Where will our inventions lead?

When reviewers say that some new book reminds them of some famous old book, it often ends up as a blurb on the paperback edition, so I want to be clear: when I say that George Dyson’s Analogia reminds me of Robert Pirsig’s New Age classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I do not mean it exactly as a compliment.

I don’t mean it as a dig, either. I just mean it has the same sense of dreamy, ambitious oddness, of trying to piece together some grand theory from disparate parts, from practical techne as much as academic logos.

Pirsig’s book was a theory of philosophy dressed up as a memoir of a motorcycle trip; Dyson’s is a memoir of a strange childhood and youth, dressed up as a theory of —what? Intelligence? Humanity’s technological future? Something. It’s hard to classify. It is a compelling and oddly beautiful book, but never quite achieves what it sets out to achieve.

It veers, as Pirsig’s did, from detailed accounts of working with one’s hands (on kayaks, rather than motorcycles) to equally detailed discussion of serious research (scientific, rather than Greek and eastern philosophy). And it wants to use them both to point to some deep truth beneath the surface.

There is a fine line to walk with a work like this between great profundity and a sort of wild-eyed red-string-on-a-noticeboard conspiracy theorising: ‘Look! Can’t you see? It all connects! All of it!’ Pirsig walked that line confidently. Dyson stumbles around rather more.

Analogia reads rather like a series of introductions to some great work that never arrives. It begins with a tale about Leibniz, at the court of Peter the Great, coming up with the idea of a digital computer; then it’s about the Bering expedition, sent by Peter to find whether western America and eastern Russia connect; then it’s about the nascent US Army using heliograph technology to signal to each other across the Arizona desert as they tried to catch Geronimo and his fugitive American Indians.