PD Smith

Fatal fascination

11 October 2008 | atomic bomb, C-bomb, Doomsday Men, Dr Strangelove, Faust | 3 comments

Two more great reviews of the paper­back edi­tion of Dooms­day Men. The first is by Amber Pear­son in the Dai­ly Mail:

“From Adam and Eve to Dr Faus­tus and Dr Strangelove, the his­to­ry — and pop­u­lar cul­ture — of the human race is lit­tered with exam­ples of our fatal fas­ci­na­tion with the acqui­si­tion of knowl­edge. As PD Smith points out, Homo sapi­ens is the only species which knows it will die. So what is it that dri­ves intel­li­gent, ratio­nal men and women to push back the bound­aries of sci­ence, know­ing that their work will be used to devel­op ever more pow­er­ful meth­ods of mass destruc­tion? Writ­ten with all the pace of a thriller, this is a com­pelling, and ulti­mate­ly extreme­ly chill­ing, look at the way sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery has always gone hand-in-hand with war­fare, and it cap­tures the sense of urgency and excite­ment felt in the race to cre­ate the atom­ic bomb.”

The sec­ond is by Jon Swaine in today’s Dai­ly Tele­graph:

“The sto­ry of the plan to cre­ate the C‑bomb — a nu­clear bomb cap­able of dest­roy­ing all life on Earth — is chill­ing. Yet PD Smith’s his­to­ry, told with the joy­ful enthu­si­asm of a sci-fi afi­ciona­do, is also irre­sistible. Dart­ing between his­to­ry and biogra­phies of the key sci­en­tists, Smith includes dooms­day devices from fic­tion, show­ing how pre­scient some writ­ers have (almost) proved. The ten­sion at the sto­ry’s heart — why their gen­er­a­tion’s most gift­ed sci­en­tists would seek to cre­ate poten­tial apoc­a­lypse to pre­serve peace — endures, anchor­ing this sur­re­al peri­od dra­ma in real­i­ty, 20 years after the end of the Cold War.”

3 comments so far:

  1. Gwilym Williams | 14 October 2008

    I haven’t yet had the plea­sure of read­ing Dooms­day Men. But I’d like to query your first premise.
    “Homo sapi­ens is the only species that knows it will die”
    Seals know they will die. Pen­guins know they will die. Ele­phants know they will die. Dol­phins know they will die.
    Per­haps you mean
    “Homo sapi­ens is the only species that know it will die [out]”
    But homo sapi­ens does not ‘know’ that. Homo sapi­ens may dis­cov­er a way to become immor­tal.

  2. PD Smith | 14 October 2008

    Thanks for your com­ment Gwilym.

    I guess this sen­tence is a gen­er­al­i­sa­tion and as such may be chal­lenged. It arose part­ly out of my read­ing of an excel­lent book by Robin Dun­bar — “The Human Sto­ry”, in which he argues (among oth­er things) that no oth­er species “has any­thing remote­ly resem­bling reli­gion”.

    As a species we have such a won­der­ful­ly rich life of the mind: we can imag­ine utopias and dystopias, we cre­ate art and reli­gions, believe in heav­ens and hells. And I think you could argue that much of this stems from our aware­ness, from quite a young age, that our time is lim­it­ed: we will all die.

    I sup­pose as we are unable to talk to ani­mals, we can’t tell whether they know they will die. My feel­ing is that they don’t have the kind of pro­found knowl­edge of death that has played such an impor­tant role in the his­to­ry of our species.

    I hope in spite of this you will enjoy the book!

  3. Gwilym Williams | 14 October 2008

    This is an inter­est­ing sub­ject.
    Sure, ani­mals don’t have reli­gion. But we can’t even say that for sure. Ele­phants have some strange rit­u­als from what I can gath­er. In our local zoo for exam­ple a young ele­phant killed a zoo-keep­er a few short weeks after the zoo direc­tor had ordered the body of an elder­ly ele­phant which had died to be removed from the ele­phant com­pound. An act of revenge?
    Might ele­phants need a peri­od of mourn­ing, per­haps some time with the deceased? Just like us in fact.
    I saw a film where some pen­guins hav­ing over­win­tered in a kind of shift­ing hud­dle in the Antarc­tic were basi­cal­ly starv­ing by the time spring came. They made their way to the sea to catch some fish. There was a hole in the ice and in the water cir­cling the hole were the preda­tors who were wait­ing to snaf­fle the pen­guins as soon as they jumped into the water. It was a kind of cat and mouse sit­u­a­tion. The pen­guins knew they might die on this day. You could see the fear in their expres­sions as they looked at each oth­er won­der­ing what to do.
    I will look out for your book.