IN AN EPISODE of our podcast “The Intelligence” recorded at the end of 2023, some of our journalists talked about books of the past that are strikingly relevant to the present. The themes that inspired our choices include artificial intelligence, climate change, war and threats to democracy. The prescient books include a science-fiction novel, works by William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill and John McPhee and a history of the Yom Kippur war of 1973. On the podcast listeners offered their own suggestions. One proposed “Player Piano”, Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, published in 1952, which imagines a world in which machines do almost every job. Another suggested “It Can’t Happen Here” from 1935, by Sinclair Lewis, about a populist who becomes president of the United States and overthrows democracy. Here are five books, all published more than a decade ago, that offer portents and lessons.
Queen of Angels. By Greg Bear. Open Road Media; 384 pages; $21.99 and £19.95 (Chosen by Oliver Morton, Senior editor, Essays, Briefings and Technology Quarterlies)
The ubiquitous discussions of AI’s future that rumbled through 2023 owed much to science fiction, the genre that has done so much to inspire the technology’s development. Many works deal with AIs becoming conscious. “2001: A Space Odyssey” by Arthur C. Clarke (better known as a film directed by Stanley Kubrick), provides a searing account of a rogue AI. But the novel that resonated most with last year’s talk of generative AI was “Queen of Angels”, by Greg Bear, published in 1990.
Its story of AIs coming to consciousness in 2048—one on a spacecraft visiting Alpha Centauri, one on Earth—provides a counterpoint to a set of narratives dealing with the aftermath of a brutal murder. In a world where people use nanotechnology to remake themselves both mentally and physically, the book’s human characters face terror, punishment and annihilation. But the bleakness is not total; the machines’ new self-awareness sees something essentially hopeful in humanity, contaminated as it may be with the germs of fear and guilt.
“Queen of Angels” is an ambitious book—“Heart of Darkness” by way of (nanotech scientist) Eric Drexler—and probably not an easy read for those not already versed in sci-fi. But the way the novel, its characters and its author, who died in 2022, “stand awkward between the earthloving beast and the cool hot electronic angel” should live long in the reader’s imagination.
The Control of Nature. By John McPhee. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 288 pages; $17 (Chosen by Charlotte Howard, Executive editor and New York bureau chief)
To change the course of nature is not to bring it under one’s command. The first endeavour, and the inclination to mistake it for the other, is the subject of “The Control of Nature”, published in 1989. John McPhee explores man’s attempt to tame his environment, be it by guiding the Mississippi river, cooling lava or resisting the slide of a mountain’s surface. In each instance humans bring their tools to bear—their ingenuity, their cash, their structures of cement and steel—and their hubris.
Mr McPhee’s style is reason enough to read him. He is a vivid portraitist of both humans and natural phenomena: a river moves “like a pianist playing with one hand—frequently and radically changing course”. But it is this book’s subject which makes it worth reading now. Man-made emissions are transforming nature on a planetary scale. Humans must now contemplate ever more elaborate measures to deal with the consequences, from walls to stave off rising seas to stratospheric dust that reflects the sun’s rays. On a planet changing faster than ever, humans stand alone among species in their attempts to bend nature to their will, and in the delusion that they can.
The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter That Transformed the Middle East. By Abraham Rabinovich. Knopf Doubleday; 656 pages; $22.50 and £18.99 (Chosen by Shashank Joshi, Defence editor)
In the past year two wars have dominated our writing about defence: one in Ukraine and the other in Gaza. Both echo the Yom Kippur war of 1973. The best account of the conflict, published in 2005, is by Abraham Rabinovich, who covered the fighting for the Jerusalem Post. Then, as now, Israel’s spies and generals missed or ignored signs of impending war, only to be shocked by a lightning Arab assault on their borders. In both cases, Israel not only misread its enemies’ intentions but also underestimated their capacity to wage a sophisticated war—a reminder that cultural prejudices lead to bad intelligence. The war also teaches lessons about how to conduct operations on the battlefield. The devastating impact of Egypt’s Soviet anti-tank missiles led many strategists to conclude initially that the tank was dead, a claim repeated widely after Ukraine’s destruction of Russian tanks. In fact, both wars have underscored the importance of combined-arms tactics, in which infantry, armour and artillery work together. American generals studied closely the lessons from Yom Kippur as they rebuilt their broken post-Vietnam army. Today’s generals would do well to emulate them.
The Gathering Storm. By Winston Churchill. HarperCollins; 752 pages; $25. W&N; £30 (Chosen by Alexandra Suich Bass, Culture editor)
Winston Churchill is best known as Britain’s leader during the second world war, but he was also a painter and a prolific writer. “The Gathering Storm”, published in 1948, is the first volume of “The Second World War”, his brilliantly written history, which was among the works for which he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1953. Churchill probes the origins of the war; his main argument is that the Allies’ appeasement of Germany, which had lost the first world war, set the scene for another conflict. “The crimes of the vanquished find their background and their explanation, though not of course, their pardon, in the follies of the victors,” he writes. Churchill wrote “The Gathering Storm” with the intellectual flair of a gifted historian and the emotion of a participant. It is rich with contemporary resonances. As in the 1930s, today democratic nations are debating how to stand up to authoritarian governments, including those of Russia and China. Rarely do histories win so many accolades, though Churchill was not wholly pleased when he was awarded the Nobel. “I remember vividly his early and touching joy, which turned to indifference when he learned it was for literature and not for peace,” recalled Anthony Montague Brown, Churchill’s private secretary.
Othello. By William Shakespeare. Simon & Schuster; 416 pages; $9.99 and £3.99 (Chosen by Brooke Unger, Senior digital editor)
William Shakespeare’s tragedy, first performed in 1604, is a tale of jealousy, evil and self-deception. Although its title character, Othello, is a general in service to the Venetian state, its central concerns are more personal than political. Yet a reader or watcher of “Othello” who is also paying attention to the political drama that is playing out in America may be tempted to understand it allegorically. On this reading Othello, the black (or “Moorish”) soldier who defends Cyprus against the Ottomans, is America itself. Desdemona, his blameless wife, is democracy. And Iago, who persuades Othello that Desdemona is unfaithful, is Donald Trump. The play ends with Othello smothering his wife to death and, full of remorse when he recognises his mistake, killing himself. It could thus be interpreted as a warning to America not to destroy democracy by heeding Mr Trump’s lies. Readers may object that Iago, one of literature’s great personifications of evil, does not much resemble Mr Trump. For one thing, he’s better with words. “I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear,” he says of his scheme to trick Othello into thinking Desdemona has betrayed him. Mr Trump would neither coin such a metaphor nor express so explicitly to himself what he’s really up to. Nor would he confess, “Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so, for my peculiar end…I am not what I am.” The self-interestedness is Trumpian, the expression of it, and the self-awareness, are not. Martial and naive, Othello has characteristics that one might attribute to America. Unlike Othello, America knows the nature of its nemesis. It does not have Othello’s excuse for succumbing to the pestilence.
The themes of war, climate change, AI and democracy fill The Economist’s pages and platforms every day. The World Ahead does not aspire to peer decades or centuries into the future, but it does seek to forecast events in the coming year. In 2021 we wrote about a century-old dystopian satire about AI in which the word “robot” first appeared. We have reviewed a compilation of pieces by Mr McPhee. This leader mentions the influence of the Yom Kippur war on thinking about the use of tanks. A Christmas special describes Churchill’s escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Africa and what the story reveals about imperialism. In 2015 1843 magazine looked back at the best portrayals on stage of Iago. ■
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