A World from Dust (Update): Should the White Rot Story Change?

One of the hazards and joys of science writing is that what you write will change in some way after publication. The first one of these just happened. A paper just came out that may change one of the sections in A World from Dust Chapter 9, from what was explained as a biochemical cause to what is more a geological/climate cause. In the book, I put forward the explanation that so many plants grew so big in the Carboniferous Era because they invented lignin, and it took millions of years for fungi to evolve an efficient system for degrading that lignin, so it eventually turned into coal deposits till the fungi evolved. This is what most people thought, and it was backed up by a recent phylogenetic analysis.

But wait! M.P. Nelson et al. just published "Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production" in PNAS. The title speaks for itself -- Nelson et al. have produced an impressively integrated array of sciences to argue that most of the biomass wasn't lignin anyway and also that many lignin-degrading activities did evolve quickly. Rather, they propose that wet climate related to geological activity resulted in the unprecedented burial of carbon as coal. As a scientist outside the field, their argument seems compelling because it depends on bringing together so many lines of evidence.

My only hesitation comes from another paper I saw during the same reading session: Nagy et al. in Mol Biol Evol titled "Comparative Genomics of Early-Diverging Mushroom-Forming Fungi Provides Insights into the Origins of Lignocellulose Decay Capabilities." This paper suggests that white rot evolved later than previously stated, although I don't find many dates to pin down just how much later they propose it evolved. If this activity is significantly better on crystalline lignin or some extra-sturdy form, the story might end up aligning in part with the book's explanation.

I'll have to see how the scientists in the field sort this one out. If, as I suspect, Nelson et al. end up with the winning story, then there is a take-home lesson that takes a story away from Chapter 9 but will reinforce part of Chapter 10: evolution tends to surprise us with how quickly it can solve problems. If Nelson et al. are right, then it didn't take many millions of years to crack the tough nut that is lignin, and fungi were able to respond much faster than I or others presumed.

I'll try to update this part as more info comes out. The book is in print, but the blog can change as science does.

"On Being Wrong in Science" posted at the BioLogos Blog

I just posted a guest blog at the BioLogos blog about my scientific and theological journeys titled "On Being Wrong in Science." Check it out, and also check out the post from John Walton that inspired it (referred to in the first sentence).

Book Review: Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle

This collection of lectures on poetry is a fascinating, perceptive, and occasionally very funny reflection on words and what words can do. A lecture juxtaposing Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, and Anne Frank stands out in particular. Mary Ruefle's writing gambols about and sometimes the wheels seem like they're on the verge of coming off but then she reels it in and the whole lecture coheres better than you thought possible. As the collection wears on the lectures get shorter and seem to fragment into reflective but still connected shards. We don't need massive online courses as long as poetry professors see fit to publish their works in collections like this -- reading this book is like sitting in class with a brilliant, humane, slightly batty poet who talks about life as much as she talks about poetry. Recommended for anyone with an interest in words and writing.

Language Map of Europe

This map shows the languages of Europe, scaled by number of speakers and placed on the map by the "lexical distance" between each. English is close to German but it's actually closer to French, although from the way these clusters line up you can see at a glance why, despite that, English is still considered a Germanic language.

Notice how the language relationships fit the geography of Europe (or were made to fit, but hey, it works).

Genes can be clustered in the same way, and they tell similar stories. It's words all the way down.

I got the picture from here, and the original data is from K. Tyshchenko (1999), Metatheory of Linguistics.

Tolkien, in Nature, on Science

Nature recently published an editorial on the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, but it was the quote at the end by J.R.R. Tolkien that really got my attention. Then I noticed that the quote was about science, and I realized I had just read my favorite Nature editorial of all time. Tolkien gives some very good advice about writing, stories, and magic:

"Perhaps the most surprising critic of such technological fixes was the great hobbitmonger himself, J. R. R. Tolkien, as revealed in his unfinished story The Notion Club Papers (published posthumously in 1992 in Sauron Defeated, edited by his son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien). Much of the story is a discussion between academics and writers on the dishonesty of using scientific-sounding MacGuffins to get one from here to there. If one insists on doing such a thing, one might as well dream oneself to Mars or wave a wizardly wand. The story centres on criticism of H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), in which the protagonist, one Dr Cavor, invents a material, cavorite, that provides insulation against gravity. “Gravity can’t be treated like that,” complains one of Tolkien’s characters. “It’s fundamental. It’s a statement by the Universe of where you are in the Universe, and the Universe can’t be tricked by a surname with ite stuck on the end, nor by any such abracadabra.” Which suggests, perhaps surprisingly, that even if time travel and warp drives are impossible, the world’s best-selling fantasy author knew a thing or two about the general theory of relativity."

Flannery O'Connor's Inspiration

Marilynne Robinson reviews Flannery O'Connor's recently published journal and, as usual, makes connections that cross time and space, pointing out how the patterns of thought that gave us the Muses as literal inspiration have been lost, evoking some of Barfield's comments to my ear:

"O’Connor’s awareness of her gifts gives her a special kind of interest in them. Having concluded one early entry by asking the Lord to help her “with this life that seems so treacherous, so disappointing,” she begins the next entry: “Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story — just like the typewriter was mine.”
      

"... I would be curious to know what story or part of a story by O’Connor should be attributed to the Lord. It can seem self-aggrandizing or simply bizarre to ascribe any thought or work to a seemingly external source, named or unnamed. Nevertheless, ­Hesiod, Pindar and any number of poets and prophets before and after them have declared indebtedness of this kind. If they, and O’Connor, were naïve, sophistication has made language poorer."

Today's Writing Quote by David Foster Wallace

Loce this quote, courtesy of David Foster Wallace in "Deciderization 2007 -- A Special Report" (this pretty much nails it as far as non-fiction is concerned; I would not know about fiction!):

"Writing-wise, fiction is scarier, but nonfiction is harder—because nonfiction’s based in reality, and today’s felt reality is overwhelmingly, circuit-blowingly huge and complex. Whereas fiction comes out of nothing. Actually, so wait: the truth is that both genres are scary; both feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc."

Book Review: On Writing by Stephen King (10th Anniversary Edition)

On a recent Facebook thread on books about writing, On Writing by Stephen King kept coming up. I agree -- it's the Fred Meyer of writing books, a one-stop shop for everything from getting ideas to getting an agent (with wonderfully specific advice on that last one that I may try out some day ... ). It is as much about Stephen King as it is about writing, and that's all right with me. The one mistake I made was starting it on an airplane after I had some sushi and we hit some turbulence. Some of King's formative experiences are vividly medical in nature and ... let's just say I put the book down for the rest of the flight and the rest of the summer. Then I came back to it and found a practical guide for the intuitive writer. Simple and effective advice. Worth the time.

Congratulations, We're Getting Nowhere

The New York Times published a letter by a scientist about science literacy today. It is a prime example of how to waste words in a public forum. The author talks about how we've gone backwards (with a 2% change in a statistic, which has got to be within the error bars), says God and science don't conflict and then implies that God and science do conflict, insults creationists without making any distinction between the many varieties, and throws in climate change just in case any minds were still open to slam them shut.

It's preaching to the choir, and the comments bear this out. 90% are empty "you go girl" affirmations of scientism echoing the author's statements and 10% are empty, defiant "I'm a creationist" negations of everything the author says. (At least stubborn denial is interesting.) The "needle" gauging belief of NYT readers did not budge. This just gave them a chance to yell at each other.

It's kind of funny to be saying popularization is what science needs when your very writing style is 1.) boring and 2.) polarizing at once. At least Sagan was never boring. But, honestly, what is interesting or even new in this essay? It gets us nowhere.

When a scientist praises the Manhattan Project without any of the self-reflection of the destruction that project resulted in, then that scientist is indulging in nostalgia and idolizing science. Oppenheimer realized the double-edged nature of science right away with his "I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds" remark. Every scientist after him has to acknowledge the same.

This essay is venting without nuance, and it only makes things worse. I say that as a scientist lucky enough to work with the beauty and strangeness of the natural world every day. This is a noble and fascinating calling, so when you write to a public audience, make sure you get that across. Instead, we have a political screed, dressed up in a lab coat, arguing against political screeds. Oy.

Book Review: The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Periodic Table is a renowned example of chemistry literature, and what Primo Levi has done in this book is unique. Each chapter is an element, but this is not a science book. Each chapter is primarily a story from Levi's life, arranged roughly chronologically, but this is not an autobiography. It skips over whole crucial episodes in Levi's life that are described in other books -- most of his time at Auschwitz, for example -- but rather does indeed focus each story on a particular element, usually literally, as in Levi in his job as a chemist was working with that element in some way, shape or form. Not sure what the word for this is: biochemgraphy, perhaps? At any rate, Levi is as much a writer as he is a chemist, which is to say, he's a very, very good writer.

Levi's crystalline prose is something that I simply hope will absorb in some ways into my own work, but there is something left unsaid. As good as this is, it was written several decades ago, and usually concerns work done in the 40's, 50's and 60's. At the end, in his discussion of the journey of an atom of carbon, Levi mentions that there are many steps that are not known here as he passes them by. But now, they are known! That's what it most exciting about this book, that it is episodic, and therefore it is necessarily incomplete. Others can now complete it. Let's hope there's a future for chem lit ... The Periodic Table clearly shows there was a glorious past for it.

Why Does Slate Think Basic Biology is Esoteric?

The news for today is not that the Supreme Count unanimously ruled against patenting naturally occurring genes in the Myriad case. At least, I saw that as such an obvious no-brainer that my fingers will not type a sentence that unequivocally states that such an item is actual news. No, the surprising part was in the Slate article I read on it, ostensibly about Justice Scalia's ignorance of the science, a key paragraph clearly condemns us all:

To Scalia’s credit, the science in Myriad is convoluted, especially for someone who hasn’t taken biology in decades. Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion, takes an admirable stab at elucidating it at the outset, explaining the basics of genes, chromosomes, and “the familiar ‘double helix.’ ” He even expounds upon nucleotides for a time, penning what must be the most esoteric sentence in the court’s modern history: “[T]he nucleotide cross-bars are chemically connected to a sugar-phosphate backbone.” (One suspects Thomas was less than enthused to be assigned this case.)

I'm left spluttering at the idea that a high-school biology sentence (which I italicized in the quote above) can be classified as "most esoteric" in any way. That is about as straightforward a description of DNA structure as you can get. It's probably at about the level of the letter Francis Crick wrote to his 5th-grade son describing the Watson-Crick DNA structure.

I don't want to name the particular author because it's not about that one author -- there's an editor, there's a readership, there's a whole culture implicated here, including me, because it's my job to let everyone know how this stuff works. It's about a whole culture that depends upon, even worships, science, and yet considers the word "nucleotide" to be excruciatingly esoteric, even boring. And that's the worst word in that sentence, folks. All of the other words are numbingly common. In fact, to me, those other words are the boring ones.

Power to the people through general biology and chemistry courses required for all college grads! Those courses are crucial. We need to understand how genes work, and I need to teach my students to the utmost end of my ability to prepare them for a world in which they will need to know DNA structure to understand Supreme Court rulings. Their language needs to include the word "nucleotide."

Also, the polticial angle in the wording of the headline: in my view Scalia is not being ignorant here -- he's being honest about his own limits in the face of complicated science. The article is clear on this, but the headline is not, and I have the feeling that an anonymous editor is more responsible for that tone than the byline author.

On the other hand, come on, the science is really not all that complicated, not compared to thousands of daily tasks. It's just that it seems complicated because it is not a daily task to you. That's fine, but we've got to try and address that, perhaps by making it closer to a daily task to use the word "nucleotide." You have a citizen's responsibility to learn biochemistry, just as I do to learn law. I promise not to be bored by law if you promise the same for my topic!

Book Review: Ender's Game

Read this one aloud to the boys. This time through, knowing the course of the story, a few things stood out. First of all, it's intense. Other authors create suspense, but Card creates intensity. The detail in strategy and mechanics of the game, and the demonstration of Ender's skills, it's all just as impressive on a second reading.

Also on a second reading, it's clear that Card is very good at not telegraphing certain spoilers. The spoiler of all spoilers occurs a good distance before you reach the end of the book so you are fooled (this won't be a problem in the movie, of course, because you don't know how much time you have left as you know how many pages you have left!). The seams where Card must have expanded this story from its original short-story form are very clear to me. I've only read the immediate follow-up book (also very good) but not any of the others in which he must really expand on some of the threads left hanging.

Card's ambivalence about violence in a story that, quite frankly, depends on it is a road for future analysis. The reason why you like Ender's Game is the strategy and the game-like nature of the conflict, the breathtaking intensity and intricacy of it all. In the end, Card makes you feel some shame for having liked it but doesn't do much more than that. That's deliberate but I need to read the later books to see where he takes it. Right now I can't tell if he's trying to have his cake (violence) and eat it too.

This was just on the borderline of being too intense for our nine-year-old, even with some judicious parental editing. Caveat emptor. But all the same, it must be one of the top 25 books of all time for me. Let's hope the movie can do it justice and expand it in subtle ways.

How high should I put the 3rd book and its follow-ups on my reading list, I wonder?

Neil Gaiman on Writing

Neil Gaiman recently published eight rules for writing, which (like his writing) tend toward the perfectly apt. I will be posting these on my wall next to my writing computer:

1. Write
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

At this site they have several other authors' rules if you want to know what other authors say. The rules are overlapping but non-identical, as you'd expect.

The Mechanical Philologist

I'm surprised it took this long.

Finally, the principles of bioinformatics have been applied to philology (the study of/love of words). The software used to make gene trees can be applied to word trees. Here's a news article on it and here is the original Proceedings of the NAS article.

This makes perfect sense because both words and genes are "made of letters." Words are like genes, and genes are like words. There is a deep poetry at the heart of life. Computers are good at analyzing genes, so (with the help of an ear or two) they should also be good at analyzing words.

Once again my mind turns to the anti-mechanism philologist, Owen Barfield. What would he say to this? Would he welcome this pattern-finding algorithm? Or would he insist that, rather than gathering a little more hidden info, this overlooks the most important part of words, the inner revelation and subjective experience?

Not being able to ask him right now, I can only look at the results with a Barfieldian eye, asking, how does the development of genes parallel the development of words? I think he'd at least welcome the idea that there are significant parallels between the two evolutions, and here's a program that may be able to capture them.

Food Detectives in the Classroom

The New York Times recently ran a story in which the reporter (a film-maker) took five everyday food items and ran them through a bomb calorimeter. Lo and behold, the calorie counts on the packages don't match the claims, and four out of five were too high, adding up to an extra 500 calories.

I have mixed feelings about this study. Sure, some of the calorie counts are a little higher than claimed -- but the error bars in the bomb calorimeter's findings were not reported. Why are we trusting the instrument so much? This is far more about journalism than it is about science.

And yet, and yet ... it could be about science. What if a chemistry course on calorimetry had each lab group buy different kinds of food and test its calories, then compare to the claimed calories? They'd learn bomb calorimetry but they would really learn whether calorie counts are accurate, which is more interesting because it's what the calorimetry is for. If it's done by students doing it for the first time, their numbers may not be as accurate, but I'm not sure they're so accurate in the first place. It would be like the lab exercises I've read about in which students use DNA barcoding to check whether the fish at the supermarket is indeed the species that the label claims it is. Instant relevant lab exercises -- and if the students like, they can inflate it into a Michael-Moore-style expose more approprite for a communcations class. Feel free.

Or a newspaper as venerable as the Times could talk about error bars and point out that not all differences are truly significant ... but that may be too much to ask. Replication and journalism may be philosophically at odds. So be it.

Book Review: The Night Circus

It's true that I both completely enjoyed this book and yet found it a bit of a letdown. The problem is that I was expecting it to be a completely envisioned historical tale like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. That's not unreasonable, since both are historically set and involve magicians in the real world. In this case, author Erin Morgenstern tells of a mysterious traveling circus that only opens at night, with multitudes of lavishly realized tents and an interesting collection of characters, as well as a clandestine contest with unknown rules lying behind it all. It's fun to explore the tents and to see what Morgenstern's imagination will come up with next. The plot that unfolds is a complex dance of characters, with unexpected outcomes and satisfying conclusions. But where this goes for theme-park-like atmosphere, Jonathan Strange went for palpable realism. I felt like the Night Circus was just an authentically magical Disney Park at times, and the characters were not true turn-of-the-century characters but 21st-century people dressed up in 19th-century clothes. The story feels current, when it shouldn't. This book gives you a magical circus, while Jonathan Strange gives you a magical world, a whole space-time continuum in perfect period prose. I have the hunch that if I encountered this on its own terms without the comparison to Jonathan Strange (one of my favorite novels), I would have enjoyed it much more. Don't get me wrong, this circus is worth a visit, but it's a fine weekend trip. I don't intend to run off and join this circus anytime soon.

Book Review: The Return of the King

Just finished the Lord of the Rings read aloud to a 10-year-old -- although he was 9 when we started Fellowship. It is really a remarkable book, and much easier to understand if you actually read the whole thing through the Appendices. It becomes clear that Tolkien intends this to be a saga like Beowulf more than a novel like Henry James or whoever would write. If we'd all take that as a starting point, a lot of the ordinary criticisms of this work would be blunted. And it survives despite the criticisms, even perhaps improving its look like the walls of an old castle improve with battle scars and lichen.

For all my Tolkien fandom, this is the first time I've read the appendices. It should be clear to anyone who's done this that Peter Jackson's new Hobbit movie hews about as close to this text as the Fellowship of the Ring movie did to its book. The supposedly "tacked-on" goblin vengeance subplot is actually Tolkien's, in Appendix A under Durin's Folk (look it up!). This vendetta is even attributed to the dwarvish Ring owned by Thorin's father, you know, "seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone." Sure, Jackson conflates a few characters, spices up the action too much with his horror movie sensibility and evil albinos, and makes a huge, huge tonal error in his depiction of Radagast. But he did this in the previous movies! Compare Denethor of the books, who is a compelling, tragic character, to Denethor of the movie, who is a storybook, boring bad guy. That's as bad as Radagast, and with a more central character. I'll go so far as to say that nothing that Jackson does is a betrayal of Tolkien any more than he has already betrayed him in the previous movies. So if we're going to attack Jackson, let's attack him for his consistency to himself in continuing his mild philosophical betrayal of Tolkien, but commend him for a richly enfleshed Middle Earth. And hope that he stops the stupid Radagast stuff and the "modern" dwarf-songs over the credits. Yeesh.

Getting back to Tolkien's genius, this is the first time that The Scouring of the Shire really felt necessary to me, as in I can't imagine the story without it now. I believe Tolkien when he said it couldn't be a post-WWII allegory because he knew it was needed in the story before WWII even started.

Reading the Grey Havens part aloud, especially the description of the far western shores, is utterly impossible without tears. I imagine that will get worse as the years go on and my personal brushes with tragedy and death continue to accumulate. Tolkien's right: some wounds never heal. But his depiction of that distant shore rings so true that now it is part of my own imaginings. That is what a writer can do with mere words. Someone read that at my funeral please.

So read these books, read them again and again, and don't skip Appendices A or B. (As for C and later? I won't tell if you won't.) Read them before seeing the movies, but go ahead and see the movies, even if they're not quite up to it. I find that the echo of truth is still worthwhile.

C.S. Lewis and the Courage to be a Craftsman

Taking stock of the last year and planning for the next, it's easy to keep the same old evaluation system when deciding what worked and what didn't. But sometimes the evaluation system itself needs fixing. I had never read the essay titled "The Inner Ring" by C.S. Lewis before, but it hit me at just the right time, because it speaks to this question of what are you doing and why. Here is the essay/speech itself, it's a fast read with a high value-to-word ratio:

http://www.lewissociety.org/innerring.php

The idea of constantly striving for the next inner ring reminds me of the answer to the question "How much money does a person need?": "Just one more dollar." Just one more inner ring, and then I'll be set. One more step into the onion. Here Lewis turns the onion to transparent glass (all John Lennon references aside).

This especially echoes with the state of Lewis's life in 1944. It was a good time for his "output," roughly contemporaneous with the Mere Christianity lectures and The Great Divorce, 5 years before the publication of the Chronicles of Narnia and 10 years before he would move to Cambridge after repeatedly failing to enter the academic inner ring in his department at Oxford. Lewis never reached that inner ring, probably because he was true to his own words here and realized that it wasn't worth what it seemed to be worth. Instead, he focused on his craft, finished the Space Trilogy and after it didn't go as well as he hoped -- read Planet Narnia for more on this -- he turned to Narnia, which would be his true hallmark work. (Is this an act of literary kenosis?)

If C.S. Lewis had focused on the inner ring rather than his craft, he may have stayed at Oxford, but would we have Narnia today? Academics is political and those politics have probably prevented some great works from being written as academics work more to impress their fellow academics than to create something lasting. Today I don't know who was in that Oxfordian inner ring, but I do know Lewis's words. That's lasting.

Thanks to this essay, I resolve to begin the new year wary of reaching for the inner ring when instead I should be looking to the work I've been given. It will take time and care to carve out the right words for the right time and the right student. Inner rings can wait -- I resolve this year to create value, carefully, the best I can, with focus and labor.

(PS: Looking back on this I can see how my thoughts are also colored by all this talk of the politics of the fiscal cliff, too!)

Book Review: Evolution's Destiny

Yesterday, Stephen King. Today, RJP Williams. What other blog gives you this?

I have written (and spoken) about the idea of Williams before and as for his ideas, I summarize many of them in my Survey of Physical Chemistry course (last I checked, the only Survey of Physical Chemistry course on iTunesU). If Owen Barfield's right and all authors write the same book repeatedly, then Williams definitely stays true to that statement and to his own character in this one. Evolution's Destiny: Co-evolving Chemistry of the Environment and Life is another facet of the same ideas, and the ideas are fascinating enough that it's worth reading them again.

Perhaps it's because I'm reading Return of the King aloud to the boys as I went through this book, but the essential Britishness of Williams's and Tolkien's writing really stands out to me. Even the sentence construction and the drawing of the graphs (or maps) is understated. Reading Williams is not like reading science writing, it's reading real science -- after all, it's a scientist emeritus putting together inorganic chemistry with evolution. Those are kind of big subjects, and this is kind of a big-idea book of the sort that we need more of.

This new book of Williams's finds him with a new co-author, R.E.M. Rickaby (those with a mere two initials need not apply), who is a geologist. As a result, in the first third of the book, geochemistry takes precedence over geobiochemistry, and there's some interesting passages about the chemistry of rocks and the like. If there's something I wanted to change about Williams's writing before, it's that I wanted more references and evidence along the way rather than sweeping (yet still scientific) generalizations. Rickaby's geological chops make it clear that this book is more substantial in that regard from the beginning.

The really nice thing is that the second two-thirds of the book, when Williams recapitulates his to-me-familiar scheme of biogeochemistry driven by oxidation, the references and evidences (mostly) keep up. I was already familiar with the work of Dupont, Alm, and others published since 2006, and how it supported Williams's earlier hypothesis with genetic analysis, but it's awful fun to see Williams incorporate their findings into his work. Bottom line: Williams was right. And for those who don't have the patience to read a chemist for a whole book, I'll work on translating Williams for the masses. Stay tuned.

Another thing about Williams is that after several books he has come out with the most evidence to go along with his most provocative title. Evolution's Destiny is determined by chemistry. I'm enjoying this meta-story and I enjoyed this latest installment. May there be more ...

Book Review: Full Dark, No Stars

Full Dark, No Stars is another collection of short stories by Stephen King. You may be wondering why I'm spending time on America's best-known horror writer. Not much science here, but I continue to find that elements of faith are there for those with ears to hear. Nothing organized but something universal. Has horror become the place to write about sin? Because this is Stephen King, the stories are not truly short (at least one is longer than the last novel I reviewed here ...) , and they come with moments of shock and grossness that are nearly unbearable, but that is the point. King's universe is not devoid of love or even justice, although they can be hard to find. They are that much better when found.

Two of the stories are really "ghost" stories but not in the campfire sense, more in the G.K. Chesterton sense. The first, "1922," is far and away the best. If you have time for one ghost-ish story, read this one. King's attention to detail in historical fiction and his ability to put it together into a suspenseful sequence that rings true is remarkable. This story is good like his recent novel about the Kennedy assassination was good.

He's writing several female characters in this, and I don't find them entirely convincing, but it's nothing that gets in the way of the story by any means.

I continue to find a substrate of goodness, or at least yearning for goodness, in all of King's stories (even in the shorter, "quick" one). With all the repellant detail they remind me of Old Testament stories in parts. In "A Good Marriage" I believe he acknowledges this. In the Afterword, King says (I listened to the audiobook after all): "If you're going into a very dark place ... then you should take a bright light and shine it on everything." I think C.S. Lewis even said something kind of like that. As King has matured as a writer, he's focused more and more not on the obviously supernatural -- the vampires, the mists of monsters, the telekinesis -- and more on the not-so-obviously supernatural, that is, the dark recesses of the human mind. I really can't take more than one or two of these a year, but in that kind of dose his writing is bracing, and I would argue worthwhile.

(One more word: listening to the audiobook adds an element of suspense to the mix because you don't know when the story ends. I may prefer King this way.)