I’m not sure when I first read Stephen Jay Gould’s THE MISMEASURE OF MAN — the 1980s, maybe? — but it certainly hasn’t aged at all.
Gould looks back at the long history of efforts to measure human intelligence and to rank it, not merely between individuals but between groups — man vs. woman, black vs. white vs. Native American vs. Aborigine, native-born American vs. immigrant, upper class vs. lower. Why yes, there was a lot of racism involved; even people who were enlightened and liberal routinely accepted that the white Anglo-Saxon male was the summit of human evolution and obviously more intelligent than anyone else. Knowing this unsurprisingly biased the results. The great anatomist Paul Broca, for instance, admitted that women’s brains were smaller than men’s in proportion to their bodies but obviously, as we know women are stupid, their small brains must be the root cause.
Gould argues the fatal mistake in all the theorists he’s covering was the belief that intelligence was a single, fixed, quantifiable thing (a concept that eventually became “IQ”) and that it was an identifiable physical property of the brain, untainted by education, culture, environment, etc. And that attempts to measure it were always undone by bias; when it became obvious that IQ tests of immigrants reflected how long they’d been in America (and therefore exposed to American culture) the response was that obviously the immigrants who arrived earlier were the smarter, more ambitious types and the later arrivals were the degenerate dregs. This is wonkier than his previous books, getting much more into the technical weeds than they did, but it certainly makes its point well.
WILL EISNER’S NEW YORK is an anthology of multiple smaller works by the creator of the Spirit, all focusing on life in the Big Apple. One section tells stories built around windows, fire hydrants and other features of city life. Another looks at four ghosts haunting the site of the building where they died, even though it’s been demolished and replaced. “Invisible People” looks at the ways people can vanish in the teeming crowds; one, concerning a recluse who can’t convince anyone his obituary was wrong (they’ve never seen him, how do they know who he is?), shows similars fears of loss-of-identity to The Net.
It’s great stuff but not Eisner’s best stuff. Like his Life in Pictures, the tone is too bleak and miserable, plus the women are overwhelmingly unlikable and unsympathetic. It’s surprising, given the women of Eisner’s Spirit series are far more interesting and appealing.
Although the publisher lists Henry Kuttner as sole author of FURY, CL Moore says in the introduction that she collaborated on it (they did lots of work on each other’s stories throughout their marriage); Kuttner’s mark is on the Don’t Trust Authority scenes, hers on the Don’t Trust Love moments. Their story dissatisfied me as a teen, probably because it’s about an anti-hero against a decaying society and I wasn’t really ready for that. And Sam, “who was born into a world he had to smash before it smashed him,” isn’t a typical anti-hero.
Following the nuclear destruction of Earth, the survivors escaped to Venus and settled in domed colony cities under the Venusian oceans. A minority of people, affected by radiation, become immortal, and eventually rule the cities. They can be killed but they have advantages: decades of added experience and knowledge and the ability to make long-range plans. They’re also cautious: the confined, unchanging environment of the cities is destroying humanity’s spirit but the Immortals are unwilling to gamble on the long, dangerous challenge of colonizing the hostile Venusian surface land.
Sam was born an immortal but his mother died giving birth to him. His bitter father had Sam brought up among the lower classes. Sam becomes a tough, dangerous criminal, then slowly gains ambition, leading to throwing his weight behind the land-colonization efforts. The Immortals don’t know what to make of him but hope they can either use him or destroy him. And why does it sometimes seem there’s a guiding hand manipulating everything? There’s a lot of interesting ideas in this novel, and Sam makes a memorable protagonist, a guy who’s doing a good job but lacks many of the ennobling qualities anti-heroes often have.
Fury cover uncredited, top cover by Eisner. All rights to images remain with current holders.
