"Pleasingly eccentric [and] impossibly wide-ranging . . . Racing from the Stone Age to the coming singularity, Dyson is in fine fettle . . . [A] lively, if deeply strange, narrative . . . A thoughtful—and most thought-provoking—exploration of where our inventions have taken and will take us.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
"This is the most delightfully peculiar book I've ever read. It's grand and intimate, personal and cosmic, and about digital computing and archaic hunter gatherers. Every paragraph is a surprise."
—Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired
"An Odyssey of discovery...part autobiography, part science manual, part history book."
—Izabella Kaminska, The Financial Times
"George Dyson's Analogia is a wonderful combination of the universal and the intimate, the timeless and the immediate, the scientific and the humane. A wise and open-minded writer sheds new light on our world."
—James Fallows, author of National Defense and Our Towns
"Analogia is a work of originality and ambition unlike any you've encountered. George Dyson transmutes memoir, history, and forecast into a page-turning tale in which Geronimo, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Catherine the Great, Kurt Gödel, and Steller's sea cow play roles. It's no less the story of the magnificent Dysons, a larger-than-life family spanning physicist Freeman, mathematician Verena, tech influencer Esther, and the author himself, an off-the-grid public intellectual. Analogia offers more serious fun than a dozen of the usual bestsellers."
—William Poundstone, author of The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
"This strange, beautiful, haunting work is like a kaleidoscope of stories, its pattern locking into place at the end. Mixing the rise of computation, the brutal wars on the Apache, the construction of ancient kayaks, and a host of other matters with the author's own remarkable story, George Dyson's book will stick in readers' minds long after they close its covers. Analogia belongs on the shelf that holds Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival and Sebald's Rings of Saturn. And it can stand proudly in their exalted company."
—Charles Mann, author of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
"This book pierces through the fog of everyday life. Read and you will become aware of history you need to know, and of how the last few centuries of the human story sit within a much larger, epochal frame. An extra treat is insight into the remarkable Dyson family."
—Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
“A thought-provoking deep dive into the ideas and stories behind some of the biggest issues of our time. One of Dyson’s best.”
—Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio
"Only George Dyson could have written this book. Equal parts scholar, natural scientist, and adventurer, Dyson seamlessly blends science, history, philosophy, engineering, cultural commentary and memoir to give us a meditation on time and the relationship between mind and matter; people and machines; and what it all means for the future of humankind and the earth."
—Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You Just Don't Understand, You're Wearing THAT? and Finding My Father
"George Dyson, over the distance of a mere 250 pages, ties together the fine strands of time, space, science, and self, in a gossamer web as beautiful and strong as a spider’s. A wondrous and stellar work.”
—Andrei Codrescu, author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess
★ 2020-04-21
A pleasingly eccentric, impossibly wide-ranging tech treatise/memoir.
Dyson, an independent historian of technology and son of noted physicist Freeman and brother of tech maven Esther, opens his account of the arc of technology with Gottfried Leibniz, who, after vying with Isaac Newton to invent calculus, took a commission from Peter the Great of Russia that had several elements: one, to mount an expedition to Siberia, find out if and where Asia meets North America, and claim some land; two, to found a Russian academy of sciences to jump-start scholarship there; and three, to use computers to build “a rational society based on science, logic, and machine intelligence.” Thus the opening of one of the four ages, by Dyson’s count, of technology, another of which we’re just entering, one inaugurated when “machines began taking the side of nature, and nature began taking the side of the machines.” Racing from the Stone Age to the coming singularity, Dyson is in fine fettle. Leibniz figures, but so does the author’s beloved kayak-building hobby. So, too, does the Apache warrior Geronimo, who occasioned the development of a technology that prefigures the modern age of communicating devices—from heliograph to iPhone, that is, and in mighty leaps of prose (but never logic). “Nothing is to be gained by resisting the advance of the discrete-state machines,” Dyson memorably writes, “for the ghosts of the continuum will soon return, when the grass is eight inches high in the spring.” With luck, the machines will tolerate us, for the culminating point in Dyson’s lively, if deeply strange, narrative is that the intelligence of tomorrow will not be human alone but will be shared with machines and nature (plants and animals and microbes and such) in time to come, fulfilling Leibniz’s dream.
A thoughtful—and most thought-provoking—exploration of where our inventions have taken and will take us. (32 pages of b/w illustrations; 15 b/w chapter-opening illustrations)
