Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Gail Godwin's 10th novel, Evensong (Ballantine; 405 pages; $25), is set in the very near future indeed, specifically the waning weeks of 1999. Millennial fever has reached even the idyllic and remote Smoky Mountain town of High Balsam, N.C. (winter pop. 1,000), where Margaret Bonner, 33, serves as rector of All Saints Episcopal Church. "Winter in the Great Smokies would shortly be upon us," Margaret says at the outset of her tale, "the winter that would see us into the next century and the new millennium. Other things were on their way to us as well, things...
...this were not a Gail Godwin novel, the reader's answer might be a rapid affirmative. For Margaret does display some narrative traits that seem to demand an ironic double take. She has the habit, for example, of quoting everyone else's fulsome praise of her: "Oh, Margaret, what a great, great story... You say such wise things, Margaret...You're an extraordinary young woman, Margaret." Isn't Margaret a wee bit full of herself? And what to make of this rector's loving inventories of the riches of her church, "the Elsa Van Wyck Memorial Ciborium with...
...dispute their claims. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State College, he and a graduate student named Clifford Bell began building a device that would allow them to solve large linear algebraic equations. Their machine, later called ABC (for Atanasoff Berry Computer), incorporated a number of novel features, including the separation of data processing from memory, and relied on binary numbers instead of ENIAC's clumsier decimal arithmetic. But Atanasoff was called away in 1942 to work for the Navy. Iowa State never filed for patents, and ABC was left abandoned in a storeroom...
...invent the computer? Novel as it may have been, ABC could not be reprogrammed, did not handle large numbers well and never became fully operational. By contrast, the reprogrammable ENIAC did initial calculations for the H-bomb, kept flashing away for nearly a decade and led to a host of more sophisticated successors. Take your pick...
Environmentalist Peter Matthiessen's latest novel, Bone by Bone, is due out in April