Book Review & Analysis: I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream

by Harlan Ellison

      I’m trapped and there’s no way out. That’s the common theme in Harlan Ellison’s collection of short stories, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream. It is possible that even death won’t end your problems.

The titular story is one that resonates well today. We stand in the shadow of a looming AI tech revolution. Silicon Valley wants to create sentient supercomputers that can think, act, and calculate in mass scales too big for our tiny human brains to comprehend. The thought that computers might dominate and even destroy us is improbable as of now, but it is plausible enough to cause dread and fear in the minds of anybody who thinks about it for a few minutes. In Ellison’s story, an omniscient and omnipotent computer called AM has been created. It learns to hate the human race and kills everybody save for a small group of people. AM keeps them alive simply to torture them. They are imprisoned inside the computer and spend their lives searching for food. None of them like each other. They are also prevented from dying because AM doesn’t want to allow them to escape their pain through death. Since the narrator can’t commit suicide, he does the only thing he can think of to hurt AM. Read it for yourself to find out what happens.

This story is short and direct. It’s like the horror of learning that your head and body will continue living after being guillotined, even though the two are no longer attached. It’s emblematic of a man who feels imprisoned by his own mind and sees no way of solving his problems. The theme of an omnipotent computer isn’t the point of the story; this is really just an allegory about a man who feels overwhelmed by his own self-loathing and mental instability. A deep analytical dive isn’t necessary to understand this. If it has any definite message though, it is that mortality is a necessary part of life.

In one way or another, all the other stories in this collection are about entrapment anddeath. “Big Sam Was My Friend” is about a circus performer who goes in search of his true love. The search makes him miserable and when he finds her, she doesn’t want him. “Eyes of Dust” is about a boy living in a world where anybody who isn’t beautiful gets put to death. The boy is born blind and his parents hide him away in a secret cellar room where he has visions of beautiful things that other people on the planet can’t see. “World Of the Myth” tells the story of a middle aged man who lives a mundane life as an office worker. He fantasizes about an afterlife where he is a heroic dragon fighter, but when he dies he is denied access to this paradise because he hadn’t earned it. He spent his life dreaming instead of pursuing his dreams and so he gets nothing in the end. “Lonelyache” involves a divorced man who seeks liberation from the prison of marriage in extreme promiscuity only to find that sleeping with tons of woman is nothing more than another kind of prison. In “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, a prostitute dies in a casino and her spirit enters into a slot machine. One man begins playing the possessed machine and finds it to be the loosest slot in Las Vegas. He hits the jackpot every time he pulls the lever. Since he is a lonesome drifter with no money, this is like a dream come true. But winning against the odds is just another trap with no way out except death.

Two of these stories, “Eyes of Dust” and “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes”, have a bit more depth than the other three which are more surface level and self-explanatory. “Eyes of Dust” is set in a city named Light located on the planet Topaz. Initially the city and its people are described as being purely beautiful. The aforementioned blind boy, hidden away in a cellar, is physically unattractive, therefore his parents keep him secret to prevent him from being killed. He is more soulful and able to access beauty through education and imagination. But when the house he is hidden in burns down, the people of Light discover him and burn him at the stake for not being good looking. This appears to be a direct reference to the way the medieval Catholic church burned heretics and witches during the Inquisition.

At the end of the story, Light is described as an ugly place even though the city itself has not changed, When the existence of the blind boy is revealed, the ugliness of the people of Light is revealed since the execution shows how they are possessed of no inner depth. The blind boy has inner vision which allows him to find inner beauty, but the others lose that possibility by sacrificing him for the sake of maintaining the shallowness of the status quo and the over-valuation of surface appearances. Their exterior beauty is only achieved by suppressing their inner ugliness. At the end of the story when Light is described as ugly, the inner darkness of its inhabitants, as revealed through burning the boy at the stake, causes the subjective perception of ugliness to override the superficial appearance of perfection. We see how the people of Light are trapped by their own lack of depth just the blind boy is trapped because of his blindness even though he can actually see a lot more than they can. Beauty is only skin deep. It’s a cliché, but it is a cliché that is well articulated in this allegory.

“Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” tells the story of Kostner, a loser who rolls into Las Vegas to spend his last bit of money gambling, and Maggie Moneyeyes, a Native American prostitute who crosses his path in a sense. After growing up in poverty, Maggie enters the world of prostitution as a means of class mobility. When she finishes serving a repulsive client in a Las Vegas hotel, she goes down to the casino to spend her money on the slots. But she dies and her spirit enters the machine she is playing.

This can be interpreted as a bit racist since the association of Native people with mystical powers if a way of fetishizing and exoticizing them. Endowing Maggie with magic powers by turning her into a spirit that possesses a slot machine could be a way of denying her humanity. White people have a tendency to write about non-white people as though they are mysterious creatures found in some distant galaxy in a show like Star Trek. But then again, many Native Americans openly embrace their spiritual traditions and culture. The question to ask is if this story would still have the same impact if Maggie Moneyeyes was written as a white character. I’ll allow you to answer that for yourself.

Anyhow, Kostner enters the casino and plays the slot machine that is possessed by Maggie Moneyeyes’ spirit. And he wins. In fact, he wins big. Then he wins big again and again. Every time he plays he hits the jackpot. Kostner becomes a media sensation and attracts large crowds who watch him win repeatedly. The casino management is suspicious that he is cheating, but they believe the attention to be good publicity for drawing in more gamblers and let him stay. But when Kostner stops playing, he dies.

Maggie and Kostner are thematically linked by their poverty. Both of them end up in the casino because they see having money as a way out of their problems. For them, money is a magic key that opens the doors of their figurative prison cells. I recall Karl Marx saying in Capital that money is a kind of magic that makes people believe they can get whatever they want. But while money may relieve the two main characters from their poverty, it just moves them into another prison cell rather than freeing them. Kostner loses everything when he stops playing and ends up dead; Maggie can only live by being entrapped inside a slot machine. Kostner is the body and Maggie is the soul and through the medium of the slot machine the two are joined.

Maggie is sexualized in her role as a prostitute and Kostner, pulling the lever and depositing coins into the machine, could easily be interpreted as sexualized as well. The big payoff at the end of every attempt could be interpreted as the sexual climax. Playing the slot machine almost has an element of Pagan fertility folk magic in the way that ceremonially seeding an agricultural field field brings forth a harvest. The stronger the magic, the bigger the harvest. Both Kostner and Maggie are sexual outsiders. Remember that Kistner’s marriage failed. It is through their erotic connection, sublimated through the act of playing the slot machine, that they fulfill their needs for both money and companionship. This fulfillment is possible for Kostner in his interaction with Maggie who is both sexualized and supernatural, a meeting place where magic is believed to be possible. But without the slot machine they no longer connect. Therefore their luck and their lives end. The only way out of their trap is death.

Ellison writes an introduction to each story in this short collection. He explains that these were all written as therapy during a time of crisis in his life when he struggled with failed relationships, heavy drug and alcohol use, and other unspecified mental health issues. The connection between his frustrations and the themes in these stories is easy to see. I do, however, find it anooying when an author explains the meaning of their own work as a part of the work. He tells you about the sources of these stories without giving the reader a chance to encounter them on their own terms. This is a small annoyance though. In any case, I think Ellison, with his prickly personality, enjoyed annoying people.

I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream doesn’t offer any profound thoughts. These stories aren’t philosophical screeds. More than anything they are brief outbursts of anger from a man who feels there is no way out of the problems he has. In that sense it succeeds. If you’ve been there before, you can relate. Existence is a prison, but the worst prison of all is the one inside your own mind. Maybe Harlan Ellison could have followed George Clinton’s advice: free your mind and your ass will follow. Sometimes music and dancing are all you need.

 

Book Review: Cuba and Its Music by Ned Sublette

Cuba and Its Music:

From the First Drums To the Mambo

by Ned Sublette

      When it comes to exports, Cuba is known for a handful of things. Cigars, sugar, communist revolution, and refugees immediately come to mind. With the exception of that last category, those are, to some extent, not so good for your health. But there is one Cuban export that makes up for all that and music is what I’m talking about. What most people don’t realize is that those polyrhythmic salsa songs are the long range product of several centuries of history. Can you blame them? They are probably too busy listening or dancing when they hear Cuban music to be inclined towards studying where it all originated. Unless they are my neighbors and they are probably too busy fuming with anger at all the loud music blasting from my stereo to really care. But for those who are inclined towards historical scholarship and not just the infectious grooves and dance steps, Ned Sublette’s Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums To the Mambo is the ultimate guide for exploring the musical roots of that tropical island’s tradition of melodic innovation.

Music doesn’t emerge out of a void. That is why the cultural and political systems of the regions that preceded Cuban colonial settlement are the starting point for this exploration. This history starts in medieval Spain on the island of Cadiz where Jews played the oud and in Al-Anadalus, now currently known as Andalusia in present day Spain, where Muslim poets recited Koranic verses to single-stringed instruments and drums. Up until the voyages of Columbus, the kingdoms of Spain were a Mediterranean crossroad for migrating cultures that included Celts, Franks, Visigoths, Romanis, Moors, Berbers, Basques, and a few others. All of them brought some small contribution to the music of Spain.

Cuba’s second large immigrant group is the African people due to the slave trade. They were mostly brought to the Caribbean by European traders from Central Africa and the western coastal regions which are now Benin, Nigeria, and Angola. These slaves brought a variety of drumming styles like talking drums and vocal harmonies along with the unique percussive bamboo thumb pianos which later influenced the piano lines that are so pervasive in contemporary mambo and salsa.

For many slaves, the port at Havana was an entry point into the Americas where they were sold at auction and then redistributed to other Caribbean islands, Brazil, and the United States. The slaves who remained in Cuba mostly worked in the sugar industry. Unlike the United States, they were allowed to practice their traditional religions and play variations of their traditional music. The societies of Lukumi, Palo, and Abakua were spaces where dance, music, and spirit possession flourished. When the Catholic church cracked down on these traditions, the Afro-Cubans continued worshiping the old deities by associating them with the cult of the saints. And so Santeria became prominent. To this day, drummers in Cuban music bands are initiates in Santeria or one of the other African diaspora religions. Drums are ceremonially possessed by spirits in Abakua lodges before they can be used in public performances.

Just as important to Cuban percussion are the rhythm sticks called “clave”. Afro-Cubans who worked in the ship building and repair industry would sing while they worked. Wooden ships were held together with wooden pegs that workers would hit together while singing to keep time. These became known as “clave”, a word which has a double meaning because “clave” is also used to designate the simple 2/2 rhythm to revolve around that acts as a central point for syncopated and polyrhtyhmic songs. Clave is a beat that holds all the complexity together and the high-pitched rhythm sticks are still used to this day.

The history of rumba is also of interest. The tradition originated in Central Africa. The word “rumba” did not originally signify a particular style of music. Rumbas were actually a type of party or celebration held by Cuban slaves on their days off. It involved drumming, chanting, and singing as accompaniments to bare knuckle boxing and highly sexualized dances that anthropologists have called ritual courtships. Rumba had a direct influence on the development of son in the early 20^th century.

As a colony, Cuba had musical styles that corresponded to class divisions. Aside from Afro-Cuban innovations, Spanish Creole street musicians, buskers, and folk singers were common, often playing styles like boleros. We can only guess what that music sounded like because lower class musicians played music by ear and never wrote down lyrics or musical notations. The upper classes of Europeans brought classical and orchestral traditions with them and opera was part of that. Ballroom dancing was also a past time for the rich and well-connected and styles like habanera, contradanza, and danzon came out of those milieus. The lower classes also had dance halls where lonely Cuban men and sailors on shore leave could rent girls to dance with. But class lines were sometimes broken because white Cubans of all statures were fascinated by Santeria and were often present at ceremonial gatherings.

The 19^th century in Cuba was a time of war. Cubans rallied around the nationalist Jose Marti in the Wars of Independence. Marti was an advocate of racial equality so the slaves supported the end of colonialism along with the abolition of slavery. This brought the Afro-Cubans and mulattos closer together. After the abolition of slavery in Cuba during the 1880s, and the liberation of Cuba from the Spanish colonialists by the USA in the Spanish-American War, Afro-Cuban music exploded, proliferated, and expanded overseas. Ned Sublette traces the influence of Afro-Cuban music on ragtime, tango, dixieland jazz, big band jazz, swing, and bebop. This happened because musicians traveled frequently between Havana, New Orleans, and New York. Radio and the invention of records also played a huge role in spreading the rhythms across the island and far from Cuban shores.

The first half of the 20^th century in post-colonial Cuba was possibly the most politcally turbulent time in the nation’s history. It was also a time of economic growth and a mass influx of tourism. Cuban casinos and nightclubs became world-famous and so did the underground economy of vice and crime. Havana had an edgy, urban atmosphere and it created its most innovative and influential musicians during then. Talented musicians have often been difficult, temperamental, mercurial, egotistical, and sometimes violent. Cuba’s modern were no exception. Some of the stories related about their lifestyles are comparable to what you find in the biographies of rock and hip hop artists of the latter half of the century in America and the U.K.

Sublette gives brief biographies of musicians and singers like the blind Arsenio Rodriguez and the OG Cuban gangsta Chano Pozo. Those musicians and other like Celia Cruz, Machito, Beny More, and Desi Aranaz brought Cuban sounds to the USA where the likes of Benny Goodman, Xavier Cugat, Dizzie Gillespie, Nat King Cole, and Tito Puente took the styles and ran with them. Cuban musicians were especially influential in Spanish Harlem where they became popular primarily with a Puerto Rican audience.

This was the time when bongos and congas were invented and son became the most prominent style, elevating the percussive rhythms of Afro-Cuban tradition into the center of Spanish influenced songs. Regardless of style, any Cuban, tropical, or Caribbean influenced music at this time became classified as “rhumba” for American audiences. As all the strands of Cuban music merged with son, it eventually coalesced into one form which was called “mambo” by the time the 1950s arrived. That is the point where Sublette’s history stops.

Cuba and Its Music is vast in its scope and detail. It doesn’t just tell the history of Cuban music up until the Cuban Revolution of 1958; it gives enough contextual information on the political, cultural, and economic history of the island to be used as a history book in general. If you want to learn about Cuba, but want more than just the political side, this is the perfect book for you. The only major problem with it is that Sublette sometimes writes about music with heavy doses of jargon and technical terminologies. If you aren’t well-versed in the vocabulary of music, these passages will be difficult to understand. You can use language to describe things like machinery or architecture so that the reader can visualize what is being described, but using language to write about music is a fool’s errand. It just can’t be effectively done. That’s not to say that Ned Sublette is a fool though. Quite the opposite since this book is consistently engaging and encyclopedic at the same time. This is a work of extensive research and he accomplishes more than most academic scholars ever will. And those paragraphs full of musician’s esoteric terms don’t last so long that he loses the reader. They are always padded between easier to understand passages so a persistent reader will stay lost for long.

After finishing Cuba and Its Music, it is easy to see how mambo, salsa, and everything that came after came to be. When you listen to Cuban music today, you are literally hearing layers of sound that stretch back beyond the island itself to the rainforests of Africa, the arid regions of Spain, the music venues of the United States, and a few other things as well. You are literally listening to a living, breathing, loving, spinning, swirling, gyrating melange of beats, voices, and rhythms propelled outwards by the sexual lifeforce itself. If this is where Cuban music has arrived, it will be interesting to see how it expands from here on out. But as good as Ned Sublette’s history is, Cuban music isn’t intended to be read about. It is intended to be listened to. So get off your ass and dance. That’s what he would want you to do anyways.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Freddie Prinze Story by Maria Pruetzel & John A. Barbour

The Freddie Prinze Story

by Maria Pruetzel & John A. Barbour

      The 1970s were a golden era for television sitcoms. People got nightly doses of half hour comedies about working class people or upwardly mobile minority groups that worked hard to raise themselves above the status they were given. These shows were socially conscious, using humor and sympathetic characters to show that, despite our differences, people from all walks of life can solve problems and learn to live together. Norman Lear was a major driver of this pop culture trend, bringing us shows like Sanford and Son, The jeffersons, Good times, and the now monumental All In the Family. Other shows like Barney Miller and Welcome Back Kotter worked along a similar line but emphasized workplaces that were more ethnically integrated as opposed to Norman Lear’s productions that focused more on white and African-American familial relations. Looking back now, it is obvious that although Latino communities were present in those shows, they were also underrepresented. So in the mid-1970s, producer James Kornack saw the gap in the market and created Chico and the Man, the first TV show in history to be set in a Mexican-American neighborhood. It was the story of a cranky, elderly white garage owner who hires a young Chicano to work as an auto mechanic. The show was a hit so when the star, Freddie Prinze, took his own life, a dark cloud came over the lives of television viewers across America.

Immediately after the shocking suicide, the networks were quick to cash in on the tragedy and aired a made for TV movie about the actor and comedian’s life. But the family were unhappy with the production which they thought was sensational, inaccurate, and commercially motivated. Therefore Prinze’s mother Maria Pruetzel in collaboration with John A. Barbour, to put together The Freddie Prinze Story giving her version of what happened.

As this biography opens, Freddie Prinze is lying on his deathbed in the ICU of a Beverly Hills hospital. His parents are there along with his closet friends and colleagues along with medical professionals who try to save his life while holding a rabid gang of journalists at bay. With a gunshot wound to his head, the chances of survival aren’t great. It’s a maudlin scene with heightened emotions and lots and lots of praying and talk about God. As a non-religious scholar of the literary arts, this was off-putting to me at first, but saw the necessity of suspending my previously formed prejudices and admitting to myself that this is how some people are in real life. One thing I can say in this book’s favor is that its realism cut through all my preconceptions and brought me out of the boxes I think inside to a grounded place that reminded me of the varieties of ways people deal with grief in this terrible world we live in. After clearing away the fog of my intellectualism (some might call it pseudointellectualism but I’m not the one who gets to decide if that’s correct or not), I was ready t move on.

In contrast to the deathbed scene, the shift to the story of Freddie Prinze’s childhood came in like a ray of sunshine. He was born as Freddie Pruetzel to immigrant parents, his mother coming from Puerto Rico and his father coming from Hungary as a refugee from the communist government. While his mother was proud and compassionate, constantly gushing with love and admiration for her son, his father was quiet and distant. Freddie maintained a close relationship with them throughout his brief life. The family raised him in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, straddling the line between the working class and the middle class. They weren’t rich, but Freddie was a little bit spoiled as his hard working parents went out of their way to give him whatever he wanted.

In his teenage years, Freddie Pruetzel got accepted into a performing arts high school, the same one that later became the basis for the TV show Fame. He was popular, charismatic, and smooth with the ladies and also a bit precocious. He flunked out of school because he was spending all his nights on stage doing routines as a stand up comic, something he had a natural talent for. Some of these venues he worked, like Catch a Rising Star and the Improv are now legendary for being the place where many famous comics were discovered. Freddie Pruetzel was discovered by David Brenner who immediately saw his talent. Brenner took him on as a friend and mentor, helping guide him towards the show business big time before he got out of his teenage years.

Freddie Pruetzel moved to Hollywood, changed his name to Freddie Prinze, and continued working on the national stand up comedy circuit. After his move, he made one of the biggest errors of his career: he ditched his agent in New York and took on a local agent who had more contacts in the West Coast entertainment industry. This contract break would come back to bite Prinze financially later on.

But things were on the up and up for Prinze. He got cast as Chico in the TV show Chico and the Man and television brought him into the homes of people all across America. The show was not without controversy though. A lot of Mexican-Americans objected to him playing a Chicano mechanic because of his Puerto Rican and Hungarian ethnic background. This might seem trivial to some, but from a Chicano point of view there were few Mexican people in Hollywood story lines and fewer chances for Mexican people to enter the mainstream entertainment industry. Historically Mexican people were often played by white people wearing make up to make their skin look brown. So the conflict, like so many other conflicts in the world, was over access to a limited resource. If you come from an underrepresented community, this can make a difference. But otherwise the show was a hit and Prinze’s stand up performances consistently drew huge crowds too.

Flush with money, Prinze bought a house for his parents in Los Angeles and that was probably the best thing he did with his newfound fame and wealth. Otherwise, he got hooked in a cycle of drug addiction where he sniffed cocaine to feel energetic then took valium and quaaludes to calm himself down. With alcohol and weed added into the mix, his brain became foggy and it wasn’t long before he felt lost in the world. Prinze made the mistake of thinking that getting married and starting a family would bring him out of his depression, but it didn’t. Then the parasitical agent in New York ,who he dropped the contract with, sued and won, thereafter being entitled to a significant chunk of Prinze’s earnings. The comedian wandered around in a suicidal daze until one night, in the presence of his business manager, he shot himself in the head.

Freddie Prinze’s suicide flies in the face of everything we are told about how to help people who want to end their lives. They tell us that religion and communal bonds are what prevent people from offing themselves, and yet Freddie Prinze was deeply religious to the point where he had considered leaving show business to become an Evangelical minister. And up until the hour of his demise he was surrounded by friends and family who were literally begging him not to kill himself. Something was wrong with him on a much deeper level than community and faith. His mother the narrator makes it look like his drug abuse was the ultimate problem. The drugs certainly didn’t help, but simply blaming the drugs doesn’t answer the question of why this happened because this kind of drug abuse is often a symptom and not the causal illness of depression. As an armchair psychologist, my opinion is that Freddie Prinze got into too much too soon. He got swept up into a life of fame at a young age and then found himself lost and disoriented without any maps or reference points to guide him along the way. He was 21 when he committed suicide; he was still a child. I feel like he was too young and immature to handle all the pressures of fame and wealth that were put on him before he had developed a strong inner core of self. He hadn’t developed enough sense of identity or psychological stability to be able to handle the burdens of a whirlwind career where he had the world at his fingertips and had no idea what to do with such responsibility. He was just a kid when he died and the close relationship with his mother, and his emotional dependence on her, shows that he hadn’t matured to the point necessary to continue on with the life he had gotten himself into.

For the kind of book this is, it’s surprisingly well written. It does leave out a few details though. This was written by Prinze’s mother in collaboration with an actual writer so it’s taken for granted that she will be selective in what she does and doesn’t include. And regardless of how close a mother is to her son, there will always be things he did that she will never know about. But as it is the story feels complete. There should have been more commentary on Chico and the Man and hat it represented in American culture. If anybody reads this book in the future without having seen the show, its significance might be lost on them.

It’s also written from a unique angle. Biographies written by the subject’s mother are rare and those written by Puerto Rican mothers are even more rare. As can be expected, Maria Pruetzel gushes with motherly love for her son no matter how bad life gets for him. The writing is often sentimental and dramatic so it might be considered over the top by conventional literary standards, but as I said before many mothers are like this in the everyday world and the sentimentality makes this book hit home as a quality work of realism. And I don’t want to indulge in stereotypes of Puerto Rican people, but the way that Maria Pruetzel idolizes and dotes on her boy is common among the Puerto Rican mothers I’ve encountered in my time. There is a certain kind of bond between mother and son here that borders on religious devotion which makes the death of Freddie Prinze at the end so much more painful. This is as much a portrait of the central role a son plays in his mother’s life as it is a portrait of a tragic celebrity suicide. It must have been extremely painful for her to tell this story.

There is a list a mile long of comedians who were miserable and suicidal. Comedians entertain people by making jokes about the things that bother them and audiences are entertained by laughing at the jokes about things that bother the comedian. At some point this feedback cycle makes a lot of them snap. The Freddie Prinze Story is an account of one of them and it’s one more story in a long line of stories that are a lot like it. Even though memories of Freddie Prinze and Chico and the Man may be fading, this book is still timeless enough in theme to be worth reading in our present day. It might be of especial interest to people who are fascinated with the dark and tragic side of Hollywood.

The death of Freddie Prinze didn’t have to happen. But it did. That’s how the world is. So it goes.

 

Book Review: Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Cosmos

by Carl Sagan

      Humans are story tellers. I’m not sure who said that first, but Joseph Campbell made a career out of demonstrating how mythologies transmit information about how to live in the world using personified symbols in narrative structures. But mythologies were products of pre-scientific societies. Ever since scientific understandings of the universe have become more prominent after the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, science has faced opposition from people who cling to the mytho-poetic and religious world view. But when the symbols of myth are revealed to be untrue in a literal sense, empirical realities fill in the void and renders the myths to simply be existential security blankets at best and fumbling attempts at explaining the unexplainable at worst. On second thought, maybe mistaking them for historical truth is a bigger problem. But mythological and religious explanations for our existence remain powerful forces throughout human societies. It seems they can’t be killed. And science is looked upon with deep suspicion and even scorn despite its high levels of success in improving our understanding of our nature at it deepest levels.

One suggested explanation for this epistemological split is that science doesn’t rely on stories to transmit information whereas the mytho-poetic framework does. In the latter case, the narrative framework of myth and religion limits the ability to apprehend and analyze information that is encountered outside of its own narrative boundaries. Science also has limitations, but it also takes into account those limitations and it attempts to correct for its own shortcomings as a system of data collection and interpretation. Therefore it has been more successful in improving the human condition, but possibly less successful at addressing deeply felt human needs for connection and meaning.

Enter Carl Sagan, one of the most ambitious and successful public relations spokesperson for science in our time. What he does in his classic book Cosmos is bridge the gap between story telling and scientific explanation by relating science-as-story to make it more relatable to your average person on the street.

Every story needs a beginning so the obvious starting point for a history of science is with the Big Bang. Sagan was an astrophysicist so there is a heavy emphasis on outer space and Earth’s place in the totality of everything. As it turns out, the sun we revolve around is a star smaller than average and it should humble us to know that Earth is only a small fraction of the size of the sun. Other topics covered are the definition of light years and how they explain why it is currently impossible to travel out of our galaxy, the Voyager probes sent to explore other planets like Saturn and Jupiter, the existence of black holes, and the search for extraterrestrial life especially in relation to the SETI program that Sagan was a part of.

Going in the other direction, Sagan explains the structures of molecules and atoms, the breaking apart of which leads to smaller and smaller subatomic particles all the way down to quarks and what may be beyond those if we ever get that far. While humans are not at the center of the cosmos, and it is extremely short sighted to think that we are, we do hold some kind of undefined place in a vast expanse that, as far as we know, is both infinitely small and infinitely large at the same time, extending in all directions at once. The limits of everything are far beyond the comprehension of our tiny little brains which have evolved as a mechanism for survival, not for accuracy or truth.

While humans may not be the center of everything, we are the center of humanity and so far, we are the only creatures we know of that would be considered of higher intelligence. I know the cynics out there will scoff at that idea in the face of massive amounts of human stupidity we confront on a daily basis, but Carl Sagan wasn’t that much of a pessimist. In fact, he celebrates humanity despite all of its faults. His exploration of the human race begins with an analysis of DNA and the theory that a comet crashing into Earth spread stardust across the world that eventually became the building block of all organic life.

Through the course of evolution, humans developed language and abstract reasoning which led to mytho-poetic explanations of physical phenomena. Rather than condemning early humans for being primitive, superstitious, and pre-scientific, he actual lauds them as being the first scientists because they tried to use reason to explain empirical observations. When ancient people looked at the constellations and saw hunters, lions, bears, and fish in the patterns of stars, they were trying to explain what they saw. And that kind of inquiry and explanation is the foundation of science. Likewise medieval astrologers became the first astronomers and alchemy evolved into the science of chemistry. Rationalists in our day can dismiss these things as naive occultism and pseudoscience, but Sagan gives credit where credit is due. Along with these pseudosciences came great advances in mathematics and medicine while great scientists like Newton, and Copernicus came directly out of these practices. Sagan presents the history of science and the rise of complex cultural systems as keys to understanding who we are as a species.

Some critics have dismissed Carl Sagan because they believe he gave too much attention to speculation and imagination. But Cosmos sufficiently counters this claim, especially in the way that Sagan writes about contacting extraterrestrial life. Such an endeavor is not just about where to look for life outside of Earth, but also about how to look for it. It is only through speculation about what we don’t know that we can begin to address problems like how to communicate, what to do in case other life forms are either friendly or hostile, or whether we can even recognize another life form if we find one. While the chances are statistically high that some other life form, possibly even an intelligent life form, exists somewhere in the multitude of galaxies, chances are just as high that such lfe forms would not resemble us in any way whatsoever. This is because they would have adapted to a different set of environmental conditions.

Sagan also argues that imagination is a necessary component of science because that is the most effective way of questioning threats to our existence. If we can imagine contacting an extraterrestrial life form that turns out to be hostile, we can hopefully predict how to deal with it beforehand. Also imagining a nuclear war should be sufficiently scary enough to make people take precautions against having one. And yet, politicians and businessmen around the world have made no strides towards nuclear disarmament. Sagan writes that the search for life outside Earth and its eventually discovery may be the only thing that can unite all of humanity in a way that would prevent us from destroying ourselves once and for all.

But he isn’t entirely optimistic either; when looking at the European conquests and the way those explorers reacted to their discovery of indigenous peoples, the results were violent and disastrous subjugation. We could be dumb enough to do the same thing to other life forms or, even worse, contact could result in them doing the same to us. His pessimism doesn’t stop there. Sagan writes about how science began to flourish in ancient Greece on the island of Ios, but when the standards of living increased, the intellectuals took an unfortunate turn towards mysticism and religion that almost entirely killed off scientific inquiry. Something similar happened with Mediterranean Muslims during the Middle Ages. The Muslims were once at the forefront of science, philosophy, and education. But when scientists made discoveries that contradicted things written in The Holy Qu’ran, Islamic fundamentalists turned on them and banished science and Aristotelian logic. With the current rise of religious fundamentalism and nationalistic bigotry on the right and anti-science attitudes in the social justice movements of the left, we are in danger of falling back into another Dark Ages. So far AI and digital technology don’t appear to be helping us in developing a more rational human society. These speculations relate back to science because it is through the imagination that we can contemplate possible scenarios for the future and hopefully save ourselves from the mutual destruction which appears to be the direction we are headed in now. Speculation in the service of science actually is part of the scientific process so long as it addresses problems derived from empirical data.

If Carl Sagan intended to bring science to the masses by writing about it as a story, he is only partially successful, at least from the standpoint of a conventional story telling narrative structure. He tends to wander from one subject to another in a non-linear fashion. He writes chapters that start in outer space and then take you directly to medieval politics or theoretical discussions on quantum mechanics. The pieces don’t always join together in ways that make sense. In the chapter on Ionian science and its degeneration into Pythagorean and Platonic mysticism, he transitions into an unrelated discussion on astrophysics and the limitations of our current technology. In another chapter, out of the blue he brings up whales and then abruptly transitions into a discussion about the challenges of interstellar space travel. At a distance, you could maybe draw a connection between our inability to understand the whales’ systems of communication with the potential problems we might have in communicating with life in other galaxies, but the connection isn’t firmly made in the text and may not even be Sagan’s intended meaning.

As such, if story telling is Sagan’s intention, this book works more like a collection of short stories than a novel. One reason conventional stories work is that they draw the reader into a series of related cause-and-effect events that culminate in the resolution of a conflict. The action is driven by a character who, in in some good stories, may embody abstract ideas, moral clarity, or exemplary behavior. But science, in its pursuit of ultimate truth, deals in abstractions, methods, logic, observation, probabilities, and other things that are taxing to the minds of people with little interest in technical discussions about the messiness of reality and our inevitable shortcomings in comprehending it as a whole. There are reasons why science is difficult to communicate using mythological language and those reasons are part of the problem that P.R. people for science face in a world full of non-scientific thinkers. But that doesn’t mean that Sagan doesn’t clearly articulate the ideas about science he wishes to communicate. He does and he does so better than other authors on this sbject. There is no reason to dismiss this book even though by literary standards it is flawed. If this issue concerns you, then Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Everything might be worth checking out; it is basically the same book, but handled by a writer with more of a literary flair and his characteristic dark but warm sense of humor.

Cosmos is a treatise on entry level science. Its intention is to arouse curiosity in the mainstream because the mainstream is so preoccupied with entertainment over anything else. Since Carl Sagan, and the TV show that accompanies this book, have made inroads into pop culture, it succeeds at least on that level. It’s clearly written and easy to follow, but probably the best audience for this is young people who don’t know much about science and want to learn more but don’t know where to start. For people with more education and scientific knowledge, there won’t be much here that they haven’t already learned. For what it is, it’s a great book but if you have an undergraduate level of scientific knowledge it’s little more than refresher material. On the other hand, it serves as a reminder that the scientific quest to learn the ultimate truth about everything ny using sound and consistent methods is a large part of what makes us human.