I respect Benjamin Labatut’s effort. A hard border between fiction and non-fiction is unhelpful. The recent surge in “auto-fiction”—which, in truth, has always been with us: people write about what they know—is dissolving the boundary a bit, but many creative paths are still unexplored, including that of conveying scientific truths with literary skill. Science, after all, is the story of nature; and the drama of nature, if we could just find a way to tell it, puts the greatest of human stories to shame. So I respect the effort…but When We Cease to Understand the World, like many an intrepid expedition, fails. Its science is flamboyant and imprecise, and the propriety of sensationally fictionalizing the lives of scientists—sex, drugs, insanity!—is questionable, to say the least. The wonder of the universe stands alone, far above the seven deadly sins and other varieties of human gossip. 4
Labatut, Benjamin. When We Cease to Understand the World. Anagrama, 2021. Reviewed July 21, 2024.