Lauren Slater, Take Notes

Richard Dawkins discusses what it takes to have a go at the Daily Telegraph/BASF Science Writer Awards, telling would-be entrants to the field:

Choose science, and you have something important to write about. Not just important but fascinating. Not just fascinating but open-ended: you’ll never run out of subjects, where the effort of simplification repays the writer as richly as the reader.

A lot of the advice devolves into fairly obvious stuff, but deep down I think there's a lot to be said for the notion--which I'm freely recasting in my own words--that the science writer seeks to make the strange familiar but not too familiar, retaining the strangeness that makes science fascinating. And though the questing scientist is certainly a major character in any science story, it's important, if casting yourself in that part, to maintain the balance, so that you don't wind up writing a book about yourself that happens to have some science in it. Back in the comments area, recently, I responded to one of Lauren Slater's defenders by suggesting she read John Horgan's Rational Mysticism, which considers the neurological aspects of religious/mystical experiences. Even though Horgan uses the same kind of structure Slater does, recounting his visits to experts in the field and drawing upon his own experiences, his book has a much different feel than hers--and is, in my own opinion, an infinitely better book. If I had to pinpoint why, the first thing that pops into mind is perhaps a certain sense of detachment.

Whether he's intrigued by an idea or repulsed by it, he's able to discuss that idea--and his ideas about that idea--without tilting the reader's perception in any particular direction. As I observed when I reviewed Rational Mysticism last year, "believers can point to Horgan's willingness to grapple seriously with their tenets, while skeptics can find ample support for the argument that it's all in our heads." And though it would be hard to say Horgan doesn't find drama in his experimental use of ayahuasca, he finds only the drama that's in that experience and no other, and I found that true of just about every other incident in the book as well. The science is fascinating enough without interjecting needless drama into it; the ambiguity is there without having to stir it up. The question, I suppose, is whether one wants to use oneself as a vehicle to write about science, or use science as a vehicle to write about oneself. And perhaps there's room for both types of books in the world, and I just happen to only find one particularly interesting. But, no, that can't be it, because I think Carl Djerassi's a swell novelist, so I'm all for using science as a means of plumbing the "soul," if it's done right...