Augmented nonfiction Thu, 27 Jun 2024 20:41:21
These three books, in order, run the spectrum from historical fiction to dramatized nonfiction.
- Pafko At The Wall/Underworld by Don DeLillo
There is the secret of the bomb and there are the secrets that the bomb inspires, things even the Director cannot guess—a man whose own sequestered heart holds every festering secret in the Western world —because these plots are only now evolving. This is what he knows, that the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast, every glimpse we get of the bared force of nature, that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert—for every one of these he reckons a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.
- When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
Among the few possessions Fritz Haber had with him when he died was a letter written to his wife. In it, he confessed that he felt an unbearable guilt; not for the part he had played, directly or indirectly, in the death of untold human beings, but because his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium of the planet that he feared the world’s future belonged not to mankind but to plants, as all that was needed was a drop in population to pre-modern levels for just a few decades to allow them to grow without limit, taking advantage of the excess nutrients humanity had bestowed upon them to spread out across the earth and cover it completely, suffocating all forms of life beneath a terrible verdure.
- Helgoland by Carlo Rovelli
At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that I had gone beyond the surface of things and was beginning to see a strangely beautiful interior, and felt dizzy at the thought that now I had to investigate this wealth of mathematical structures that Nature had so generously spread out before me.
Nothing is like the emotion of seeing a mathematical law behind the disorder of appearances.
I’ve become really interested in what I foolishly call “augmented nonfiction”. I think this interest stems from my fascination with medical thrillers from two-three years ago, but I’ve generalized it since. I loved the way these narratives wavered between “this happened, but I’m writing it in a more exciting way” and “this happened exactly as I wrote it, and it’s more exciting than anything I could ever come up with”.
When We Cease To Understand The World also has a story which features Alexander Grothendieck. I’m convinced that reading it, in some obscure way, nudged me towards my life today. Labatut wrote that Grothendieck and Mochizuki glimpsed “the heart of the heart”, and what they saw forever changed them. It creeped me out a little; one of my mutuals on Neocities calls himself holyheart, and his tribulations regarding _Hart_shorne’s Algebraic Geometry form the crown jewel of his website. Grothendieck was a pioneer of algebraic geometry. What a weird coincidence, unless I’m missing something.
Every six months or so I will make an account on Reddit to ask a question, linger for a week, and then delete it right after. This time I created an account to ask about this not-genre. What other books are there that weave together fiction and nonfiction in such a seamless way? I could only think of Sebald and his walks through Europe, his every step treading through a stratum of history.