Praise for The Starship and the Canoe
“This is science fiction come real . . . The Starship and the Canoe is neither a wilderness survival manual nor a book of blueprints. It is another of those rare books impossible to define: the kind that seeks you in time. And you will know it, live it and consult it thereafter simply by name.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Brower’s superbly written book clutches at one’s imagination.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In the tradition of Carl Sagan and John McPhee, a bracing cerebral voyage past intergalactic hoopla and backwoods retreats.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An unusual and often moving double biography . . . In their individual ways, the Dysons embody the extremes of twentieth-century life—science and technology, and the revolt against them.”
—The New Yorker
“In this biography of two generations, Kenneth Brower writes with humor and insight of the Dysons’ estrangement and ultimate reconciliation. The clean, sharp prose is reminiscent of John McPhee’s, who once wrote memorably of Brower’s conservationist father, David.”
—People
“A compelling and evocative biography of father and son . . . a highly moving allegory on the compelling ideologies of our times. . . . Aside from any deeper meanings one could extract from this book, it is a lot of fun.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
KENNETH BROWER
MOUNTAINEERS BOOKS is dedicated to the exploration, preservation, and enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas.
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Copyright © 1978 by Kenneth Brower
Foreword copyright © 2020 by Neal Stephenson
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Design and layout: Jen Grable
Cartographer: Erin Greb
Cover illustration: Jen Grable
Many of the quotations from Freeman Dyson found in Chapter 6, “Fire Storm,” first appeared in two articles written by him (“The Sellout” and “Letter from Armenia”), both published by the New Yorker and used here with permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file for this title.
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ISBN (paperback): 978-1-68051-278-6
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-68051-279-3
For my mother and father
Foreword
In the tenth chapter of Kenneth Brower’s The Starship and the Canoe, George Dyson—who, to that point, has been introduced as a curious, solitary, tree-dwelling delinquent and wanderer—speaks. Brower quotes three paragraphs from an account, written by George, describing a sea voyage he undertook circa 1970 in a newly christened vessel he had helped build. Brower introduces the passage gingerly, making mention of George’s Victorian prose style. Decades ago, when I first read this—before I had met George—my immediate reaction was to wish that I could see a great deal more in the same vein, on almost any topic, from the younger Dyson. Despite, or perhaps because of, his difficult and quite brief relationship with the apparatus of formal education, George had obviously taught himself how to write. And in the same way as he made choices around tools, materials, clothing, and lifestyle—namely, picking what worked best for the purpose, regardless of what anyone else might think—he had settled on a prose style that did its job as well as a chisel cuts wood, and as such needed no improvement.
Later, at the head of Chapter 18, Brower quotes George again, describing himself as one who adopts a slender form little influenced by wind and waves. It is ostensibly about how to paddle a kayak in rough conditions, but clearly has a more general significance. At that point (the book dates to the late 1970s) George seems as elusive, to curious readers of Brower’s fascinating and sui generis book, as that passage implies. Less than a decade later, though, George began to tell his own story in Baidarka: The Kayak, and ten years after that he published Darwin Among the Machines, the first in a series of books usually billed as “history of science,” though this doesn’t quite capture what they are. Baidarka is nominally an exploration of Russo-Aleut boat building translated into modern materials, so you must read between the lines and look closely at the beautiful photography of Ann Yow (who later married George) for clues about the enigmatic figure, the innovative boats, and the famous treehouse described by Brower.
In like manner, George’s history of science books, though they are as meticulously researched as any academic publications, are nominally about figures such as Leibniz, Darwin, von Neumann, Ted Taylor, and Freeman. But they are also about George in the sense that only George could, or would, have written them. Only he has access to, and the implicit trust of, some of the people he is writing about; and a man capable of living alone in a treehouse has the leeway to write what he thinks without concern for, or even awareness of, the fads and perverse incentives that dominate the lives of academics.
Freeman too has found more of a public voice in the decades since the first publication of The Starship and the Canoe. It was, for a long time, vaguely known that the British war machine had put his brain to work on something related to bombers during the Second World War. Brower alludes to this, relating a story that Freeman once, without any explanation, sent George a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece about the firebombing of Dresden. The true nature of that wartime research was finally explained by Freeman himself in a Technology Review article published in 2006. This was, as you would expect, quite interesting on a technical level. But it also bore the hallmark of Freeman’s best nonacademic writing in what it said about the culture and psychology of bomber crews and the brass who sent them into harm’s way. It has much to teach us about the difficulties that the human mind has with thinking statistically,