Issues
← Back to all issuesGranta 16: Science
Summer 1985
For the last thirty or forty years, it has been a commonplace that science and literature don’t mix. But recently science writing has undergone a revival and has come to constitute a literature in itself. What accounts for its sudden appeal? The attraction of facts? Or the possibility that ‘facts’ are themselves inventions of the most spectacular kind?
This issue is devoted to representing part of this revival. In ‘Excesses’, Oliver Sacks describes individuals suffering from not only too much personality but too many. In ‘Amazon’, Eugene Richards and Dorothea Lynch document the terrible mystery of illness and the body. The sexuality of tortoises, the lunacy of invention, the bizarre mating habits of a tropical rodent, the zoo-like existence of the young scientists of Reagan’s Star Wars – all invite us to understand ‘science’ not simply as the study of fact but also as another way, not unlike the novel, of describing the mystery of the world.
From this Issue
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Excesses
Oliver Sacks
‘Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy: hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.’
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Amazon
Dorothea Lynch & Eugene Richards
‘We women, how in the dark we are about our bodies and what can happen to them. We ask in whispers in the corner at a party or on the telephone, what does a breast lump feel like? What does cancer look like? Will I be all right?’
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Bell And Langley
Thomas McMahon
‘He said that new ideas only came to him between these hours, and when they did, they were like recollections of things forgotten. Sometimes he put on his hat and coat at two a. m. and walked ten miles, the way a mourner will do when he is trying to recall the sight of a beloved face.’
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The Loves of The Tortoises
Italo Calvino
‘There are two tortoises on the patio: a male and a female. Zlak! Zlak! their shells strike each other. It is the season of their love-making.’
Italo Calvino on animal drive and communication.
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Co-operation for the Birds
Lewis Thomas
‘Somehow, despite the internal squabbles and constant competitions, the tree swallow societies manage to get by and survive, year after year.’
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The Scientists of Star Wars
William Broad
‘Until 1980 or so I didn't want to have anything to do with nuclear anything. Back in those days I thought there was something fundamentally evil about weapons. Now I see it as an interesting physics problem.’
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Children of The Wind
Primo Levi
‘Today Kaenunu is largely deserted. On Mahui, on the other hand, it is not unusual for anyone with patience and good vision to catch sight of some atoula.’
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Self-Control
Primo Levi
‘He'd have to keep an eye on his liver now, the way you do with cars, if you want them to last: regular washing and greasing, an eye cast over the electrics, the injectors, all the pumps, the battery and the brakes.’
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Chromium
Primo Levi
‘Life is full of customs whose roots can no longer be traced ... but in any event, why were pig's feet obligatory with lentils, and cheese on macaroni?’
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Adam’s Navel
Stephen Jay Gould
‘Since Omphalos is such spectactular nonsense, readers may rightly ask why I choose to discuss it at all. I do so, first of all, because its author was such a serious and fascinating man.’
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Quantum Jumps
Tim O'Brien
‘Where on earth is the happy ending? Kansas is burning. All things are finite. ‘Love,’ I say feebly. The hole finds this amusing.’
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The Imagination of Disaster
Mary Gordon
‘We live knowing not only that we will die, that we may suffer, but that all that we hold dear will finish; that there will be no more familiar.’
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The Bridge
David Mamet
‘Surely the world was going to end. And probably in fire - in nuclear destruction, by mistake, or at the hands of madmen.’
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England, Whose England?
Darryl Pinckney
‘My Anglophilia was something like haemophilia - that is, I was easily bruised by facts so stayed away from them.’
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Warsaw Diary (Part Two: 1983)
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘History as class struggle? As a struggle of systems? Agreed: but history is equally the struggle between culture and the mob, between humanity and bestiality.’
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Women and Power in Cuba
Germaine Greer
‘For a feminist like me who considers that the combination of dazzle with drudgery is one of the most insidious ways in which women in our society are subject to stress, the multiplication of contradictory demands upon the Cuban women is a cause for concern.’
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Nicaragua: An Appeal
David Hare
‘To arrive in Nicaragua is at once to be disorientated, for since the earthquake in 1972, there has been, and is still no proper city of Managua.’
