Francis Spufford

August 1974. Compared to the Cortinas and Maxis in the carpark, the prototype Concorde taxiing onto the runway at RAF Fairford looked astonishingly modern: but then, it always would. For the next quarter of a century, it would always be an object that stood out from its context, stylistically disconnected from the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at...

In November 1944 a group of men met in a London pub. In this fifth year of the war, the capital was dingy, dog-eared, clapped-out, frankly grimy. Though Britain had not shaken off its usual inefficiencies at mass production, it had converted its economy to the needs of the war more completely than any other combatant nation. For five years there had been no new prams, trams, lawnmowers,...

This book is presented as a pessimist’s primer, full of circumstantial evidence for the vanity of human wishes. It offers a portfolio of sharp blows to the back of the head, as good intentions boomerang. Dieting makes you fatter. Green washing-powder only replaces the algal blooms in the Adriatic Sea with mats of floating slime. But Edward Tenner’s book is dedicated, half-successfully, to subtler propositions about the contrariness of stuff. His argument, you could say, turns on the implicit difference between Sod’s Law (everything goes wrong) and Murphy’s Law (if something can go wrong, it will). While the first is vacuous – or a matter of the psychology which ensures we remember the times things go wrong and forget the times they don’t – the second is an engineer’s motto about the scope we allow to disaster. After a record-breaking run on a rocket sled at Edwards Air Force Base in the Forties, Captain Edward Murphy Jr discovered that all the recording instruments had been mounted backwards. The axiom he put in joke form had less to do with the human error involved than with the way the mechanical system had tolerated the error. The design of the gauges permitted them to be fitted wrong; the complexity of the system prevented the mistake from becoming apparent until results failed to appear. Why Things Bite Back, likewise, directs its attention towards the behaviour of systems, and our relationship with the particularly susceptible kind described as ‘tightly-coupled’, where the components act jostlingly on each other. It is about managing the unmanageable; it seeks intelligent responses to a world of malfunctioning cash dispensers.’

Seventeenth-century books of Arctic travels contained occasional reports of a kingdom in the far north of the Americas called Estoty: just out of reach over the icy horizon with its wealth, its monarch, its city of copper-roofed houses. Eventually the chimera-collecting eye of Vladimir Nabokov fell on Estoty. The horribly spry cast of Ada live in a Russo-American arcadia of the same name – a suitable metamorphosis of one kind of impossibility into another, perhaps. But the invention of Estoty also testifies to an aspect of European disappointment with the New World.