Better than a Dog Anyhow: Stories of Darwin, by Stan Rice

Author Stan Rice has just published a set of short stories, Better than a Dog Anyhow, based on Charles Darwin. Rice wrote the Encyclopedia of Evolution and other popular books about evolution. He knows a lot of details about Darwin, and this collection of stories shows it.

 

Here is the Amazon description of the book: “The young Charles Darwin wants to believe in an orderly created world. But his experiences of the world—from the death of his mother, to the beautiful ravages of love, to the many exciting adventures during his trip around the world—disrupt this view. For Charles and Emma, his wife of four decades, religious faith has always been a point of quiet but loving contention. Five of these stories are fictionalized accounts of Darwin’s true biography. The others are imaginary stories: about Darwin’s Irish gardener who cannot understand why Darwin is so kind to him; a fantasy in which Darwin is reunited, via interlacing time lines, with his dead daughter Annie; and, what if Darwin, the father of evolution, had met Mendel, the father of genetics? In these stories, you will find a man whom you wish you could have known.”

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 5. The Old Burrill House

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth (all reviewed earlier); The Book of Ruth (reviewed in my religion blog); The Old Burrill House (reviewed here); The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (all reviewed in my religion blog later).

This story uses a premise that shows up in a lot of speculative fiction, and Rice employs it at least as well as other examples I have seen: shifting time lines that intersect and allow characters to move between them, from one century to another.

Kent is a graduate student in botany in the 1980s. His experiment is in a greenhouse that has been built into an old house, left to the university, that used to belong to Burrill, a prominent botanist. The house is falling apart, but still has rooms used for storage upstairs from the greenhouse. Kent sees light coming from one of the abandoned rooms, and slips in to investigate. He sees a beautiful woman bathing. He then tries to slip back out, but the portal has closed and he is trapped in the 1890s in a room with Burrill’s daughter Imelda. Kent slips out of the house and comes back to the university, to enroll as one of Burrill’s graduate students. One problem is that, living almost a century later, he knows a lot more science than did Burrill, a fact he must hide.

Imelda falls in love with Kent. Kent has to conceal his knowledge of the shifting timelines, only it turns out Imelda has seen the greenhouse that does not yet exist. Are they both crazy? What is Burrill to do when his daughter wishes to marry Kent? Kent decides to stay in the past with Imelda, but then Imelda gets sick with a bacterial disease that he can cure if he goes back into the future and steals antibiotics. I’ll let you read about whether he succeeds.

Rice writes from the knowledge base of a science teacher. Antibiotics are often made from fungi. They are not magic chemicals. They serve a purpose for the fungi: they kill the bacteria with which the fungi must compete for food. Even in his fiction, Rice is a science teacher.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 3. Bleeding Earth

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly; The Haunted Castle (both reviewed earlier); Bleeding Earth (reviewed here); The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

Robb is an environmentalist who works at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a federal agency which is friendly to farmers, not to the environment. Robb meets DoAnna, who owns a large farm and does everything environmentally wrong. But she knows it and asks Robb for advice. He gives her more advice (such as “Get rid of your cows”) than she wants. But he nearly convinces her to be an eco-farmer until she catches him trespassing on her land to get runoff water samples to identify her farm as a major source of pollution. They had just started to be friends…

Robb loses his job even before DoAnna files a complaint about his trespassing. Depressed and sleepy, he parks his car at a rest stop and falls asleep. He awakens during a severe dust storm and finds DoAnna has prepared him a picnic lunch. She is now convinced he is right—our farms are blowing away in the wind—and she hires him as a full-time advisor on how to make her farm into an eco-farm. They soon become lovers.

Running an eco-farm turns out to be nightmarishly difficult, especially the way Robb and DoAnna do it. The project (raising hemp) fails. They have to start over—but how? They blame each other for what has happened. A summer storm brings on a mud-fight, which leaves them laughing and loving once again.

This story is of particular interest to readers interested in science who may not realize how difficult it is to turn a conventional, pesticide-and-herbicide farm into a “green” farm. It also shows the NRCS is caught in a delicate spot: they have to enforce environmental laws without alienating farms whose cooperation with conservation programs is, after all, voluntary. If being “eco-friendly” were easy, all farmers would have done it already. Rice, far from being a raging environmentalist, seems to understand this.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 2. Haunted Castle

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed earlier); The Haunted Castle (reviewed here); Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

This story begins, “Arjana worked in the only place at Joyworld Moscow where you did not have to smile: The Haunted Castle.” Arjana and Zef were two Albanian teenagers from a village destroyed by the Serbs. Arjana couldn’t smile because of what she saw, especially the face of the smiling, ruthless Serbian soldier who chased her and Zef but could not find them. When they sneak onto a train going to Moscow, they find a shipment of costumes for Joyworld, and decide the best place to hide is faraway but in plain sight. Zef played a cowboy at a fake frontier town (Russians were killing Siberians at the same time white Americans were killing Natives). Arjana worked the ticket counter of Haunted Castle, a train that wound through fake graveyards and dangling ghosts. But the soldier found Zef and shot him dead; the visitors thought it was part of an act. Other visitors thought it was part of the act when the soldier found Arjana and tried to rape her. (“The fake blood looks so real!”) But a small and silent act of heroism saves Arjana.

One thing I found very interesting about this story was that Arjana’s ability to play dead was an adaptation to danger. Animal adaptations to escape from danger are as varied as the animals themselves.

An evolutionary puzzle is, why do people so intensely hate those in other racial or cultural groups? An evolutionary argument can be made for why individuals or groups, in competition with one another, would hate each other. But the intensity of hatred seems too much for biology or evolution to explain. It is almost enough to make one believe in Satan.

Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption, by Stan Rice, story 1. When Pigs Fly

Author Stan Rice has just published another collection of short stories: Stars in the Daytime: Stories of Disruption. Stan Rice is better known as a science writer, and scientific content and themes show up in most of his stories, including those in this collection.

Here is the author’s summary from Amazon: “You cannot see stars in the daytime, but they, like hidden reality, are always there. In these nine stories, Stan Rice asks, what if God appeared in the sky, with a message for Muslims? Can a theme park haunted castle help a young woman escape from genocide? What if an old greenhouse is the site of shifting timelines? What if a hotel burglar is actually a kindly man? What if a man discovers his girlfriend thinks of him as a teddy bear, then needs him? What happens if a demon from hell changes places with a human being on Earth? In one of the stories, Ruth meets Carmen.”

 

The stories in this collection are: When Pigs Fly (reviewed here); The Haunted Castle; Bleeding Earth; The Book of Ruth; The Old Burrill House; The Lord Will Provide: Two Stories of Faith; The Gentleman; Ursa Minor; and You Little Demon (reviewed in later essays).

The first story, When Pigs Fly, is about an American woman (Wendy) who wandered away from her Muslim heritage (she was Wafa before). Then one day, God appeared in the sky. Only, unlike Rice’s novel Glass Cathedral it was Al-lah, not the Christian God. God said he was going to kill reprobate former Muslims, but He was going to give Wafa an extra chance, since, He said, He just likes her. His only rule is to stay away from pork and pork products. Could salvation be so easy?

Wafa rejoins the mosque in which she grew up, in Oklahoma, and thinks she is obeying Al-lah. She has even dedicated her life to making the world better, by getting a college degree in biology. But in her biotechnology class she discovers that pig genes have been sliced into the DNA of almost all crop plants, and that she and all her fellow Muslims have been eating pork without realizing it. So, God killed all of them.

The question for my religious readers (explored in my other blog) is, would God ever do anything like this? But in this science blog, I point out that genetic engineering is already being used to insert genes into agricultural products. We hardly know what we eat. Rice does not get into the details, but it is very unlikely that you are getting genes in your food that you do not know about, because the biotechnology (even with the clever new CRISPR technology) still moves one gene at a time. No way can you get a half-pig half-vegetable. But you can get a vegetable that is 0.0001% pig, and for some people that is just too much.

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 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 4. Wisdom Builds Her House

 

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 (all reviewed earlier in this blog), Wisdom Builds Her House (reviewed here), Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Wisdom Builds Her House, Dolores Pector, a very serious molecular biologist, alienated the other scientists at her university. The graduate students, even her own, were terrified of her. But a visiting professor, the happy-go-lucky ecologist Jeremy Duckett, showers her with innocent friendship. When she has a medical crisis, she doesn’t want anybody to know, but Duckett finds out and visits her in the hospital; he actually gets her to laugh. He also explains to her how altruism evolved, and why it is perhaps the most important thing to the human species. Pector tries to shield herself so much from the messy friendship and love that when she has a heart attack in her bomb shelter, nobody knows it.

Rice’s question for his fellow scientists and religious people is, what is science for? Is it a grim search for precise truth, as Dolores sees it, or is it, as Jeremy sees it, part of the human celebration of life? Guess which one Rice, better known as the author of popular science books, believes!

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 3. Flow of Blood

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 and Light Apparel (reviewed earlier), Flow of Blood (reviewed here), Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Flow of Blood, the science is not impossible, as was the case with the two previous stories. It is about a viral fever killing people in Africa, including graduate students trying to stop it. As I write these words, the ebola virus is spreading almost uncontrolled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Perhaps the most important plot component of this story is racism. The white male grad student was raised to be a racist, until he meets and loves a black female grad student from Africa. He goes with her to study and fight the disease in her birth village. He becomes ill, and she goes back to Kansas to be with him. His family at first rejects her, thinking that Africa is where all viral diseases come from. But they have just suffered another loss: another son has died of a viral fever, but this time it was the American hantavirus. This shared experience of death brings them together.

Medical science is not just about germs and medicine, but about the struggles and perils of real people. And sometimes it takes a medical tragedy to bridge the gulf of racism.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, part two. Light Apparel

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 (reviewed earlier), Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Light Apparel, a physicist, Hadley, discovers how to weave light into a fabric from which clothing could be made. People could now go naked but look like they were clothed, and this was very popular in a globally-warmed world. At least they appeared clothed to everyone except Hadley; he could use his equations to make spectacles that could unscramble the light and reveal their nakedness. Hadley lived in an endless fantasy world.

The only person who rejected this light-apparel was a young Christian woman, Xan, who wore cloth. She stood out among the naked bodies as surely as if she were the only naked person. Hadley was attracted to her, as she tried to save his soul. But her parents sneaked into his room and stole his secrets. The father was ready to destroy Hadley’s financial empire, until Xan shoots her father.

The question that this story raises—but does not answer, since it is just a story—is, why do humans wear clothing? Is it for modesty? Is it to curb unbridled sexual lust? You can think of an almost limitless number of reasons these cannot be the reasons. Some tribes and nudists manage to have modesty despite nakedness. Instead, from an evolutionary biology viewpoint, clothes are power, sometimes hiding, sometimes revealing, sometimes emphasizing, what people want others to see. In the history of every culture, clothing is much too complicated and ornate to simply serve as a covering against nakedness or to keep warm. Clothing is a product of cultural evolution in our species of otherwise naked apes.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science. Story 1: The Man Who Could Work Miracles

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 book are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air. I will post an essay about each story in this blog. All of his fiction books can be found on his author website, where the fiction books are at the bottom.

The first story, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, is also a short story by H. G. Wells. And as in the Wells story, the main character ends up destroying the world—almost. At the last minute, in both stories, the main character rejects his miracle-working ability. No human being is good or smart enough to have this ability.

Rice’s twist on this situation is that the main character, Irwin, only has the ability to work miracles—and then only one at a time—when the odometer on his old car lines up with the same number at least five times. Then, his miracles can only alter the laws of probability, no other natural laws. When Irwin sent the arrogant co-worker to Hell, it was something that was going to eventually happen anyway. When Irwin got incredibly rich from lotteries and investments, it was something that would have happened to someone anyway. Irwin’s patient girlfriend found out where his powers came from, and Irwin used his ability to make her forget what she had learned about him—but he did not expect this would cause her to have a stroke and become brain-dead. But she would have eventually had a stroke anyway, right? But this was enough to make him revoke his ability just seconds before his old car would have collided with a truck in the opposite lane.

When the protagonist revokes his ability in Wells’s novel, it saves the world. In Rice’s novel, it saves only the people Irwin knows. He realizes all he needs is a job and his devoted girlfriend.

Human intelligence evolved only to deal with local, immediate circumstances, and then only imperfectly. It did not evolve to give humans—any humans—the ability to understand the world and control it.