Abstract
STS scholars frequently entreat their colleagues to take the material world seriously in social analysis by critically considering the roles objects play in shaping social experience. In Our Own Devices, Messier, an aerospace engineer by training, imports this perspective to fiction. Messier’s style, which he terms “literary materialism,” aims to tell human stories through close examination of the stuff humans create. The book is a collection of nine short stories revolving around three of the most significant periods of technological development of the 20th century: the Second World War, the advent of nuclear power, and the exploration of space. Objects take center stage in the stories—a jar of radium, a lunar landing craft, a Geiger counter—as Messier examines the roles they play in interpersonal and international dramas.
The stories are, to varying degrees, based in fact, and Messier helpfully supplements them with a section of historical and technical notes, as well as abundant illustrations. Messier’s breadth of knowledge about technological history is the book’s primary strength, and his attention to scientific detail lends credibility to the stories. “The Fisherman and the Genie” tells the tale of a young aspiring chemist secretly extracting radium in his backyard shed. In “The Sky Is Calling,” a team of engineering students set off bottle rockets following an unsuccessful moon-buggy competition. Messier has a generally romantic view of technology; in the section on space exploration, in particular, he displays a dreamy admiration for devices that extend human capability beyond imagination, and the book is most successful in its depictions of the scientist at the verge of discovery.
Messier enters into more fraught territory when he approaches the political dynamics surrounding new technologies. The book is less successful here; too often it simplifies the subtleties of technopolitics, opting instead for more heavy-handed moral indictments. One overarching theme is that technology facilitates a separation of the self, enabling people to do things they otherwise would not because their actions are mediated by machines. This is, in a sense, the sociotechnical equivalent of “just following orders,” so it is unsurprising that the theme emerges most clearly in the war stories. In “The Girl at Panel 857,” a woman who ran an arcane control panel during World War II learns several decades later that she was helping to produce the uranium used in Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. “Hypothermia” juxtaposes the story of an aide’s role in concentration camp freezing experiments with his later attempt to rescue a dying boy from frigid waters. “A Is for Atom” is perhaps the oddest of the collection; in it, a radiology technician faces off with an antinuclear activist over the ethics of nuclear power while preparing to give her radiation therapy for cancer. Messier notes that the story is based on his own exchange with “a former friend” (p. 199); he makes no secret of his own pro-nuclear views, and the story comes off as more of a screed than an even-minded consideration.
The author’s politics are revealed even more directly in the foreword to his section on the glories of space flight, in which he opines that
[a]s the horrors of communism have made all too clear, redistributing wealth for the benefit of all only leads to further decay and misery. It holds the best and brightest—and humanity as a whole—back. . . . Our salvation lies in the stars, not the aid camp. (p. 145)
The author is clearly entitled to his point of view regarding the relative benefits of funding space exploration versus public aid, but his rather flippant dismissal of the alternative view seems unnecessary and oddly placed.
Our Own Devices reads less as a series of discrete stories and more as a sequence of Twilight-Zone-esque vignettes, in which the technology sometimes seems to serve as no more than a punchline. The book would be more successful if Messier’s treatment of the complexities of technopolitics matched his command of technical and historical facts. Counterintuitively, such an approach would require a more nuanced treatment of the human actors in his stories; human relationships with technologies are more complicated than the book lets on.
Literary treatments of technological histories can be evocative teaching tools. Some of Messier’s stories may be useful for this purpose, particularly for students new to STS as a discipline. His plea to take technology seriously as a means for comprehending the human condition is a welcome one.