The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

In his introduction to The Earth Dwellers, M. Maurois mentions a book which delighted and exasperated me when I read it: Jean Henri Fabre’s essays on the “social insects.”

“He described some extraordinary feats performed by insects, and kept on warning the reader: ‘Do not believe there is any intelligence in all that. It’s just instinct. Bees hare no patriotism with regard to the beehive nor ants toward the anthill.’ “ And in an epilogue, Jacques Choron adds a quotation from Bertrand Russell: “... animals behave in a manner showing the tightness of the views of the man who observes them.”

Which brings us back to the more advanced sport of watcher-watching. “The Nobel Prize Winners” is a long hard look at some engineers and scientists, by a scientist and engineer. W. J. J. Gordon, besides being the author of occasional brilliant farcical fiction in the Atlantic, Is a lecturer in the Engineering Department of Applied Physics at Harvard, and also President of Synectics, Inc., a “consulting firm concerned with augmenting the creative output of industrial research organizations.”