The most unsettling thing at the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is not that David Bowman has become something other than human. It is that he has acquired dominion before deciding what to do with it. The novel enlarges intelligence without settling the purposes intelligence should serve.

Spoilers for the novel follow.

The first safe night

Moon-Watcher begins as a hungry creature who thinks he might reach the Moon by finding a sufficiently tall tree. Curiosity precedes an adequate account of distance.

Angela Cerinotti’s Miti greci e di Roma antica ends with an index that accidentally delivers the book’s sharpest argument. Zeus receives 496 references. Near the end come the Vineyard Women with seven, Zagreus with eight, and Tithonus with eight. The numbers map the gravitational field of the pantheon, but they do not measure what remains in the reader. I remember the three Vineyard Women, indexed seven times, more clearly than the 496 appearances of Zeus.

On Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death

A world assembled from need

A Maze of Death begins like a theological murder mystery. Fourteen strangers are transferred to Delmak-O, a nearly empty colony where the landscape answers belief with matter. A jellylike oracle accepts written questions, a mechanical insect plays the music its listener most wants to hear, and a tiny organism endlessly prints Egon Specktowsky’s sacred book. The settlers have doctrine in abundance: the Intercessor, the Demiurge, the Walker-on-Earth, and the Form Destroyer give suffering a cosmic grammar. What they lack is a reliable way to read one another.

Jim Al-Khalili’s La fisica del diavolo is built on a useful little injury: the moment when the mind discovers that its first, confident picture of the world is not merely incomplete but structurally wrong. A paradox, in this book, is rarely a mystical door. It is more often a diagnostic instrument. It shows where ordinary intuition has been allowed to speak outside its jurisdiction.

That is the book’s best quality. Al-Khalili does not treat paradoxes as salon tricks, even when he begins from cases that can sound like puzzles for a clever dinner table: Monty Hall, birthdays, missing dollars, Achilles and the tortoise. His stronger move is to make the trick accountable. The puzzle is not there to make the reader feel stupid. It is there to expose the hidden model the reader was using without noticing it. Probability, motion, heat, time, measurement, causality, cosmic scale: each chapter finds a place where the everyday model works just well enough to become dangerous.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is often called an ambiguous utopia. The phrase is accurate, but too polite. The book is sharper than that. It is a novel about a revolution that has survived long enough to become ordinary, and therefore dangerous to itself. Its great subject is not whether Anarres is better than Urras. It is what happens when a society built to abolish domination begins to produce domination in forms it no longer knows how to name.

Guido Tonelli’s Genesi is most convincing when it refuses the cheap version of wonder. The book is not a hymn to humanity standing at the summit of creation, waving a little flag over the rubble of physics. Its better movement is colder and more useful: matter organizes itself, structures appear under constraint, life becomes cooperation, and finally some animals discover that a shared story can keep a group alive when the world has stopped being hospitable.