1813 – review of Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin (Goodreads)

1703 – Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin (2020 book)

Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Black Hole Survival Guide – is probably top ten of Survival Guides in the Universe (even better than The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attack; Downtown LA). Can one pull trough the math behind the existence of black holes and still come out sane on the other side? Well, if math is not your strength but you’re still willing to grapple with inherent complexities in a readable form and enticing style, this is your entry. Even without the tongue-in-a-cheek survivalist or prepper add-on, it is still a remarkable book about the most extreme objects in the universe.

I truly appreciate an author taking time to take us along, to cognitively estrange us from everything we thought we knew about the tangible universe, and funnel us towards things that lie beyond any type of immediate perception or empirical experience. No wonder, since time itself begins to comport weirdly around them. Benjamin Bratton wrote in his intro to The Terraforming about the impact of the “The Black Hole”(of M87*) picture, and where this representation stands in a lineage of astronomic imaging. Blue Marble or Earthrise images are still images of the Earth, still operative, still clinging to the geocentric iconicity that props up “transitional humanisms” of an unfinished Copernican Turn. The Black Hole image is frightening because it resists mirroring back, and in a way this non-operative image makes our planet turn into a camera that is not looking “up” or “in” but “out”. The hyperdense void enclosed by the Event Horizon is frightening, and not just because it “uproots the human” as in Heidegger’s angsty 1966 interview in Der Spiegel. Once the certitude of extinction seeps in and uprootedness is taken as a given, there is room to move on. This “something” that is a crushing time-space nothingness- makes us care here on Earth for an impossibly remote invisible object (its light arriving from the Eocene to us) at odds with every other single phenomenon we encounter in our earthly life.

Black holes have become huge imaginary and cultural attractants in SF, movies, books, artwork, philosophy, etc At the same time, even when dealing with black holes – cosmic or bodily, I agree that we should beware of male authors or artists making claims about emptiness since as Audrey Wollen’s beloved meme keeps remind us that ‘Girls own the void’.
How is it that we start to care about something so remote from everything that we know or care about?! Janna Levin guides us patiently, step by step towards this all-engulfing event horizon & even towards what might lie beyond it. This travelogue puts any other travel (cheap flight or X spaceship included) to shame. It is a rendezvous with an astronomical feature that we never think as – tangible, as touchable, and that will always keep being doggedly theoretical. It was a theoretical object not so long ago. Janna Levin makes the impossible happen – an embodied experience of what it would be like to go down the drain of a black hole, in fact, several such black holes. Another important inescapable fact is that black holes have the same status as elementary particles, and this is definitely hard to grasp. No matter how big, they are all equal in a way that all atoms of the same kind are equal.

Yes, we think we know about trees falling in the pre-human forest without our minds realizing or sensing it, but what about a non-sensuous perception of objects whose ‘nothingness’ shapes the largest galactic structures, giving a twist to everything, even our spiral galactic core.

This delightful book makes Janna Levin stands tall on my list of fav STEM outreach examples. The book works for all age groups and even has some great illustrations to make her point. Exposing us to remote larger-than-life forces, she managed to pull me beyond a reality of terrestrial lockdown and uncertain futures. Scientists or authors with a background in life sciences writing sci-fi (i am thinking here of Peter Watts, Adrian Tschaikowsky, Chris Beckett or the great Joan SLONCZEWSKI!) have a special spot in my heart. I live for (and love) speculative fiction – yet I still recognize that without Kip Thorne’s contribution to Christopher Nolan’s filmic oeuvre the CGI-digitally designed black hole Accretion Disk in Interstellar might have felt quite anodyne, maybe less appetizing and less aesthetically entrancing and tangible.

So I think that black holes via Black Hole Survival Guide – will definitely become more accessible to non-specialists in a way that is not dumbing down nor patronizing, attractive in the most literal sense of the term. Ominous and good to speculate (get comfy?) with, the STEM scientist/physicist/astronomer by training makes a good friend to have along on a deep dark cosmic journey. I could not pinpoint what are the new “rules of the game” that Janna Levine brings or if there is any magic secret to this scientific imaginary (i want to believe that imagination pools and informs both rigorously scientific and non-scientific speculative endeavors). From that special skillset, if I can single out one- is the ability to sum up the current state of knowledge on a given topic. What are the implication of black holes, unthinkable (for us) implications((for now) not just on stars but carbon-based bodies and minds such as ours, seemingly prisoners of our isolated sensorium and our speck of the universe?

I appreciate her own subjective-objective intervention – the informed ability to lean on other available explanations, or limit or circumscribe explanations while reaching out for other theoretically sound possibilities.

This I find vital. There is of course and the silliness and the sound advice one gets (how to choose which black holes to fall into! answer: the larger the better) along the way. As remote as it sounds – you can play around in your head with monstrous black hole peculiarities that seem to multiply. As we get closer to these cosmic sublime objects we seem to get a taste of infinities. As we taste some of the limits of science when approaching or entering a black hole we look beyond. To be able to hold on to this you need to envision the precise moment when you start seeing the back of your head (truly) and Janna Levin brings us as close to that as currently possible.



View all my reviews