Irregularity

by Nick Harkaway

  What about Love, sir?

  That is the centre of it. Love. I find Myself, at my advanc’d Age, taking stock—both literally as I inventory my Possessions and Business and figuratively as I collect my Memories. I have had some small Success, a Trifling thing when compar’d to that which you are sure to have for your great Projeckt. Here I finally come to the Point. Where is Man in your order’d List? We, as one of God’s Creatures, are sure to be part of your Great Order. Yet are we not different? We Love, and in divers Manners.

  I have a young Nephew John, not yet grown, and I Love him, an Uncle’s love for his Nephew. He is now my only Family, for his Parents, my dear Sister and her Husband, are both gone. Is the Love I have for the Boy the same as a Man has for his own Son? Can one be set higher than another, when it is All that I have? Were I to marry soon, would the Love I have for my Wife be different than if I had marry’d young? Is Love of God the only Love that matters?

  I ask too many Questions.

  If you see fit to humour and old Man and his Curiosity, you are truly a generous Soul.

  Yours, etc.,

  Thos Fairchild

  1736

  Inside the church, Carl found little beyond Fairchild’s name on the list of sermons, as John Bacon had described.

  Outside, among the flowers that he had loved, was a stone dedicated to Fairchild.

  There being no bench, Carl made a seat for himself on the grass. He took the pack of letters out of his bag, keeping the newest and replacing the rest. He cracked the seal and unfolded it, enjoying and fearing the feeling of reading his own letter, as if it were he who had died.

  1732

  Dear Sir,

  I look forward to making your Acquaintance and to the Feast you describe.

  Your letter has found me, after many Travels, Home again after an expedition to study the Flora of Lapland. Yet it has shot straight to my Heart and Soul. For while it is a Prodigious Thing, begging your pardon to speak about my Projekt in such a manner, it is an even Greater Thing to understand the will of God as it relates to Man, and, especially, as it has to do with that great Thing Love.

  I had not consider’d the Question until I receiv’d your Correspondence. I believe that a Man may write on Paper what he cannot utter in the hearing of another. A Confessional of the Soul, from one to another, with God listening in, of course. Is it not God who creat’d us all? And so to order God’s creations is to understand the Creator. It is clear, then, that to examine Love is to understand Man and, above all, God, as well.

  I am thinking on it.

  Yours,

  CL

  1717

  The carnation wilted. Its petals withered and dropped, indicating that it was time.

  Thomas harvested the seeds and placed some into a paper twist that he labelled clearly. The others he planted. And then he waited some more.

  Thomas took possession of a new Primula auricula, a striking specimen with a golden centre, with plans to pass it on to Mr. Wade, who would appreciate its addition to the small theatre at the side of his house.

  At a fete, Thomas danced with Rebecca Wade. She danced with every available young man, her mother at her heels.

  The seeds sent up their first green tendrils.

  At a coffee house, Thomas met with Mr. Wade and discussed future designs for the weaver’s new silks.

  Soon, the little tendrils thickened and grew, and buds appeared at the tips.

  Thomas hired an illustrator to begin a set of drawings of the carnations and Sweet Williams. But they could not be completed until the new plant flowered. Rebecca would wear her father’s silks, designed by her greatest admirer.

  The little plant bloomed. Its flowers were a deep colour, nearly red, with petal edges that mimicked the trimmings of a lady’s gown, inviting admirers.

  It had no smell.

  When the new drawings were finished, Thomas sent them to Mr. Wade, but by that time the fashion for bizarre silks had waned.

  The new flowers wilted and died.

  And left behind no seeds.

  The plant was sterile.

  Meanwhile, Rebecca Wade’s father announced her betrothal.

  Thomas wrote up his findings and took them along with a pressing of the plant to a meeting with his fellow gardeners. From there he went to the Royal Society.

  They named the plant Fairchild’s Mule.

  Some called it his greatest creation.

  He called it his greatest folly.

  1736

  …I understand from your Nephew that you came to regret the Mule, in particular your role in its Creation, believing that you had defy’d God’s Law.

  The Housekeeper has set out my Supper. Unaware of our Friendship, she is under the Impression that I dine alone. I call you Friend I spite of the Situation that separates us, and this simple Lamb pie, like that you ate when you first heard my Name, shall be our Feast.

  After long consideration, I conclude that it cannot be list’d, rank’d, or organis’d in any manner. We may do so to those things that do not change from one to the next. A Deer now is the same as a Deer in my Grandsire’s time, as are your Pinks, simple Sparrows, and Oak Trees. But Love—

  One can only order those Things which One can see, touch, smell, taste. We may trust our Senses.

  Ah, but is Love not a Sense, you ask?

  No, I answer.

  But, you argue, what of the various Types of Love? A Man’s love for his fellows, for his Wife, for his God. Are they not different?

  I will shake my head. They may be different. No, listen to my point. They may be different, yet they are all One Thing. They are all a Deer or a Pink, a Sparrow, an Oak.

  Yes, you say loudly and bang your fist on the table. Do not upset the Wine, I will say and laugh. It is rather Good and I would enjoy it all this Night.

  Yes, you say, they are all One Thing, but there are Deer here in our Land that are different to those in other Lands. The same with Love.

  Can you see the Deer? I ask, and you nod. Can you see the Love? I ask. And you stop, gesticulate, sip from your glass. And, finally, shake your head.

  I win the Point. Now let me win the Battle:

  As a Natural Philosopher, I must only trust that which is observable, which does not alter. Turmoil alters Harmony, if I may be poetic. And Love is, if nothing else, Disorder. Chaos of the heart, the senses, your very Being, whether it is the Love you had for young John, or that, I suspect, you had for a Woman you did not marry, or even the Love I am feeling for this Wine. Ah, would that you were here. The Housekeeper would be jealous of the debate, for it would be as delicious as this meal.

  So, sir, Thomas, my Friend, do not regret the Mule. The Materials for its Creation—and your idea to cross those two humble Blooms—are traceable to God. But let us leave some Mystery. Let us understand what is possible to understand, but not fight to know all of it. Let us leave something of Chaos so that we may stay Men of the Earth and not become like God. To do so would be the true Folly.

  Your most humble Servant who wishes you were here, etc.,

  CL

  Afterword

  Crudely speaking, science is about describing and defining the universe, finding nature’s laws and setting them down. But what happens when it fails? What if nature resists and won’t be constrained? What about the things that won’t fit? These are questions Irregularity raises, challenging today’s authors to create stories inspired by people’s systematic, and not so systematic, attempts to classify, understand and impose order on the world.

  Irregularity has been published to coincide with a major exhibition, Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest for Longitude at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. It’s a good match, since the age-old challenge of finding longitude (east-west position) at sea was all about finding regularity and the frustrations of nature’s evident irregularities. Like this book, Ships, Clocks & Stars tells a story that spans the globe, taking visitors from the coffee-houses of London to the shores of the Pacific.
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  For many, the quest for longitude was itself the stuff of fiction, and the imagination that inspires Irregularity echoes that of the men (and sometimes women) who pursued that quest. In the popular mind, it became a fool’s errand, like the search for eternal life or perpetual motion. The Longitude Act of 1714 sought to change the game, however, by offering life-changing rewards for solutions that worked. Yet, after twenty years, one author found that although the Act had encouraged many to bend their thoughts to the problem, nothing worthwhile had come from it, just ideas like Mr Jackson’s “monstrous Machine” and John Bates’s “Chimaera’s in his Brain”. When solutions did emerge in the 1750s, they were all about regularity. Carpenter-turned-clock-maker John Harrison created a sea-watch that could keep regular time on a pitching and rolling ship. And the Moon’s motion — that most irregular of phenomena — was pinned down in the service of a complementary astronomical method.

  For this volume, authors were asked for stories inspired by the history of science from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. This encompassed the Longitude Act and the events that followed, with the longer timeframe taking in everything from the foundation of the Royal Society in 1660, through the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, to the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). It was an extraordinary period that saw important institutions created, amazing inventions, the harnessing of new power sources, countless discoveries and a tireless drive to classify almost everything.

  But there is a danger in hindsight. Science does not progress through a simple succession of ideas and inventions. False leads abound, and the theories and inventions that now look to have been the clear winners were not so obvious at the time, when alternative lines of attack showed equal promise. This is certainly true of the longitude story. Had many of the archives not survived, the successes of the 1760s would have concealed the failures, dead ends and might-have-beens along the way. These provide their own fascinating tales. As Nick Harkaway’s framing story to this volume says, “It did not matter to me if each and every one was full of provable falsehoods and stupidities: any text is an image of the mind, and any mind is worthy of attention.” Nor should we forget that the greatest minds could also make mistakes, reach an impasse. The precocious polymath and Secretary of the Board of Longitude, Thomas Young, noted that even Isaac Newton “was liable to err”. Indeed, one of those failures concerned longitude. Trying to model the Moon’s motions caused Newton’s head to ache, he said. The solution fell to his successors, including Tobias Mayer, a German astronomer who had never seen the sea.

  The history of science clearly offers rich territory for the imagination. In Irregularity it has inspired stories about people’s efforts, successful and unsuccessful, to know the world better and make it comprehensible, for tales about the things that prove unknowable, and the tension between order and chaos. The result is a wonderfully eclectic mix that asks questions about the boundaries of science and what we can know. But it is more than just entertainment; writing and reading fiction can help us interpret the past and come closer to it. Like all writers, historians need imagination to draw together the papers in archives and objects in museums to tell their stories. Without it, history would be little more than lists of dates and facts. It was in the imagination too that longitude solutions and other schemes came into being. Some got no further than that; others became theories and technologies that still define our understanding of nature, and survive in laboratories and museums as evidence of the past.

  So Irregularity’s stories can help us think about humanity’s desire to describe the universe, and the ways in which nature complies with, and resists, that ambition. Some of them offer a glimpse of the past as we think it was, others bend time and space to create worlds that can only be imagined. Not bound by strict historical or scientific realism, they conjure up dinosaur automata, Restoration-era black holes, uncatchable chimera and prophetic spiders. Yet when compared to the quest for longitude, in which impossible schemes were discussed in all seriousness and the line between madness and genius felt precariously narrow, even these fictions can seem remarkably close to reality.

  Many of Irregularity’s tales dwell on the urge to classify the world, to name and describe its parts, exemplified by the Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, whose Systema Naturae (1735) set out his famous taxonomic system. But what of its limitations? “Let us understand what is possible to understand, but not fight to know all of it”, Linnaeus himself is moved to write in Tiffani Angus’s tale, “Fairchild’s Folly”, which asks whether science can understand love. Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Animalia Paradoxa” presents a creature that cannot be captured, whether by classifier or hunter. And classification becomes a terrible power in E. J. Swift’s “The Spiders of Stockholm”, where the knowledge of true names can suck mystery and power from the world.

  Manipulating nature, making it regular and exploiting its power also runs throughout. Claire North’s “The Voyage of the Basset” has Charles Darwin sent to change the climate for imperial ends, while the secrets of the winds are mapped and tamed by William Dampier in Rose Biggin’s “A Game Proposition”. Yet to meddle in this way is to court disaster; experiments can go wrong and overwhelm their creators. M. Suddain morphs the Great Fire of London into a consuming vortex in “The Darkness”, as Restoration natural philosophers treat nature as a toy and lose control. Roger Luckhurst offers something much more unsettling in “Circulation” — sinister powers unlocked by an infernal machine. Drawing on the longitude story, James Smythe’s “The Last Escapement” has one of John Harrison’s rivals literally give his all for his invention in a tale that echoes eighteenth-century debates about the fine line between genius and madness.

  Smythe’s clock-maker is pursuing tantalising financial rewards. In a similar vein, Simon Guerrier’s “An Experiment in the Formulae Thought” has a Victorian scientist cry, “Lay down the gauntlet and we shall deliver. If only we have the funds!” It’s a call that could equally have come from Charles Babbage or any number of longitude projectors, although the results might have been less catastrophic than Guerrier’s account of a misfiring initiative in the public understanding of science.

  These concerns about science’s impact seem perfectly in tune with the Romantic sensibilities of the period in which many of Irregularity’s stories are set. From the late eighteenth century onwards, writers like William Blake and William Wordsworth professed an ambivalence towards science and poked at its limitations. By then there was already a long literary tradition that made fun of foolish truth-seekers, found in satirical plays like Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676). Romantic authors took the critique further, worrying that science’s mechanistic explanations constrained the universe, denying individuality and the possibility of coming to a deeper understanding of the world through imagination and emotional experience. Some foresaw great danger, as was famously explored in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818). Shelley’s has become a defining image: the man of science who over-reaches and leads to his own and others’ destruction, yet who is to be admired for his tireless quest to understand the absolutes of life and death. It’s an image that courses through Irregularity’s veins.

  There are other influences too. Guerrier’s tale of dinosaurs on the loose in England’s capital has an echo of Charles Dickens’ opening to Bleak House (1852–53), which evokes a London so bogged down in mud that one can imagine a Megalosaurus, “waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-Hill”. Dickens created other creatures out of time for Ebenezer Scrooge’s life-changing journeys in A Christmas Carol (1843). Time travel gained a technological medium in Edward Page Mitchell’s The Clock That Went Backwards (1881) and H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). Theirs is a rich legacy. In this volume, Kim Curran speculates on what might have been if Emilie du Châtelet, “A Woman out of Time”, had lived in an age that did not constrain women of scientific persuasion. The story also brings to life the forces that ke
pt her imagination in check. In a very different tale, Adam Roberts conjures up a murderous meeting between Isaac Newton and a time-travelling Robert Boyle, struck by Newton’s resemblance to Brian May.

  A more recent legacy comes through the literature of steampunk, which explores the possibility of technology rather than people out of time. One of that genre’s seminal works, Bruce Sterling and William Gibson’s The Difference Engine (1990), describes a world in which Charles Babbage’s calculating engines have propelled Victorian society into a pre-electrical information age. In Irregularity, steam- and coal-powered automata designed by Ada Lovelace and Restoration sky ships draw freely on this rich genre.

  Above all, people are the heart of Irregularity, with all their ambitions, fears and failings. When primal fears are awakened, Archie Black’s “Footprint” reveals, even the most regular of minds can act irregularly. All too human traits — vanity, jealousy, curiosity, morality — infuse the practice of science in Irregularity’s tales just as they do in reality. As Richard de Nooy reminds us in “The Heart of Aris Kindt”, for example, it is all too easy to turn a blind eye to the unexpected or the inexplicable, weaving a tale in which the pomposity of the scientific elite is punctured.

  By setting human stories against the vast scope of scientific thought and technological progress, Irregularity helps us remember the countless people caught up in the quest for longitude and other great scientific challenges. Their personalities can be lost in the archives, but can be re-found by applying imagination to history. As Mary Shelley wrote in the introduction to a new edition of Frankenstein in 1831, “Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.” Her words fit this volume perfectly.