If you’re looking for a way to make the world a better place, and you’re a gifted inventor, I recommend inventing an empathy machine. Imagine if more people cared about other people, and also cared about animals and plants and whether they’re going to leave behind a habitable planet. It sounds pretty cool to me, but short of some device that forces one to feel empathy, such imaginings are clearly the stuff of speculative fiction.
Of course, there is always the original empathy machine: stories. These are incredibly effective at producing empathy and enlightenment, but their drawback is that one has to read them, and reading is something most people don’t do. So, to all the gifted inventors reading this, if you can’t quite crack the empathy machine, I recommend inventing a machine that forces people to read. (Just to be clear, dear inventors, so that my words don’t haunt me: the machine forces them to read in their leisure time: not while they’re operating machinery or performing a medical procedure or precariously balancing knickknacks on the lip of a frothing deep fryer, etc.)
Once you’ve perfected your make-people-read machine, if you’ve included a setting that chooses which books they read, make certain the works of Richard Powers are on the docket. His newest novel, “Bewilderment,” is about a father and son and the empathy machine that improves their lives. Theo and Robin are the father and son, Robin is neurodivergent, and they are both still grieving his mother. They agree to participate in an experiment that might soothe his mind. The experiment is effective, and Robin’s behavior and quality of life improve dramatically. Unfortunately, a terrifyingly recognizable American government wants to cut the program’s funding (and also hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, sickeningly and hilariously in order to prevent forest fires).
“Bewilderment” isn’t all “Flowers for Algernon” references and horrifying reminders of an ecosystem portended to die slowly and then all at once: there are also the imaginary trips the father and son take to distant planets to visit forms of life that sometimes might not even be recognizable as forms of life (unless you’re perceptive and patient). These tales are worth reading all on their own: they’re fun, interesting, and perhaps as comforting to the reader as they are to Robin, whose despair over dying animals and plants is assuaged when thinking about the vastness of existence and believing that life is out there even if we don’t care about it here.
If you can’t invent an empathy machine or a reading machine, I recommend constantly begging everyone you see to read “The Overstory,” a Powers masterpiece that will make you love all trees and some people. This sentence consists of hyperlinks of recommendations to read this novel. It’s one of my favorites. It’s also a long overdue attempt to repay the debt books owe trees. (Books are made out of processed trees.) While I can’t speak for trees (until the completion of a really impressive empathy machine anyway), I reckon if I were a tree and had no say as to whether I was violently sawed from my home, I’d take some solace if I were turned into a copy of “The Overstory.”
