This is the secondl book about Calhoun’s experiments that I have read in as many months, although Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery, which I read first, will be published later, and so will not be up as a review at the time of this posting.
To compare the books, Rat City is more a conventional popular non-fiction work on the study, whereas Mousery is more of a biography. Mousery has much more primary material from Calhoun. Rat City is the better book, but let me damn with faint praise there in the sense that it is better written, but that is about it. It does provide important historical context for Calhoun and more history in general, but I found it less informative and more opinionated. If you had to read only one, my instinct is to say Rat City, but look: if you are reading this, you are the sort of person who is going to enjoy the more detailed, sedate, and sourced Mousery.
Mousery makes Calhoun feel crazier, earlier. It does a better job at getting across his unhinged optimism and the pleasant strangeness of his motivation, which is the thing that sets Calhoun apart from his fellow travelers and humanity as a whole. Mousery is more journalistic, whereas Rat City is interested in rehabilitating Calhoun.
More specifically, Calhoun felt misunderstood with the directions of the popular views of his research, and died resentful over it. In the correcting of that, the temptation is to empathize the ways he was misunderstood and make him the ‘good guy’ in the narrative. But it is closer to the eccentric upset that you think it is the lizard people from space who control the world when it is the saurians from the hollow earth. It is still weird, and still bad, just not in the way that you thought it was.
The striking distinction to me in the two books was the treatment of overpopulation. Mousery is, I think, rightfully dismissive and gives the matter little serious consideration. There are two claims that really stuck in my mind in Rat City on the topic. First, that overpopulation became racist. As far as I know, it started racist, it just also had non-racist adherents. Second, that it became the focus of science fiction because the writers felt that it was a compelling way to make a dystopia. I read a collection of essays of science fiction writers from 1980 recently, and that seems not to be the case. It comes up repeatedly, in the context of how a contemporary science fiction writer might discuss climate change or AI risk. And it is relevant because we really ought not to minimize what was going on, if only because it speaks to Calhoun’s frame of mind.
Of course, I am not a historian, so I worry that my look at things has it wrong.
I am also not a biologist, which is why I try to keep my opinions on the research itself out of the reviews. As I wrote in the Mousery review, I want the book where the experiment is examined as an experiment, and I find odd the degree to which both books avoid examining the research. However, I do have many opinions.
At one point, someone does try Calhoun’s experiment. He gets none of Calhoun’s wild results (with mice as opposed to rats as a budgetary measure, but even Calhoun though this should not affect anything). The mice are overcrowded, but totally functional. Calhoun goes to look at it, and eventually determines what he thinks the problem is. The initial colony was too large.
With a large enough starting group, no mouse is able to create large territorial claims. The mice have to live together from the start, which causes them to have lower stress, and so not develop any of the vice-like pathological behavior. This creates an unnatural state of equality.
Looks At Camera
This extends to the designs of the experiments, that are designed to create inequality in their simpatico with human dwellings and different height buildings and different food access configurations. with the low rises and the high rises and different sorts of food access. I do not know whether to question the results there or where to square them against the alpha wolf, which gets treated as mostly a myth but seemingly less so in certain population situations, but the weirdly prescient imagining of what I am left to describe as the Sigma males who would save the day feels like he has some baggage.
For clarity, my opinion is not that Calhoun was interpreting the data incorrectly and that it actually proscribed fully automated gay communism. My opinion is that Calhoun got the answer without knowing the question. The results are proactive, but what is the experiment testing? This vagueness I think comes out of Calhoun’s own optimism: when he says universe, he means it. It gets filtered into pop sci in a manner that he was not comfortable with, but also did not want to disavow because it was popular.
CITATION HEEDED 