From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: Re: Asimov and the Decay of SF
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
	<9231@emory.mathcs.emory.edu> <1992Jul26.173018.12808@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 26 Jul 92 12:02:46

In article <1992Jul26.173018.12808@athena.mit.edu> kamorgan@athena.mit.edu (Keith Morgan) writes:

   Joanne Eglash wrote:

   Can anyone recommend fiction (both by authors in previous decades and
   current writers) in which the subject of science and scientists is
   andled intelligently?  Such as a book about a marine biologist, 
   perhaps?  I seem to remember a book about a woman who was interested in
   anthropology...Margaret Drabble?  Lloyd's birthday is in August, and
   I'm going to sneak in a novel with his other gifts! 

   Meg Worley responds:

   C.P. Snow.  Anything by him.  He was a fine and respected scientist, and,
   I believe, an even more fine and respected novelist.  Not bad as an
   essayist either (cf _The Two Cultures_, which might do both you and your
   friend a spot of good, as it has done me and mine).  

   A bit of a cold fish too, but that's not important.

   Rage away,

   meg

	   A vigorous dissent on Snow from this corner; I don't know if
   he was considered a great scientist but I think his pronouncement on
   "the two cultures" uninformed and condescending towards the
   humanities. As an suggestion for someone trying to convert a scientist
   towards literature I think that Snow would only confirm prejudices
   rather than expanding insights. E.g.: Snow thought Ibsen the only
   "world-class" writer to understand the industrial revolution. Snow had
   an authoritative ignorance hard to replicate these days. I'd recommend
   Russell McCommach's _Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist_ as an
   interesting book that deals with changing scientific "paradigms" in an
   interesting way. John Banville's novels about Copernicus and Kepler
   are good and maybe Gerald Durell's books.  None of these are
   "scientific" authors in a rigorous way but they do address scientific
   themes in a manner that could be interesting to a scientist. 

   --Keith
   --
   Keith Morgan		      | Just because your voice reaches half-
   MIT Libraries                 | way around the world doesn't mean
   kamorgan@athena.mit.edu	      | you are wiser than when it reached 
				 | only to the end of the bar. Ed Murrow

I'll defend Snow and say that his condescension toward the literature
eductate civil servants and policy makers was entirely justified.
Snow, though scientifically educated and with some scientific work,
spent a good part of his career as a scientific bureaucrat.  Then
he became a novelist; at least I suppose he must have been a
full-time novelist for a while to write all those novels.

I think that his "Two Cultures" unfortunately turned out to be mistaken
as regards the future of the time when he wrote.  Unfortunately, the
scientific culture did not maintain its independence of fashionable
non-scientific ideas.  Many scientists went along with wrong things that
were within their areas of scientific competence in order to feel
good.  Alas, there are but 1 1/2 cultures today.

--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.