PD Smith

A few days ago I went on a walk with my partner through the water meadows not far from our home. It was a beautiful day, one of the few in recent months when it didn't rain. We let the course of the river guide our feet. The water beside us was as clear as crystal. Fish flickered among the green weeds.

Nietzsche once said that "only thoughts that come by walking have any value." I think he was right, about this at least. Things have a habit of falling into place while you walk.

Now that my book Doomsday Men has gone out into the world, I'm in writer's limbo. For the first time in four years I'm not writing a book. It's a bit unsettling. Although some say writing is a flight from reality, I don't feel I'm quite alive unless I'm writing something.

But although I'm not actually writing a book, I am dreaming books: I have several ideas in my mind for potential ones. One of these embryonic books has even got as far as a lengthy proposal. But even that is just a tentative beginning. I need to convince others - and perhaps even myself - that it is viable and can fend for itself in the real world. It can be mean out there, you know...

The proposal I have written is for a cultural history. Like much of my writing, it explores the way science and literature work together to inform our understanding of the world. I think the links between these two different fields are fascinating and important. (If you're interested, I wrote an article on this a while back and have just posted it here.)

But since leaving London I've also begun researching a historical novel. It's a new direction for me, but the more I find out about the late sixteenth century, the more this period intrigues me. The ideas, language and people are drawing me back through time into their world. It's certainly different from what I've been working on for the last few years. And perhaps that's part of the attraction. New faces, unfamiliar landscapes...

I've just been reviewing Peter Marshall's The Mercurial Emperor, a wonderfully rich biography of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612). If you want to dip into the culture of this time, then Marshall's book is a great place to start. The characters that inhabit this world are extraordinary. Dr John Dee, for instance - the most celebrated magus of his era, an alchemist who conversed with angels and who spied for Queen Elizabeth I.

In 1584, Dee left his home by the banks of the River Thames for Rudolf's court in Prague. He shared his visions and unique wisdom with the Habsburg emperor for two years before rumours of necromancy forced Rudolf to banish him. Dee returned to England to find his home and the library he had spent forty years collecting had been destroyed by a mob that believed him to be a black magician. Undaunted, he continued his fruitless quest for the Philosopher's Stone and died without a penny to his name. Dee's real wealth lay in his thoughts and words.

Peter Ackroyd's superb novel about this magical character, The House of Doctor Dee (1993), sets an almost impossibly high standard for anyone tempted to explore this period in fiction. There's a wonderful passage in it about researchers who spend their lives among old books and in dusty archives: "we understand that we are at odds with the rest of the world: we are travelling backwards, while all those around us are still moving forward."

When I read writing as good as Ackroyd's, I ask myself why I even bother picking up a pen. How can I hope to equal such eloquence... Do other writers feel that too?

But perhaps writers are like alchemists. They are driven to discover some elusive, hidden knowledge, either about the world or about themselves. Pen and paper are their crucibles. Just add fire.

Whether they discover fool's gold or the real McCoy, only time will tell.

[also posted on TNB]

BBC History Magazine has reviewed Doomsday Men in its current issue (September 2007, Vol 8, No 9). Unfortunately, the review is not available online, but in his review, Jeff Hughes - author of The Manhattan Project: Big Science and the Atom Bomb - compares my book to Gino Segrè's Faust in Copenhagen:

“In a deeper and darker study, popular science historian PD Smith takes the Faustian theme more seriously. Using a wider range of sources than Segrè (including literature, popular magazines and film), he charts the ways in which science and science fiction interacted in a quest for Doomsday ‘superweapons’ in the 20th century. From HG Wells to Dr Strangelove and after, fiction has evoked weapons of mass destruction and their consequences, and created new horizons of possibility. Many scientists and policy-makers reacted to the possibilities, and from the First World War onwards, scientists worked with the military to produce the weapons and strategies that shaped the world in which we now live. Smith’s book offers a much broader cultural-historical perspective than Segrè’s, and an equally approachable history of atomic science.”

I've not yet read Segrè's book, but I'm looking forward to doing so...

Reviewing Bahr's Weimar on the Pacific reminded me of my own research on Brecht's wonderful play about science in the atomic age, Life of Galileo. As well as forming a chapter in my book Metaphor & Materiality, I explored Brecht's use of science in a long article for Prometheus magazine. As this has never been put online in its entirety, I thought I would make it available.

"Elective Affinity: A Tale of Two Cultures?" tries to move beyond the rather tired idea that there are two opposed cultures - the arts and the sciences. Using a number of important texts from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, I try to show how literary writers have engaged with science. Scientists and writers are indeed listening to each other; and some are even talking the same language...

I'd be very interested to hear what people think about the books I discuss, and of any others you know which deserve to be mentioned.

The Guardian have just printed my review of Einstein: His Life and Universe
by Walter Isaacson. Obviously, there have been many excellent biographies of the great physicist, but Isaacson explains Einstein’s revolutionary physics with an infectious enthusiasm, memorably describing his seminal 1905 work on special relativity, On the electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, as “one of the most spunky and enjoyable papers in all of science”.

Isaacson also had privileged access to a cache of family correspondence which was kept under lock and key until 2006, in accordance with the will of Einstein’s step-daughter Margot, so he can righful claim to have new material. He makes good use of these personal documents, although I suspect much of interest remains. We will have to wait for future volumes in Princeton's excellent Collected Papers for the full picture.

You can read my review here.

There's a very good review of Doomsday Men in the current edition of Nature (vol 448, number 7156). It's by Gregg Herken, author of the excellent study of Oppenheimer, Teller and Lawrence, Brotherhood of the Bomb. Unfortunately, the review is not available online unless you have a subscription, but here's the first paragraph:

"There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons," said the Devil in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. Shaw's adage could almost be the leitmotiv of P.D. Smith's well-researched and altogether depressing account of humankind's long hunt for the ultimate superweapon: a doomsday device that, by its very terribleness, would make war forevermore unwinnable, and hence unthinkable. Although we all know how this tale turns out, it is a journey well worth taking. Along the way, Smith includes some fascinating asides about the men - and it was, almost exclusively, a fraternity - who, in seeking to make war obsolete, have only made it more deadly.

Herken concludes:

One can only sympathize with the author's observation that, since the end of the Cold War, global warming and Islamist terrorism have distracted our attention from the weapons that remain in the arsenals of nations, numerous, primed and waiting. Although not as deadly as Smith's fictive doomsday bomb, they are cause for us to be more fearful, for they are real.