TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter, by Neil deGrasse Tyson
I suspect that most readers will enjoy “Take Me to Your Leader,” the latest book from Neil deGrasse Tyson, to the exact extent that they’re amused by the author’s social media presence.
For well over a decade, our most famous astrophysicist has been entertaining — or annoying, depending on your perspective — a vast online audience with high-low insights like this: “If Bruce Banner retains his original mass when he expands to become the Hulk, then his body must become less dense. If so, then in his Hulked state, he’d have the density of a champagne cork.”
His new book is full of such tidbits, and I confess that one observation — based on an old Tweet — did make me laugh. “If the Disney queen Elsa from the Frozen film franchise has a human-sized head, then her brain is only 10 times the size of her eyeballs.”
Tyson is a busy guy, with a podcast and frequent public appearances competing with his day job as the director of the Hayden Planetarium. Perhaps it isn’t surprising, then, that “Take Me to Your Leader” is a slender trifle seemingly destined for the gift table at Paper Source.
The book, subtitled “Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter,” is supposedly inspired by his lifelong dream “to be abducted by aliens,” but it consists mostly of brief scientific nuggets paired with references to fictional extraterrestrials. As Tyson said in a recent interview, “I find when you present science in that mixture, people come back for more. Pop culture makes it relevant, the humor makes them smile, and the science enlightens them.”
In practice, this translates into an interminable catalog of dozens of titles, from “Arrival” to “Space Jam,” most of which receive only a bland line or two of description.
Tyson notes that movies and television shows tend to feature aliens with “a head, two eyes, a mouth, shoulders, two arms, two hands and 10 fingers,” presumably because of the physical limitations of “human actors paid to don alien costumes,” and he gently chides their creators for being insufficiently imaginative.
Oddly enough, however, he almost entirely ignores an art form that isn’t constrained by practical considerations — the dazzlingly inventive world of science fiction novels and short stories. While he mentions a handful of literary works — “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “The Andromeda Strain,” “Contact” — if Tyson really wanted to explore scientific ideas through depictions of aliens, why not devote a paragraph to, say, “Mission of Gravity,” Hal Clement’s 1953 novel set on a rapidly rotating planet populated by intelligent centipedes?
This lack of engagement is a giveaway. Tyson doesn’t seem all that interested in science fiction; it’s frankly unclear if he even likes it, or feels any need to approach it on its own terms. In his discussion of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” for instance, he notes that it doesn’t make sense for the aliens to broadcast the longitude and latitude of their landing site, which requires so much culturally specific knowledge that it would have been just as easy to use English: “Hey, we’re all coming to Devils Tower at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Be there.”
But then we wouldn’t get to see Bob Balaban’s unassuming interpreter announcing that he has solved the message; the U.F.O. investigators stealing a globe from a nearby office; or the close-ups of two fingers tracing the grid lines until they intersect. It isn’t about logic, but wonder — the stuff of everyday life suddenly transformed by the unknown.
At no point does Tyson’s scientific expertise deepen our appreciation of these works; instead, it flattens it. This might be excusable if the science weren’t so superficial, but Tyson skates quickly past the concepts that he introduces, as if reluctant to challenge the reader for even a second.
In talks and interviews, Tyson can be witty, impassioned and informative, but these qualities don’t come across here. He explains his title by suggesting that if an alien were just to say, “Take me to your leader,” we could skip the politicians and introduce our visitor to “people who have high scientific and technological expertise.” If that ever happens, Tyson wouldn’t be a bad choice. But you’d never know it from these pages.
Tyson is often compared to Carl Sagan, whose career was the best advertisement imaginable for how scientific training can enrich and intensify our interactions with the rest of the world. When Sagan talked about aliens — as when he supervised the selection of music, sounds and images for the Voyager Golden Record — it was largely to shed light on our own values.
At the moment, the sciences in this country are under unprecedented attack. Tyson, who clearly knows this, was under no obligation to deal with it here. But if Sagan were alive today, he never would have seen a book like this as a good use of his time — not in a billion years.
TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter | By Neil deGrasse Tyson | Simon Six | 230 pp. | $26
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