The Tech­nol­o­gists by Matthew Pearl is a fic­tional book about the early days of the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy (MIT). The story takes place in the years after the Amer­i­can Civil War dur­ing a very frag­ile time in our history.

A Civil War vet­eran & POW by the name of Mar­cus Mans­field is attend­ing the first class of the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy as a char­ity stu­dent. Even though he is not as rich as his coun­ter­parts, Mar­cus is smart and a sci­en­tist n heart and mind.

Mans­field and his col­leagues decide to inves­ti­gate recent strange occur­rences which hap­pened in the Boston Har­bor and the city itself. What’s at stake is the future of MIT as well as mod­ern sci­ence itself.

The Tech­nol­o­gists by Matthew Pearl is an enter­tain­ing read with won­der­ful his­tor­i­cal detail and a bunch of nerdi­ness thrown in for good mea­sure. While I wasn’t sucked into the book as much as I would have liked, I found the char­ac­ters cap­ti­vat­ing and the plot line interesting.

The author does a great job inter­weav­ing real­ity and fic­tion as well as the dia­log which was spo­ken in that time period. The harsh social norms of the time are pre­sented in the form of a lone MIT female stu­dent who is forced to study in isolation.

There were sev­eral intrigu­ing aspects of this book, it is writ­ten almost as a futur­is­tic novel, but of course with tech­nol­ogy most of us con­sider anti­quated. The ones I thought were the most inter­est­ing where the tech­no­log­i­cal aspect, Har­vard’s reli­gious aspects, and flash­backs of the pro­tag­o­nist to the Amer­i­can Civil War.

The over­reach­ing tech­nol­ogy which the MIT stu­dents dealt with, old in today’s stan­dards but pre­sented in the book as the lat­est inno­va­tions (rem­i­nis­cent of steam­punk) are explained in an inter­est­ing way. Tech­nol­ogy, then as is now, is some­times seen as an evil, espe­cially when it looks as if it might cost a whole class their liv­ing wage.

I have always held Har­vard as a for­ward think­ing uni­ver­sity. This novel, and a quick con­fir­ma­tion on Google, taught me that it wasn’t always so. From my pre­vi­ous read­ing on Amer­i­can his­tory it seemed to me that Har­vard has always strove to inno­vate, but it seems that around that time Har­vard upheld its reli­gious stan­dards higher than its sci­en­tific ones. The uni­ver­sity wouldn’t admit stu­dents who aren’t Chris­tians as well as oppose ideas which do not agree with the Chris­t­ian dogma based on noth­ing but the ridicu­lous idea that reli­gion shouldn’t be questioned.

A few of the chap­ters are told in flash­backs to the char­ac­ters’ Civil War expe­ri­ence and how that expe­ri­ence came to influ­ence them at the cur­rent time­line. Per­son­ally, I would have loved to read more about that era, chap­ters switch­ing between war expe­ri­ence and how they affect peace time expe­ri­ences. How the war tech­nol­ogy which was meant to destroy can also be used to rebuild.

Over­all, while not a page turner, I found The Tech­nol­o­gists to be a solid, above aver­age mys­tery, which holds itself together well, writ­ten by a gifted author.

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