Four months after my previous issue, it feels very good to be back with you. A handful of you have reached out in the past couple months to tell me you miss the newsletter—thank you for saying so. Things have been very busy at Decrypt—but this newsletter is not the place (at least not in this issue) for crypto talk.
Since we last chatted in March about Normal People, I’ve been on a nonfiction diet. I tore through Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (on the Osage Indian murders over oil fortunes), American Fire by Monica Hesse (about a bizarre string of abandoned-house arsons in Virginia in 2012), Cult of Glory by Doug Swanson (on the Texas Rangers—the bloodthirsty militia, not the pro baseball team), and Taken By Bear in Yellowstone by Kathleen Snow (subject self-explanatory). I also read and loved the novels Klara and the Sun (Ishiguro), Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison, it blew my mind), Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (had been on my list for a very long time), and The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs (the good kind of weird).
What have you read and liked in 2021 so far? As always, I really do want to hear. And as always, if you enjoy this space and want to share it with friends, please forward this email. If you aren’t subscribed, or your friends aren’t, here you go:
For Issue 12, I want to tell you about a sensation I privately think of as the feeling.
It’s the feeling I get from a certain kind of book or movie that makes me think about our cosmic insignificance. Some of these works involve “aliens,” but not all of them do. Most of these works get classified as sci-fi, but not all of them are.
The earliest I can remember getting the feeling was from the movie “Contact,” which we watched one day in 1999 in sixth grade life science class at Wayland Middle School.
In the key scene in “Contact,” Jodie Foster’s Dr. Ellie Arroway travels through space in a gyroscope via a series of wormholes (or thinks she does) and ends up on a beach where she meets her dead father. But after an emotional hug, she pulls away and says, “You’re not real. When I was unconscious, you downloaded my thoughts, my memories.” And her father (an alien) confirms, “We thought this might make things easier for you.” But that’s not the moment that most strongly gave me the feeling: it was when she returns and her colleagues tell her nothing happened on their end, the gyroscope simply fell to the ground and the feed was lost for a few seconds. (At the end of the movie, we find out the footage also recorded 18 hours of static.)
I should say here plainly that I fully believe there’s other life in the universe. The kookier-sounding way to phrase that is to say I believe in aliens, but this belief appears to have lost its stigma in recent years; just a couple months ago, CBS Sunday Morning ran a segment on UFO sightings. Of course, the most famous line in “Contact” is: “If there wasn’t, it would be an awful waste of space.” But the reason I believe in life beyond Earth is because it strikes me as absurd, and solipsistic, to conclude there isn’t simply because we haven’t discovered them yet.
I get a hint of the feeling from a few other alien or interplanetary travel movies like “Arrival,” “Signs,” and “Interstellar,” though not quite as strongly. I got the feeling from Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, but not from the next two books in the trilogy.
The feeling isn’t about being creeped out or scared, more like stunned silent. It’s when an artwork makes me think deeply enough about the likelihood that we are not alone, and thus not so special, and thus even more infinitesimally small than we already comprehend. It’s like a tingle. This, from a 2020 Stephen King short story I happen to have just read (“The Life of Chuck”), is a good description: “a small and not entirely unpleasurable chill.”
There was an article in Rolling Stone I read at least a decade ago in print that gave me the feeling, and I have been trying in vain to find the piece online ever since. (If you can find it and send it to me, God bless you.) The article was about people who have had near-death experiences, and as I recall (you know how it goes when your memory of an experience, book, or moment becomes more important than whether you remember it correctly) it quoted one person who was able to describe something that happened in the same hospital as them while they were in a coma, and another person who said that they met God, and God laid out before them all of their possible futures as a series of panels. I have never forgotten that article.
Season 1 of the Netflix show “The OA,” which is about a group of people who all had near-death experiences and are rounded up by a mad scientist of sorts, also gave me the feeling. (I appeared in a scene in the first episode of Season 2 of the show, which was very cool.)
Most recently, I strongly got the feeling from The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu.
The novel was published in China in 2008, where it was a massive success (the best-selling sci-fi novel in China in many decades), but didn’t get an English translation until 2014. It’s the first in a trilogy, and maybe I shouldn’t write about the series until I’ve read the second two books, but I’m also not sure I want to continue, in case the second two aren’t as breathtaking as the first.
What surprised me about the novel is that it doesn’t even read like science fiction until hundreds of pages in. It opens during China’s cultural revolution in the 1960s, when an astrophysics student, Ye Wenjie, witnesses her father, a professor, get beaten to death in an auditorium by student supporters of the Red Guard. Ye’s own mother and sister cheer on the beating. Ye gets branded a traitor as well, and sent to a labor camp where a journalist befriends her, then betrays her, and she ends up in prison. (This whole start to the book felt more like Darkness at Noon than, say, Dune.)
After reading a copy of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (you could argue Three-Body Problem is eco-fiction) Ye concludes: “The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper—or, at least, neutral—act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteous were, in reality, evil? […] It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race. This thought determined the entire direction of Ye’s life.”
Ye eventually gets sent to a top secret Chinese government facility to do satellite research, only to discover the facility’s true purpose is to scan for messages from other planets. She intercepts a message from a planet called Trisolaris (three suns) that warns Earth not to respond, or else Trisolaris will invade Earth. Ye, disgusted with her own people (justifiably so), makes a terrible decision: she responds and dares Trisolaris to invade. This is the moment the book really got its tentacles in me.
In case you’re thinking that it sounds like the book starts slow: it does. But it also carries you along with an eerie guile, despite many complicated explanations of scientific theories. It is also an unemotional novel, not very concerned with character development. It’s far more about scope and vastness.
To wit: Late in the book, two scientists, Wang Miao and Ding Yi, are talking about what subatomic particles would look like to the naked eye (I know, I know, this might sound exhausting). Wang says the particles would just look like a tiny point. But Ding demonstrates how much can be contained in one tiny point by opening up a cigarette butt and revealing “the yellowed spongy material inside.” He says, “If you spread this little thing open, the absorbent surface area can be as large as a living room.” A pipe uses the same kind of filter inside as a cigarette, but it’s a longer tube filled with active charcoal, and Ding explains that if you take the active charcoal out, “the absorbent surface formed by the tiny holes inside is as large as a tennis court.” Wang asks (and you, too, might ask), “What are you trying to say?” Ding says (after some more sciency stuff): “Because God was stingy, during the big bang He only provided the macroscopic world with three spatial dimensions, plus the dimension of time. But this doesn’t mean that higher dimensions don’t exist… In the universe, an important mark of a civilization’s technological advancement is its ability to control and make use of micro dimensions… From the perspective of a more advanced civilization in the universe, bonfires and computers and nanomaterials are not fundamentally different. They all belong to the same level. That’s also why they still think of humans as mere bugs. Unfortunately, I think they’re right.”
The point, for me, beyond the science, was: look how much can be contained in a single point; how vast the universe is; how tiny we are.
This scene in The Three-Body Problem also reminded me of a specific detail in Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction that my friend Ryan loves to cite: Kolbert writes that in one hundred million years, every single thing created by humans will be “compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.”
It’s difficult to truly contemplate that. But thinking about is strangely satisfying, even if also upsetting, like picking at a scab. That’s the feeling.
The Three-Body Problem truly hits its stride when some of the characters discover what the reader already knows: that the computer game they’ve been playing (“The Three-Body Problem”), set on Trisolaris, was designed by the aliens of Trisolaris to recruit supporters on Earth. The game gets its players so enwrapped in its world and levels that by the time the Trisolarans behind the game reveal themselves, the players have been groomed to feel more kinship with Trisolaris than with Earth. And the big-picture intentions of the Trisolarans are… not friendly.
The first book leaves you pondering a scenario that really gives me the feeling: What would we do if we found out aliens exist, and are coming to invade Earth, but they won’t get here for hundreds of years?
Would we immediately drop everything we’re doing and band together as a planet to focus on preparing for war? How would regular people react? It’s really hard to predict with certainty. For many people, their entire belief system would crumble. I can imagine law and order immediately collapsing and some people going insane, but can also imagine many people shrugging and continuing to live their current lives.
There are certain sci-fi novels I love dearly that don’t give me the feeling, by the way. Ender’s Game was seminal for me; I’ve probably read it six or seven times. Dune was a revelation when I finally read it a couple of years ago and then tore through the next three books in the series. The Left Hand of Darkness is up there for me. But none of these novels set on other planets give me the feeling.
That’s not to say it’s only from books about contact with aliens. It can be about contact with God, or about what might happen eons in the future, long after us, so I think the idea of our own cosmic smallness is the key for me.
Three other books that do it for me that I’d highly recommend, each of them extremely different (but bound by the common feeling they give me, and how long they’ve stuck with me): The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian, in which the Earth is flooded again and one hospital becomes the Ark, selected by God to survive and build the next society (holy shit, right?); The Book of Dave by Will Self, about a society far in the future that adopts an angry diary written by an angry London cabbie in our time and printed on metal as its Bible, thinking its author is God (brilliant); and Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr., in which a man born in Maine in 1974 is told, by a voice in his head, exactly how and when the world will end, and given a chance to save it.
You can see an obvious theme here. And folks, the truth is out there.
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Further reading: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America (New York Times Magazine)
You're back, yes! Loved this one. And I was just recommended The Three-Body Problem by another friend, as well.