Book Review: Your Utopia

 By Bora Chung

• Translated by: Anton Hur

• Pub Date: 2024

• Genre: Short Stories

• Where I bought this book: Barnes & Noble, Florence, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: I thoroughly enjoyed Cursed Bunny, Chung's first collection of stories 

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   Normally, when reviewing a book, I focus on the author's writing, the quality and imagination of the story, and the telling moments that give the book its star rating. A good story, well told, is what I'm looking for.

    But here, I'm just going to let the author's descriptive writing and fierce imagination speak for itself. The following is a snippet from the tale Maria, Gratia Plena, ostensibly about the investigation of a women thought to be a drug dealer. This part is about a dream the investigator has after looking into the woman's thoughts and memories, which included details about the Cassini mission.

         In my dream, I am a planet. A small, unmanned spacecraft comes up to me, circling me. Whenever it moves, its tiny bright lights sparkle. In that vast bleakness that is the black of space, the spacecraft twinkles its little lights and stays by my side. I am a happy planet.

           But a few days after our first encounter, the spacecraft begins to move away. I shout after it.

           "But why?" 

           The spacecraft does not reply. Blinking its tiny little lights that I love so much, it goes farther and farther away.

           "But why? But why?" 

        It pays my pathetic cries no mind as it continues to go farther toward destruction. When it starts to fall into the fires of the sun, I am woken from my sleep.

           My phone is ringing.

    This collection is mostly about life sometime in the future, when intelligent machines dominate our lives. They have emotions, thoughts, and memories. These are their stories.

    It's a strange future, which gives voice to some of our greatest fears about technology, but like Pandora's Jar, it remains oddly full of hope.

Book Review: Bitch

 By Lucy Cooke

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Left Bank Books, Saint Louis. 

• Why I bought this book: I heard a Science Friday interview with the author, and I was fascinated

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     Lucy Cooke takes on a lot in this wide ranging study, from Charles Darwin himself, to the male scientists who ignored female ingenuity over the years, to the female scientists who are seeking to right those wrongs, to Disney's ignorant portrayal of the natural world. She does so with a sharp eye, a sharper wit, and mountains of research and interviews to back her up.

    I'm not sure what is more impressive about her work -- her thesis that the females of the species have been wrongly portrayed over the past two centuries, or the staggering amount of research, field trips, and people she has interviewed while working on this book.

    It results in wide ranging factual discussions about animals from the tiny spiders who engage in all kinds of kinky sex -- including oral sex, cannibalistic sex, bisexuality, and bondage -- to the great orca whale, one of five species on earth -- including humans and three other toothed whales -- who undergo menopause.

    She starts by blaming Darwin as a man of his Victorian times, the founder of evolutionary science, who believed it dictated the activities of the two sexes. Males take advantage of the abundance of sperm and mimic it by being active, aggressive, and promiscuous in their sex lives. Females, who have to protect their limited supply of eggs, became coy, passive, and selective. These traits were projected onto humans. So it was, and so it ever shall be.

    Bollocks, says the Oxford educated Cooke.

    As just one example of misguided illusions she cites: In the animated movie Finding Nemo, the anemone mother, Coral, dies while laying her eggs during a barracuda attack, leaving just one hatched egg to survive. Years go by, and we are shown how the overprotective father, Marlin, goes to search for his missing son, Nemo. But clownfish such as Marlin and Nemo are female-dominant species. Should the mother die, the male father would switch to female. The son would quickly mature and mate with her, producing more young.

    I'm guessing Disney did not find evolution particularly family friendly in that case.

    (Also, penguins do not exist in Madagascar, and ring-tailed lemurs have a queen, not a king, because they are a female dominant species.)

    But Cooke takes down more than pop culture's assumptions. She offers, sometimes gleefully, the many female-dominant species that are promiscuous and cunning in their sex lives. Take the female songbirds, long thought to be monogamous for life, who often slip away for a little extra sexual relations on the side before returning to the nest. They may be socially monogamous, but they seek out and enjoy the extra male attention.

    Why all this happens is still being debated, investigated and researched. It's a lot of work, and example of contradiction abound. For instance, chimps and bonobos, our closest primate evolutionary mates, are total opposites.

From the book: An image
of a female bonobo
in the throes of passion

    Chimps are male dominated, aggressive, and violent. Bonobos are female-led, aggressive only in sharing sexual activities -- they enjoy frottage as foreplay, for helping them reach decisions for the group, and as a social diversion -- and peaceful. (And yes, bonobos are believed to be one of several species in which females enjoy orgasms.)

    A few quibbles here: Cooke tends to repeat herself over the chapters. And sometimes, she provides too much information, such as telling us how she interviewed a scientist over Zoom or Skype, which honestly felt irrelevant. 

    But her research is impressive. After a book of 288 pages of heavy if enjoyable reading, she has 90 pages of acknowledgements, notes, and an index. There are also numerous footnotes in the text, and you should read them. How else would you learn that a 16th Century Catholic priest with the unlikely name of Gabriele Falloppio was the first to identify and describe the clitoris -- and invent the first prophylactic sheath to shield against syphilis?

    Cooke hopes her book's reception will lead to more research, more equality between the sexes in human culture, and a greater acceptance of gender fluidity, which is rampant in the natural world. The transitional anemonefish "rocked my world," she said in closing.

    Discovering that biological sex is, in truth, a spectrum and that all sexes are basically the products of the same genes, the same hormones, and the same brains, has been the greatest revelation of all. It's forced a shift in my perspective o recognize my own cultural biases and try to banish any lingering heteronormative assumptions about the relationship between sex, sexual identity, sexed behaviour and sexuality.

    All I can add is, #MeToo. 

Book Review: The Cat's Meow

 By Jonathan B. Losos

• Pub Date: 2023 

• Where I bought this book: Left Bank Books, Saint Louis, Mo. 

• Why I bought this book: The cover has a cat

*****

Asked to help me review this book, Callisto had but one word

    Cats are pretty much unchanged in the 20 million some years they've lived on earth.

    Plop an African wildcat down in your backyard, and you'd take her for your neighbor's cat or one of the community cats out for a stroll. The wildcat  -- from which  domestic cats evolved -- may be a bit bigger, with longer legs, and perhaps a bit more leery if you reached out to pet it. But that's it.

    Even through their 3,000 years hanging out with humans, cats have stayed the same. Perhaps they are a little friendlier, with humans and with each other. Other than that though, you'd have a hard time distinguishing them from their ancestors.

    They will easily revert to their feral ways if left alone -- and many modern cats are unhoused and wild, and scavenge our towns and cities for their food and reproductive needs. And cats are both fertile and promiscuous -- when a female is in heat, she will have a string of males lined up waiting for their turns. It's one of the few times male cats hang around with each other, and the females will take on all comers. It's not unusual for a litter of cats to have kittens with different fathers.

    So cats know how to reproduce, and this book explains it, sometimes to a fault. That's because the author is a evolutionary biologist (who normally studies lizards) and took up this study as a labor of love.

    But ...  

    Sometime he goes a bit overboard on the evolutionary science. And when he gets into the breeding section, it all starts to get a bit creepy. Humans have changed small, "domestic" cats more in the past 70 years than natural selection did in hundreds of thousands. And many of those changes seem to be for the vanity and whims of humans, and do more harm to the animals for the sake of a cuter cat.

    Take, for instance, the Persian or Siamese breeds, which no longer are recognizable.

... thanks to selective breeding, modern Siamese and Persian cats are unlike any feline species that have ever existed, either today or in the past. They are more different from each other than a lion is from a cheetah or a domestic cat.

    Indeed. Today, the vain include people who want to make a cat into a smaller version of the tiger. Getting the stripe pattern down is difficult, but they cross-breed various cats to get the look they want. They are not there yet, but they are trying. And Losos writes about them with scholarly disinterest.

   The failures are handled -- for instance, for the breed to be called the "toyger" -- rather obliquely, in a footnote at the bottom of page 222, quoting Darwin quoting Lord Rivers, who bred greyhounds back in the 18th Century: "I breed many, and hang many." That may not be happening, but let's not kid ourselves.

    Breeding cats for our pleasure is certainly not in the cats' best interests.