Plantation Odyssey, A Short Novel by Stan Rice, part one

This novel by Stan Rice, about the adventures of a slave boy named Ulysses, shows the hellish unfairness of black slavery in what became the Confederacy. So many depressing things can be and have been written about slavery. But Rice’s novel is very specific: slavery prevented slaves, as humans, from using their talents, even to the benefit of their owners. This is a theme that frequently shows up, as in Horse and March, in novels by Geraldine Brooks.

 

 

In exploring this theme, Rice is able to use a lot of humor. The delightful framework is about Frank Hicks, a white man, and Alberta Hicks (Bert; a black woman) who were lovers in rural Oklahoma in the early twentieth century, a time and place where interracial love was kept secret when it happened at all.

The main character in Plantation Odyssey is a slave, Ulysses, who was very smart, and trained himself to be a botanist (an image inspired, no doubt, by George Washington Carver, who lived later). Ulysses got a lot of help from the old white woman who owned the plantation, something that perhaps never actually happened. She wants Ulysses to use his botanical knowledge to increase yields on the plantation. Penelope is also a slave on the plantation, but she is seven-eighths white. Of course, she and Ulysses fall in love.

But the Heir Apparent (the old woman’s son) is not at all pleased that his mother has chosen Penelope, not his own white daughter, to inherit the plantation. But Penelope is also his daughter. But because she has a drop of black blood, she is ineligible to be an heiress in the Old South. The Heir Apparent plans to not only kill Penelope and Ulysses but even his own wayward brother, who has connections to the North. The Heir Apparent kidnapped Penelope as she fled with Ulysses. Ulysses escaped to the North to work with the very real, abolitionist Harvard botanist Asa Gray.

For a young Black botanist in the middle of the nineteenth century, there could hardly be anything better than working with Asa Gray. But, like Odysseus (Ulysses) in Homer’s Odyssey after winning the Trojan War, there was no place like home. He wanted to go back to his loving wife named, of course, Penelope. I would not recommend reading this novel if you have no idea what happens in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. Also, please don’t get it mixed up with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both Ulysseses want to go home even though both Penelopes were getting old and both Ulysseses had almost boundless sexual opportunities by not going home. What a story! No wonder it has persisted two thousand years! Epic stories have contributed to the social evolution of our species; humanity is inconceivable without them.

In the next essay, I will tell about how the slave Ulysses, just like the Greek hero Odysseus, encountered an enchanted path of danger and promise as they went home.

Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, Story 9. Fresh Air

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website here). Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse (all reviewed earlier), and Fresh Air (reviewed here).

This final story, Fresh Air, is the chemistry class you wish you had, the world (the whole world) as told from the viewpoint of an oxygen atom named Gould. Gould, who resembles a white man, is inherently selfish. He has a hunger to grab and keep every electron from every other atom that he can. He doesn’t feel good about his selfish nature, but he can’t do anything about it. When you get two oxygen atoms together, forming oxygen gas (O₂), they become almost criminal in their ruthlessness. Gould does not want this to happen.

Gould is bonded to a black carbon atom named Chedd, who is calm and loving. Chedd likes to form bonds, networks of atoms, even giant molecules. But right now Gould, Chedd, and Elsie (another oxygen atom, whom Gould loves even though he cannot see or touch her) form a molecule of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Get ready for the carbon dioxide molecule to get sucked into the process of photosynthesis and end up in the wood of a tree, hidden in the dark until one day the wood gets chopped by a human poet named Cosmo. Gould ends up in a fire. 

The only way an oxygen atom in carbon dioxide can be freed from the carbon cycle is by becoming an oxygen radical and joining to an oxygen molecule, making ozone. This is what happens to Gould. The story ends when Gould, inside an ozone molecule, is floating high in the air protecting the planet from ultraviolet radiation.

A surprising fact emerges from this story, one which most writers would overlook. There are two largely separate cycles in the Earth’s ecosystem. In one, carbon and oxygen atoms circulate through the food chain by photosynthesis. In another, oxygen atoms become water, then oxygen again, also by means of photosynthesis. The only atoms that can cross over between the two cycles is the occasional oxygen atom. The oxygen atoms in organic molecules produced by photosynthesis come from carbon dioxide, while the oxygen atoms in the air come from water. The oxygen atoms very seldom cross from one cycle to the other. Gould, however, does.

This story not only explains difficult concepts such as electronegativity but also provides a brief overview of the chemical history of the Earth.

There are, as in most Rice novels and stories, undercurrents of important issues. In this case, the oxygen atoms are white and greedy, while the carbon atoms are black and nice.

Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science. Story 8, Doghouse

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website here. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat (all reviewed earlier), Doghouse (reviewed here), and Fresh Air (reviewed next).

This story, Doghouse, is really nothing more than oddball scientific comedy. A genetic engineer uses dog DNA to build a house that breathes and grows hair. The joke goes too far when the house gets up on its legs and walks away with the engineer inside. This is, of course, impossible, but Rice, a biologist, makes it just believable enough to enjoy.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, Story 7. Olga the Science Cat

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website here). Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

 

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy (all reviewed earlier), Olga the Science Cat (reviewed here), Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

Rice wrote a book about the scientific method. But how much better it would be to have the scientific method explained to you by a cat! No, not a talking cat like the gorilla in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. In Olga the Science Cat, the cat com-mew-nicates by grabbing items and leaving them on the floor or table in such a way as to answer human scientific questions. After Olga helps the kids with their science fair projects, she helps save the little girl’s life by dragging a hamburger sack from the garbage, with its evidence of salmonella poisoning.

Rice is not known for juvenile literature. This is the only piece of juvenile literature I have seen from him.

A Word for Weeds

 

In French, there are at least two ways to say “weed,” and they reflect two different attitudes.

The first way reflects the same feeling that we usually have in English when we say weed: mauvaise herbe, bad herb. This is not only a value judgment but also shuts the door to asking any further questions about the plant.

This phrase reinforces our prejudices that weeds are noxious. There are, of course, more exceptions than you can shake a stick at. One example is the pineapple weed Matricaria.

 

I have admired this weed since junior high school. It grows in dry, compacted soil (such as hiking paths). It does not bother to grow tall. You can hardly avoid stepping on it. And if you do, what is the plant’s response? To release a pleasing pineapple-like odor!

The second way to say weed is adventice. This suggests a feeling that weeds take advantage of any opportunities that are available. In English, we say that roots are “adventitious” when they grow out of stems to take advantage of opportunities, such as a vine crawling up a wall or a tree trunk. From this viewpoint, weeds are very creative and waste no time in filling any resource space that may be available. However inconvenient weeds may be, we have to admire this aspect of their lives.

One way that weeds do this is that they adjust their growth and physiology to circumstances much better than other species do. I devoted a considerable part of my Ph.D. thesis (see here for a simplified version of it) to this idea. Weeds live under conditions where they never know what they will find: a lot of light, or mostly shade; a lot of water, or little; a lot of nutrients, or sterile soil; etc. This is why I prefer the French term adventice over the term mauvaise herbe.

 

 

 

Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 6: Entropy

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible (see his author website). Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles; Light Apparel; Flow of Blood; Wisdom Builds Her House; Rock Bunnies (all reviewed earlier), Entropy (reviewed here), Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air (all reviewed later). As in the previous stories, Entropy teaches some deep science in a context of humor.

 Manfred and Meave are tech nerds who have their whole lives in perfect order: they know exactly what and when they would eat (spotlessly cooked meals); what they would play (Monopoly over and over); and when they would get married. Then their perfect order was disrupted by entropy, which is disorder. First, Manfred’s perfectly ordered meal is disrupted when he hides an engagement ring inside of a beet for Meave to find; second, the astonishingly beautiful illegal immigrant Cornelia arrives unexpectedly and gets Manfred in bed with her. Then she brings her whole family. Meave’s latent energy explodes when she finds out about this…until she finds out that she really likes Cornelia’s family. When Cornelia’s family leaves, they do something that makes it impossible for Manfred and Meave to ever be torn apart again.

Entropy is disorder. Everything that happens—every physical transition, every chemical reaction—results in a loss of energy (First Law of Thermodynamics) and a loss of orderliness. That is, an increase in entropy, which the discoverer of entropy, Josiah Willard Gibbs, reportedly called mixedupness. To a certain extent, you can reverse the second law by adding extra energy and information about how to use it. Big molecules break down into smaller ones unless you give them some energy and an enzyme that “knows” how to use it. Don’t you wish you had this explained to you by a writer like Rice when you took chemistry?

The spiritual lesson in this story is that you have to be ready for surprises to come along, rather than imposing your own idea of order on all of life. Being a rigid Puritan—none of whom read this blog, I assume—is not only bad, but also impossible. This lesson makes up about half of the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne. But also, you have to be open to surprises if you are to notice the wonder of creation. Cornelia tells Manfred, “You have a map of the heavens, you think, because humans have made up names for the stars and drawn little lines between them. You think that constellation over there looks like a Big Dipper. Our people think it looks like a Volkswagen Bug. Just kidding. But, seriously. Do you have a map of the Streets of Gold? When you get glimpses of heaven, and you get them every day, it leaves you bewildered. But you better get used to it. You better be content with feeling a little bit lost, because the heavens are so big, you will never have answers to everything.”

This story also squarely faces one of the most important current issues of our time: illegal immigration and what ICE can or should do about it. Rice does not, of course, provide an answer.

Blood Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 5. Rock Bunnies

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House (all reviewed earlier in this blog), Rock Bunnies (reviewed here), Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

In Rock Bunnies, once again, Rice takes an idea from the fiction of H. G. Wells, in this case from The Time Machine. In Wells’s novel, the human species has evolved into two: the infantile Eloi and the shabby but hard-working Morlocks, as different as any two animal species. In Rice’s story, the Urbanites are rich white technologists who have evolved into a slightly-different race that lives in artificial cities, while the dark poor Rock Bunnies live in places the whites have destroyed. This story is set in the Black Hills, which (as anyone visiting Mt. Rushmore knows) is currently covered with pine trees, but in this story, set in the future, is a desert. The Rock Bunnies leap from cliff to cliff and live off of mountain goats and little clumps of edible wild plants.

A white Urbanite graduate student out in the desert sees a Rock Bunny who, as they almost never do, fall from a cliff and injure herself, perhaps mortally. He wants to rescue her but her fellow Rock Bunny vandals have destroyed his car, and he becomes their captive. The Rock Bunny woman, however, is the niece of their chief. They develop a friendship, and the chief—whom they call the Scientist, because he keeps the spirit of science alive among his people—wants the white man to stay with them as his son-in-law.

In this view of the future, which is otherwise bleak, Rice shows that this tribe of Rock Bunnies reveres science and its practitioners. Nice fantasy.

An Urbanite helicopter comes and finds the white man. The white man assumes it is to rescue him. In this, he is quite wrong.

As in other stories in this collection, Rice makes a strong case that altruism—the evolutionary basis of love—is the most important human adaptation. This is the message of both science and religion. As in many other Rice stories, there is also the theme of racism.