96. Bellwether

by Connie Willis (247 pgs)

Rating: 4

Sandy Foster is a statistical sociologist who studies the causes of fads. Bennett O'Reilly is a chaos theory scientist currently working with macaques. Both of them work in corporate hell. Together will they unravel one of the secrets of the universe or just fall in love?

While I was reading Bellwether I ran into a friend who had read this book in High School. His opinion of it was not very high. He said that it didn't strike him as true science fiction. The conversation then meandered off into a discussion of various authors who's books ended up being badly classified for one reason or another.

Whether this book is truly misclassified as science fiction or not is debatable. I think the problem is that there is an expectation that science fiction is going to be futuristic a la Heinlein and Asimov. Truly, I believe what qualifies a book as science fiction is an exploration of a scientific theory or possibility. I think the futuristic ideal is common side affect of this exploration but not a prerequisite of the genre. So in that sense, Bellwether is truly science fiction although not at all futuristic, it's actually set in the 1990's. To avoid misleading, however, Nacy Pearl's description of Willis's work as 'speculative fiction' may be more apt.

Bellwether starts out a little slow but it's well worth the effort and is an interesting well crafted read. I would recommend this particularly to people interested chaos theory or the infuriating persistence of fads.