From: lazlo polykoff
Category: Amis
Date: 7/8/99
Time: 8:38:12 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
[Poster's note: The following newspaper extract is from *The Independent* of London. From June 22, 1999. It's from a piece where Terence Blacker vented his paranoia about genetically modified crops. You'll notice that I included A.S. Byatt's comment. I included it because Ms. Byatt's fatuous smugness is so incredibly obnoxious. A.S. Byatt is the same dingledorf who threw a feces-fit over Amis's Big Money.]
FROM *I'D RATHER TRUST A POET THAN A SCIENTIST* / BY TERENCE BLACKER
It is a fair assumption that, when a number of high-profile novelists trill in unison about a new enthusiasm, the rest of us should be on our guard. Yet, not so long ago, literary interest in science had seemed so well-meaning and innocent. Who could forget the moment when, in the late 1980s, Martin Amis discovered astrophysics---the casual references to protons and Grand Unified theory, the equations dropped like tintacks into the busy carpet of his prose? In *London Fields*, the connection between black holes and his famous murderee Nicola Six was bewildering until, with one sentence---'Caught in the imploding geometry, the man and his rocket enter the black hole.'---all became clear. Phew, after all that, it was only sex. What a relief.
Then the others joined in. Jeanette Winterson, William Boyd, Ian McEwan, A S Byatt, even, briefly and disastrously, John Updike. Perhaps, we thought, the problem was with fiction: the novel had lost confidence in itself and was seeking a bit of authority from the lab. Yet the ardour of these writers seemed quite genuine. 'I get very excited about the nature of proteins---science is the most beautiful thing', Byatt announced a few months ago. 'Revelations about the real world are mind-blowing...I substitute science for religion.'