Currently, I’m in the middle of a book titled Uranium, by Tom Zoellner. I can’t remember where I first heard about it, but after I did, I set out to the bookstore to pick it up. Unfortunately, they only had a hardback and the inside cover flap contained the wallet-punching: U.S. $26.95. With the price of books not being the issue here, let me just say I wasn’t able to pay that. So when I found it in the bargain bin at Borders for THREE DOLLARS, I snatched that bad boy up.
A little further than halfway, so far it has been a really interesting read. Since the 1200’s, the rock known as uranium has been at the center of a widening gyre of scientific breakthrough, technology inspired advancement in political power, and greed induced mining. Looking at this, it seems naturally allegorical to compare the way uranium wildly casts off particles in an effort to achieve rest (this instability being the source of radiation and the basic principle behind the atomic bomb) with the history of mankind attempting to harness uranium in order to achieve peace and wealth—yet invariably creating mostly destruction, corruption, and war.
Woah, sorry! I didn’t mean to get all back-cover book review on you. It is just a subject I really find interesting. How thematically rich is a story about an esoteric stone that contains the potential for life changing transmutations? That is modern day alchemy, folks.
Related is a book that I read within the past year, Tuxedo Park, by Jennet Conant. This book is about the private scientific labs of Alfred Loomis, where much of the research that went into creating the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were derived from. It covers much more than that, but what drew me to it was the advancements of technology that came during that time.
The history of science is a theme I’ve explored in many of my own stories. Another is the way war forces mankind to evolve. Most recently this occurs in As Above, So Below, and there are elements of duality in this next story, Traces, as well.
Some of my deepest inspiration comes from reading non-fiction like these two books. This passage in Uranium, where Zoellner quotes the wife of a scientist regarding the local Zuni Indians hired to do construction at Los Alamos, really gets my creative juices going:
“There they were, the oldest peoples of America, conservative, unchanged, barely touched by our industrial civilization, working on a project with an object so radical that it would be hailed as initiating a new age.”
To wrap it all up, there is just a ying and yang about this subject that really pushes my creative buttons. The connections between the past and the future contain an endless amount of possibilities; literary, scientifically, and politically. Even while I sit here finishing this blog post, I see Vice President Biden speaking about increasing spending to insure the U.S.’s aged nuclear arsenal remains ready and capable, with an ultimate goal of reducing these weapons around the world, and I am reminded of another quote contained in Zoellner’s work. This one is from Winston Churchill, whom the bomb detonated over Nagasaki and nicknamed Fat Man, was possibly named after:
“If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce.”
So have a good Friday, and remember, watch out for blinding flashes of light in the sky!
