MAN AND SPACE

...The space age merely serves to accentuate the unsolved problems of the nuclear era...

...Readers of Peter Ritner's new book will be puzzled about this "space" book since it is more concerned with the limited "space" inside man's cranium than with the infinite space beyond our planet...

...To these two kinds of space, Ritner adds a third—"the dimensions of choice— opened up to man or foisted upon him by the Technological Revolution...

...We on earth are now so caught up in nuclear arming and mutual terrorism that the first lunar-bound astronaut may crawl out of a subsurface bomb shelter as he heads for his spaceship...

...For the determined reader who is undaunted by viscous prose, Ritner's views on life on planet Earth will be stimulating...

...In quick succession he takes up "The Rejuvenation of Idealism," the problem of juvenile delinquency, art, and love...

...This reviewer finished reading this chapter outside the delivery room, somewhat apprehensive of the issue...

...For example, on the very first page of the book: ". . . Some neuroanatomists tell us that the limits of man's intellectual efficiency will be set by the relative thinness of the commissural trunks, like the corpus callosum, which link together the two hemispheres of the cerebrum, instead of by the near infinite number of possible pathways through the brain-cell mass...

...The question, "Can Society Survive Science...

...Ritner goes farther: "The Scorpion is man's brother...

...Earth's solitary Moon, Earth's siblings Mars and Venus, the outer giants, our star the Sun, the rolling abyss between the Solar System and the nearest star, the black void utterly swallowing up this abyss within itself, flickering with the unenumer-able shapes and luninescences of Creation...

...These, it seems to me, are belabored configurations...

...He is glad to report that son Nicholas is a normal Earth-child...

...Although Ritner does not really invade the domain of space, he defines it poetically: ". . . the extraterrestrial environment—the ocean to be invaded and quartered by human voyagers for the first time in our era...

...He sandwiches in a chapter on "Other Forms of Life" in which his lively imagination envisages an unearthly creature on a distant planet: "What if the first intellectually intriguing life form man finds is a hopelessly repulsive—indeed, appalling—creeper, resembling an enormous Scorpion writhing on its side, with a common eye-ear-nose-mouth orifice in the middle of its ventral surface, which at certain ceremonies devours its third sire along with segments of its own discarded feelers...

...the book might more properly be titled A Commentary upon Man versus Technology...

...One does not have to venture into the dim recesses of space, or even beyond the rim of the earth, to appreciate that man's technology has thrust him into a vicious competition...

...Unfortunately, this soaring prose is often blighted by bloated paragraphs of overly vivid writing and language that either frightens a reader or sends him scurrying to a technical dictionary...

...And we loathe him...

...The changes we perceive are but a small part of the total change inherent in the technological revolution...

...At this point I expected some acid comment about an Earth-man-to-Scorpion encounter and racial prejudice...

...Such writing is lucid only to the specialist who already understands the vocabulary...

...Man's art forms, his view of himself and of the world around him, his relationship to his family and to society in general—all these are now the subjects of revolutionary forces unleashed by modern science...

...It is still a shock for the mind to find itself situated in the midst of an exploding perspective such as this, as if man were already riding a quantum of light, overleaping the galactic seas, his ancestral home lost beneath him, a speck of blue-green oil on a pointil-list canvas...

...is the basic issue which troubles Peter Ritner...

...In sum, Ritner is saying that the tide of technology has far outraced man's mode of living on earth...