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Not all popular science books are created equally. The best of them are written by scientists describing the body of knowledge to which they themselves have contributed. Hawkins’s A Brief History of Time helped define the genre (though of course there were important antecedents); my favorite book from 2021, David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, is an example from the humanistic side of the social sciences.

Leidy Klotz’s Subtract (“the Untapped Science of Less”) begins by describing a fascinating series of psychology experiments that systematically tested a hypothesis that Klotz had articulated: people tend to solve problems by adding things (Lego bricks in the first experiment, but also other things, including ingredients in recipes and words in text) when subtracting things would work as well or better. Klotz argues that “subtraction neglect” is a form of cognitive bias that influences much of our thinking, to our detriment.

After describing this research, the book becomes less empirically grounded, but remains interesting. The book offers examples of designers who created striking works and activists who effected important change by employing subtraction. Naturally, the book eventually addresses climate change.

Here’s where things get interesting, and why I’m excited about this book. Without naming “degrowth”, or even directly invoking its key concepts (e.g., we must actively shrink the economy to bring greenhouse gasses down to a level that will allow the planet to sustain a human population close to the current one), Klotz asks the question: “can we stop climate change by subtracting instead of adding”? By the time the book reaches this point, I expect that most of the audience — presumably consisting primarily of educated liberal-but-not-leftists — will think so. This is terrific news, because as it happens, we must indeed actively shrink the economy to bring greenhouse gasses down to a level that will allow the planet to sustain a human population close to the current one.

Anyone who has tried using this messaging during a conversation with the average liberal knows that this it goes nowhere. But now? Well, we have a well-documented phenomenon — “subtraction neglect” — and a fascinating, easy to understand set of experiments that conclusively show that “people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations” even when subtractive transformations work better. If people can accept this, well, now we’ve established an excellent starting point to talk about what “shrinking the economy” could look like.

So I look forward to using this book to as a way to start talking about degrowth with people who might otherwise be skeptical of the concept. I invite you to do the same. If you don’t have time to read the book, check out the article Klotz published with his colleagues in Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y). But if you’re simply in the mood to read a popular science book, or give one as a gift, I can endorse Subtract.

This book was a potential book for the #SFFBookClub poll for a while, but I ended up reading anyway because it looked intriguing.

As a reader, it seems like a novella is a hard length to hit; it's hard to have the space for both pacing and sufficient worldbuilding, and it's also hard to have enough runway for the resolution to resonate and feel satisfying. The short of it is that I feel like this novella nailed it for me.

The worldbuilding here is brutal. The book kicks off with idyllic introduction of Raquel working for the Global Institute for the Scientific and Humanistic Study of Pocket Worlds. Pocket worlds are small offshoots of reality, much smaller than our own universe--maybe the size of a meadow or a room or a bag even--and they can run at different time rates to our own universe.

After the protagonist Raquel falls into a fast time pocket world and comes back forty years later (while only a few moments have passed relatively for herself), the world has changed for the worst. Her institute is no longer doing scientific studies, her daughter has died, and capitalism has moved in to colonize the new spaces of these pocket worlds. The implications for labor when corporations have access to nearly infinite time and space goes exactly where you think it might; people signing up for a decade of work to then come back before breakfast, extra dumping grounds for garbage, or even locking rioters into these worlds. These are just a couple examples, but woof this book captures the capitalist extraction of time and space from a new technology.

Raquel is an archeologist of pocket worlds, and believes the Quisqueyan Taino people might have escaped into a pocket world to avoid genocide and is looking for clues to their past. She is the descendant of the Taino but also of conquistadors, and in some ways is at the intersection of both. What really works for me in this book is how her personal history and struggle parallels the larger story about colonialism and capitalism--she has her own insatiable wants for knowledge and family, especially around grief about her archeological work and her lost daughter.