The Only Show in Town, by Michael Sims

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This month I have two books coming out-The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, which has just appeared, as you can tell from this blog page; and In the Womb: Animals, which National Geographic Books will publish later this month. The latter, my fourth book about nature, prompted a colleague, an editor, to email and ask me about my interest in science and technology. He phrased it that way: "science and technology," as if they were linked, like Laurel and Hardy or time and tide.

So I had to explain that although I often write about nature and the natural sciences I really have very little interest in or knowledge about technology. Not that I'm a Luddite; I'm writing this on a laptop from my deck and sending it via email where it will appear on the Web. I use digital cameras almost exclusively nowadays. Clearly I don't hide out in a cabin in the backwoods of Manitoba and commune with moose. But I can't stir up much interest in technology in itself. In fact, after years of interest in photography in the 1980s and 90s, I got bored with the paraphernalia until digital came along and its immediate gratification restored my waning interest in, to use the origin of the word photography, "drawing with light."

I respond to technology with a sort of primitive awe. It's like that joke that kids used to tell about the thermos bottle: "You put cold stuff into it and it stays cold. You put hot stuff into it and it stays hot. How does it know?" I'm the same way about most of the technology around me. A friend told me that she saw a documentary in which an Amish woman said of the microwave, "Surely cooking without fire is of the devil." Makes sense to me. Anything more complicated than, say, a stapler confuses me. Of course, there's plenty of technology I like. I'm very fond of the grapefruit knife. I like bicycles. You sit on them and you put your feet on the pedals and they turn the wheels and the gears all connect in a way that you can see and appreciate and admire for their clever intricacy. But electronics? My computer? My cell phone? The devil's own microwave? It's all just magic.

So I stick to writing about nature, because, for some reason, for some deep down reason that goes so far back in my life it seems primordial, I find in the natural world all the wonder and glamour and excitement and satisfaction and context and humor and tragedy and meaning I could ever yearn for in life. It's not that I find it all pretty or warm and fuzzy or comforting or perfect. Good God, no. I can't imagine anything less perfect. It's fierce and utterly unromantic and yet unstoppably creative. It makes things with the most offhand expertise you can imagine: blue whales, scarab beetles, chipmunks, birds of paradise.

The natural world is a crazy mess and I can see no sign of an intelligent or any other kind of designer. Why so much pain, all the millions of anonymous bloody battles to the death? I have no idea. Why does all the suffering seem irrelevant to nature's bottom line of making babies for a living? Beats me. Why the irresponsible creativity of it all? Dunno.

But I can't look away. Half awestruck and half horrified, I stare all day at it and try to explain what little I comprehend. To me, it's the big picture, the context, the stage for our comedy, the only show in town.

I thought of all these things while writing In the Womb: Animals. The book follows the prenatal development of various creatures, primarily a litter of golden retrievers, a bottlenose dolphin, and an Indian elephant, with wonderful side trips to peer at the similarities and differences demonstrated by a lemon shark, a red kangaroo, and an emperor penguin. I based a lot of it upon the research for two National Geographic Channel documentaries: In the Womb: Animals and In the Womb: Animals Extreme. (The latter will premier on the N G Channel on Mother's Day, which strikes me as apt and amusing.)

And every day while writing the book, as I sat down at my desk and worked on conveying as lucidly as possible the beautiful crazy processes of fertilization and growth and development in the womb - and as I looked at what each step of each process tells us about the species' past and the invidual's future - I was reminded all over again that, however much we know, we are only beginning to peer closely at how the cosmos works. Every new discovery reveals new mysteries. What a fun opportunity at this time in our evolution to have just enough brainpower, thanks to our long and winding simian ancestry, to be able to peer at the universe and try to figure it out: a little here, a little there, another puzzle piece, another example of the infinite crazy creativity that brought forth our own inexplicable existence.

Michael Sims, The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime, Penguin Classic, Penguin Books