powerful blast against British
public schools and their products that should kill sales in bookshops near Eton
and Harrow. And the book also contains the only substantial female character of
the series other than Franklin and various wives. Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s
daughter, was a fine mathematician who assisted Charles Babbage—described
here as “an irascible old fart”.

Please, Mr Strathern, may we read about, say, Marie Curie and Dorothy Hodgkin
in the next batch? Or are women just too staid and sensible?

The New York Library Amazing Space (John Wiley, $12.95, ISBN
0471144983) is an absolutely straight reference book, well-written and organised
for tackling the kinds of questions children ask. Ranging from the structure of
the Earth to quasars, it has a good index and bibliography, and should appeal to
adults. Amazing Facts (Dorling Kindersley, £7.99, ISBN
0751355178), on the other hand, is a very well-illustrated ragbag organised in
double-page “topics”. The price seems a bit steep—even in
hardback—for 18 topics with about a dozen facts on each. But as a present
it should keep precocious nephews and nieces quiet for a while.

I am increasingly convinced that in this story Forster speaks clearly to us all about the dangers built into so-called “developed”, “postindustrial” societies. Yes, the theme has been explored by other authors, but he probably got there first and did it better. Furthermore, he was the first president of the National Council for Civil Liberties, promoted Indian independence, detested Nazism openly when the establishment did not and, with Eric Crozier, wrote the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s powerfully anti-authoritarian opera Billy Budd. Unlike many writers, Forster put himself where his pen was.

The only characters in The Machine Stops are Vashti and her son Kuno. Kuno had been removed to the public nurseries soon after birth. Everyone in the world lives in their own underground room; all services are provided by the omnipresent Machine. Vashti believes that she has many friends, although she has had no human contact since childhood – except during insemination – and that she never has any spare time. She gives and receives frequent lectures. She leaves her room only once, and is “seized with the terrors of direct experience”. The room contains one “survival from the ages of litter … the Book of the Machine”, which she worships. “Beware of first-hand ideas!” exclaims one lecturer. “Let your ideas … be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation.”

Those who rebel against the Machine are ejected through the “vomitories” to the harsh conditions on the surface, to which they are unaccustomed, and die. But by using a respirator, the determined Kuno manages to reach the surface and discovers people who have somehow managed to survive there; a woman trying to rescue him is killed by the Mending Apparatus which drags Kuno back underground. But “year by year the Machine was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence”. No one understands the monster as a whole. Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the Machine deteriorates, while apologists preach patience and the Committee of the Mending Apparatus continually refers complaints to the Central Committee.

Then the Machine stops. Kuno and Vashti are, improbably, reunited in the final cataclysm, and together they weep for humanity. “Man, the flower of all flesh … was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with the colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as it was a garment and no more, so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body.”

Forster thus foresaw at the beginning of the 20th century our present confusion of the flow and accessibility of information with knowledge, knowledge with wisdom, efficiency with intelligent effectiveness. Throughout his long life he was against centralisation, especially of authority and power and the means of maintaining them. He was very much for tolerance and liberty and wrote a book extolling democracy. He would have dismissed “virtual reality” as an oxymoron and dangerous with it. I am sure that he would have deprecated a National Curriculum for schools, because it does not instil in pupils the crucial ability to question received opinion and authority. Nor does it develop a capacity for superversion: that is, overturning the accepted order from above, unlike subversion which does it messily from below.

Forster’s idea of education, shaped by his unhappy experience at Tonbridge School, he expressed through Fielding in A Passage to India: “I believe in teaching people to be individuals, and to understand other individuals.” Do computer games or surfing the superhighway make people happier and wiser? Does observation persuade us that massive information-handling power necessarily makes businesses more profitable, governments more able to govern well, the future more predictable? Word processors and printers generate more paper, but does the writing reflect carefully formulated thought, and how much of the paper is ever properly read? As Joanna Coles wrote recently in The Guardian: “In the great race for technology we find ourselves up a creative cul-de-sac. Just because something is possible does not mean it has a point.”

The Machine Stops was the first piece of genuine literature to grab my attention and demand a voluntary written response. My English teacher was so surprised that he read it aloud to the class. In the peroration of my essay back in 1951 I wrote: “We are all potential Kunos.” Now, I believe that we in the rich countries are potential Vashtis, content to put unthinking trust in yet higher technology, withdrawing from first-hand observation and experience, and decreasingly capable of originality and creativity. Our attention spans are shrinking, our family bonds are contracting or severed, and while we have shoals of fleeting acquaintances, we have few real friends.

Forster’s official biographer, Nick Furbank, wrote: “He believed – literally, and as more than a sentimental cliché – that the true history of the human race was the history of human affection.” A later biographer, Nicola Beauman, described Forster’s Howards End as “perfectly contemporary for today in its contrasting of Thatcherism [the Wilcoxes] with liberal values [the Schlegel sisters]”. Margaret Schlegel famously urged Henry Wilcox to achieve “the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion”. Forster acknowledged the necessity of both the prose and the passion but, as he stated through the Schlegels, “personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever”.

Is it too late, is it indeed possible, to change information technology from subtle slave-driver and good excuse for not meeting people into a way of increasing human contact and human affection?