Are we all just followers?

kw: book reviews, science fiction, social trends

There are many kinds of ant, and certain caterpillars, that follow pheromone trails. They can be found going from place to place, marching in lines. If you divert one member of the group from the trail, and quickly erase some of the trail ahead, wiping with a wet finger for example, you can sometimes coax the new "leader" to follow a circular path until it, and the members following, are going in a closed loop. As they go 'round and 'round, the pheromone trail gets stronger, for each member adds a bit as it goes. It has been said that such a loop will follow itself until they starve, but this is unlikely. Nonetheless, they will circle about for quite a long time. This has been proposed as a model of society. All following, but effectively leaderless. Most "leaders" that do rise up are found to be following things like polls, and are thus part of the leaderless circle themselves.

Put this thought together with chaos theory and its "butterfly effect" and you have the background for Bellwether, by Connie Willis. I found it a real page-turner, as is usual for her work. The title comes from a large section of the book in which researchers who cannot obtain monkeys for their research, substitute sheep. A clerk who was raised on a sheep farm tells them how the sheep will follow one that is a little bit hungrier and more aggressive, but only a little bit, and that this one is the bellwether. Lead it and you lead the flock.

Embedded in this environment, we find a number (at least two) talented researchers living in a ghastly, novel-length Dilbert cartoon, with a clueless boss labeled Management, colleagues who are either too self absorbed to get any work done (but quick with the TLA's – that's Three Letter Acronyms) or too predatory to spend time doing anything other than writing grant applications or figuring out how to write them more effectively.

Layered on top of that we find a love story with an amusing triangle situation, or maybe it is a quadrangle… plus a perverse guardian angel/demon and a host of lesser demons. And the top layer? Science progresses in as random a fashion as natural selection does. A researcher who is trying to track social trends (the author's First Person) finds that they are often sourceless, as hard to ascertain as the identity of the bellwether in a flock. Her colleague O'Reilly, a chaos theorist, is trying to teach a new skill to a sheep, and see if the others will learn it. He gets exactly nowhere, as you'd expect of sheep. Though when the bellwether finds out how to unlock the paddock, a seeming new force of nature is unleashed in the corporate halls.

The author is well read, and the novel abounds with literary allusions and historical references. This is a good thing (It was one element that made the original Star Trek series so entertaining: Kirk and a few others had a good education that showed). The corollary of "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" is "those who learn from others' mistakes are free to make new and improved mistakes." But all science progresses from an encounter with the unexpected, the surprise that prompts a "Now where did that come from?"

I just have to tell this, for it is so in keeping with the way this long Dilbert cartoon unfolds. I once produced a piece of mapping software that was as close as you can get to the ideal oil exploration manager's dream: a green blob that begs, "Drill Here!" I got to demo it at several exploration offices, and in one place, a fellow began to label the green blogs, saying, "OK, this one is the X field and that one is Y…but what is that?" I replied, "I don't know, but it probably means money." Can you guess the result? My company sold their interest in "that" and the other oil company made a pile of money from it.