Dr No by Percival Everett – A Book About Nothing
Dr No is a 2022 novel by Percival Everett. It’s about a maths professor Wala Kitu who studies nothing, as in the concept of nothing. A super villain in the James Bond manner tries to recruit Wala to help in a scheme to break into Fort Knox and steal the stock of nothing which he believes is kept there. The plan is then to use this nothing as a weapon, negating whatever a super villain wants to negate.
When a book considers an unfamiliar topic, I sometimes do a bit of background research before starting a review. I didn’t know much about nothing, but was vaguely aware that people are studying the subject at MIT. So I tried to do an internet search on that, which turned out to be a bit tricky. A Google search for ‘Are scientists at MIT studying nothing?’ resulted in one of those AI summaries which announced indignantly: ‘No, scientists at MIT are not studying nothing, they are studying a whole range…’ with subjects listed. Next I tried: ‘Are scientists at MIT studying the concept of nothing?’ A mollified AI then did a U-turn, telling me about the MIT scientist Daniel Harlow and his studies of profound absence. So, no people are MIT are not studying nothing, and yes they are.
All I can say is that nothing, which might seem to be the simplest of things, as in the absence of any complications whatsoever, turns out to be very complicated. It all started with Otto von Guericke who in 1654 invented a pump that could suck the air out of a hollow copper sphere. In a demonstration of the power of nothing he had two teams of horses trying and failing to pull apart two halves of his copper sphere containing a vacuum. Since then researchers have defined other types of ever more rarified nothing. I won’t go into details. Suffice to say, a subject that seemed simple is really not.
Dr No revolves around these head spinning paradoxes, which makes for a funny, surreal, and philosophical read. This is a book about nothing. You could write a great deal about that; or you could leave it there. Nothing is fiendishly complicated and reassuringly simple. You can take both from Dr No, a spy story with all the easy cliches, which also takes you on a mind boggling journey through the contradictions of nothing which seem to lie beneath everything.
