The Technologists (with bonus short story The Professor's Assassin): A Novel
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The Technologists (with bonus short story The Professor's Assassin): A Novel
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Overview
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Boston, 1868. The Civil War may be over but a new war has begun, one between past and present, tradition and technology. The daring Massachusetts Institute of Technology is on a mission to harness science for the benefit of all. But when an unnatural disaster strikes the ships in Boston Harbor, and an equally inexplicable catastrophe devastates the heart of the city, an antiscience backlash casts a pall over MIT and threatens its very survival. So the best and brightest from the Institute’s first graduating class secretly join forces to save innocent lives and track down the truth. Armed with ingenuity and their unique scientific training, gifted war veteran Marcus Mansfield, blueblood Robert Richards, genius Edwin Hoyt, and brilliant freshman Ellen Swallow will match wits with a master criminal bent on the utter destruction of the city.
Don’t miss Matthew Pearl’s short story “The Professor’s Assassin,” featuring characters from The Technologists, in the back of the book.
Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780679605072 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2012 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 576 |
| Sales rank: | 558,201 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Book 1
Civil and Topographical Engineering
I
April 4, 1868
Its proud lines intermittently visible through the early morning fog, the Light of the East might have been the most carefree ship that ever floated into Boston. Some of the sailors, their bearded faces browned and peeling from too much sun, cracked the last rations of walnuts in their fists or under their boot heels, singing some ancient song about a girl left behind. After wild March winds, stormy seas, dangerous ports, backbreaking work, and all the extremes of experience, they’d be handed a good pay at port, then freed to lose it to the city’s myriad pleasures.
The navigator held the prow steady, his eye on his instruments, as they waited for the fog to disperse enough for their signal to be seen by the pilot boat. Although Boston Harbor stretched across seventy-five square miles, its channels had been so narrowed for purposes of defense that two large ships could not safely pass each other without the harbor pilot’s assistance.
The Light’s austere captain, Mr. Beal, strode the deck, his rare aura of high contentment amplified by the giddiness of his men. Beal could envision in his mind’s eye the pilot boat breaking through the fog toward them, the pilot dressed like an undertaker, saluting indifferently and relieving Beal—for once—of his burdens. Then would come the view of the stretches of docks and piers, the solid granite warehouses never quite large enough for all the foreign cargo brought in by the merchants, then beyond that the State House’s gold dome capping the horizon—the glittering cranium of the world’s smartest city.
In the last few years, with so many men returned from fighting the rebellion, even modest Boston merchants had become veritable industrialists, beset as they were by excess hands. This city had prided itself on its history from the time it was little more than a quaint village, but Beal was old enough to know how artificial its modern visage was. Hills that formerly sloped through the city had been flattened, their detritus used to fill in various necks and bays, the foundations for streets and new neighborhoods and wharves such as the one that soon would welcome them. He could remember when the Public Garden was plain mud marking Boston’s natural boundary.
A steam pipe bellowed from some unseen ship launching on its way or maybe, like them, gliding toward a journey’s end, and Beal felt a solemn comradeship with all unknown voyagers. As he glimpsed the crescent moon and thought he would soon have enough light even in this nasty fog to lay course, his pleasant reverie was broken by a bright light flashing low in the water. When the captain craned forward, a lifeboat caught in the current, right in the path of their prow, sprang out from the mist.
His lookout cried out while Beal seized his speaking trumpet and shouted orders to change course. A woman’s scream floated up. The schooner veered adroitly in efforts to avoid the small craft, but too late. The lifeboat’s passengers jumped for their lives as their boat split into pieces against the Light’s prow, the screaming woman thrusting a small child above the waves. To the shock of the captain, another obstacle broke through the dense curtain of fog on the schooner’s starboard side: a pleasure steamer, with its flags flying the signals of distress, and taking on water.
“Clear lower deck!” Beal shouted.
Light of the East had nowhere to go. The side of its hull grazed and then caught the stranded steamship, right through the forward bulkhead: Pipes snapped and scalding-hot steam rushed into the heavy air as the hold of the schooner was ripped open. Now it, too, took on water, fast.
Chaos reigned on and off the ships. Beal snapped an order to throw the cargo overboard and repeated it sharply when his men hesitated. If they didn’t unload right now, they would lose not only their profits, but also the ship and likely lives.
“Captain! There!” called his lookout.
Beal stared in astonishment from the railing as a stray breeze parted the fog. The wharf loomed ahead, but it was now clear they were approaching it from the wrong angle, parallel instead of perpendicular. Incredulously, the captain extended his spyglass. A bark flying British colors had wrecked against the tip of one of the piers and caught fire, while another schooner, marked the Gladiator, had drifted against the wharf, where its crew feverishly tried to tow it in. As he watched, fiery debris spread to the Gladiator’s sails, which an instant later were wreathed in flames.
At least half a dozen ships were visible in those few moments of clarity, and all were foundering in various states of distress across the once-orderly harbor, reverberating with shrieking whistles, bells, foghorns, and other desperate signals.
Beal frantically stumbled and slid on his way to the navigational instruments. The needle of the steering compass, held under glass by the wheel, spun around violently, as if bedeviled, while on his pocket compass the needle was 180 degrees off the mark—north was south. He’d sailed by these navigational instruments—finely tuned with the expertise of nineteen centuries—for his entire life as a seaman, and he knew there should be no way for them to fail all at once.
The pleasure steamer they had crashed into suddenly lurched forward with a boom. In seconds it was entirely underwater. Where it had been, a vortex opened, sucking under those already stranded in the water, and then spitting them out high into the air.
“To the lifeboats!” shouted Beal to his thunderstruck crew. “Find anyone alive and get as far away as you can!”
II
Charles
Submerged. As the waves soothed his naked body, his athletic strokes worked in concert with the rhythm of the current. The first week in April had not yet promised any warmth, the water still rather icy. But he willingly endured the chill ripping through his body for the better feeling swimming afforded him. It was a feeling of being alone but not lonely, a sense of freedom from all restrictions and control. Floating, kicking, somersaulting—try as he could to make noise, the water rendered him irrelevant.
Throughout his boyhood in a port town, he’d heard so many people spoken of as “lost at sea.” Now it seemed to him the strangest turn of phrase. As long as he was in the water, he could not be lost. He could bask, bathe, disappear, and the water sheltered him as much in Boston as it had back home. Not that he ever felt homesick, as some of the other Institute students did who had come from outside Boston. He still traveled the forty miles back and forth to Newburyport by train every day to keep down living expenses, although it cost him more than an hour each way.
To his mother and stepfather, the Institute remained a strange detour from his good position at the machine shop, and a daily interruption to his help at home. His stepfather, James, had always been unhappy, plagued by a partial deafness in his left ear that made him shun all society and friends. He worked as a night watchman for a jeweler because he preferred the solitude and uneventful nature of the position. He assumed people were speaking ill of him because he could not hear what they said, which led him to the further conclusion that city life, being loud, was an evil cacophony of deceit. As for his mother, she was a religious zealot of the old Puritan kind who saw danger in urban life and no value to the son’s studies in Boston.
Even now, when he was a senior, graduation a mere two and a half months away, they did not accept that he—Marcus Mansfield, of all people!—was a student at a college.
Marcus plunged his head back into the cool water, ears tingling as he surveyed the river—a tranquil and forgiving lane that ran between Boston and Cambridge, lined by a gentle, sloping green sward that would shade swimmers and oarsmen from the hot days to come. Unseen behind the thick weather, above the riverbank and the fields and marshes skirting it, there lurked the crowded brick and iron and gold-domed city, propelling Marcus forward with the powerful thrust of a gigantic engine.
At the shallow bend of the river Marcus took another big breath and sank, closing his eyes and relishing the drop. Down below, pieces of debris and lumber had lodged in the muddy riverbed. As he brushed against the foreign articles, he heard a voice beckon, distant, as though issued from the sky:
“Mansfield! Mansfield! We need you!”
Marcus bobbed up from under the water and then grabbed onto the side of a boat.
“Mansfield! There you are! You’re late.”
“How did you know I was swimming?”
“How did we—? Ha! Because I saw a pile of clothes back there on the shore, and who else would dare plunge into this freezing Styx!” The tall, blond oarsman dangled a suit of clothes above Marcus’s head. “Actually, it was Eddy who recognized your clothes.”
“Morning, Marcus,” said the second, smaller oarsman with his usual open smile.
“And since Eddy and I were both ready,” continued Bob, “we pushed out to find you.”
“Then you were early,” said Marcus, treading water toward the bank, “before I was late.”
“Ha! I’ll take that. Get dressed—we need our third oar.”
He shook himself dry on the bank and climbed into his gray trousers and light shirt. His two companions presented a study in opposites as they helped him into their boat: Bob, with the quintessential New Englander’s clear skin and crown of handsome curls, standing carelessly at the edge of the shell; Edwin Hoyt, slight and frail-looking, throwing the little weight he possessed to the other side in anticipation of a tragic drowning.
Despite knowing the water and boats pretty well, Marcus had not grown up indulging in such impractical pursuits as rowing for pleasure, with its arbitrary rules and catchwords. Some weeks before, Bob had announced one morning, “This is the day, fellows!” to Marcus and Edwin, their fellow Institute of Technology senior, as he bounded ahead of them on the way to a lecture.
“Which day?”
“Spring is here, Mansfield, and since it’s our last one at the college it’s time I showed you rowing just as I promised. Why, I hardly knew one end of the oar from the other until I was nine years old. A scrawny boy I was, the smallest Richards ever!” This served to emphasize what a commanding twenty-two-year-old Bob had become. Marcus could not actually recall Bob promising to teach them, but let that pass, given Bob’s enthusiasm.
To his surprise, Marcus found rowing not to be the wasted time he expected, and it took his mind away from worrying about the looming future away from the Institute. It was at once calming and exciting, a thrill when the shell launched across the surface of the water as though alive. They tried to recruit more oars among their classmates to join them, but the few willing candidates never did find time.
As their small vessel pushed steadily along, Bob began laughing to himself. “I was just thinking of my brothers,” he explained. “They used to warn me about the sea serpent of the Charles. Nearly one hundred feet long, they said, with humps like a camel and a cry like a braying donkey crossed with an elephant’s trumpeting. You know how I have to take it upon myself to investigate anything in nature. Well, for three months I searched out old Charley, until I determined that the water wouldn’t sustain a sea serpent’s diet.”
“But how did you know what a sea serpent ate?” Edwin asked seriously.
“Bob, would you mind rowing farther east today?” Marcus proposed.
“A quest! Where to?”
“I haven’t seen the harbor since . . .” Marcus did not finish his sentence.
“Better not to, Marcus,” Edwin said quickly. “I caught sight of it this morning after it was all over. The whole harbor was up in smoke. It was like looking into the face of a bad omen.”
“Eager to see the destruction?”
“Actually, Bob, I was hoping to learn something from seeing how they begin the repairs,” Marcus corrected him. “There is already some debris on the riverbed that must have drifted on the current.” He stopped when he saw Bob’s face narrow as he looked out on the water behind them. “What is it?”
“Just my luck,” Bob said. “Faster, fellows! Go! Come on, Mansfield, faster! Well rowed, Hoyt! All clear, come on!”
A forty-nine-foot shell had shot out of the trees sheltering a narrow adjoining channel with the speed of a lightning bolt. Six flashing oars creased the surface of the river in synchronized strokes, throwing off white streaks behind them. The rowers were bare from the waist up, with crimson handkerchiefs wrapped around their heads, and their flexing muscles glistened in the strengthening sun. As Marcus peered back at them, they looked like highly educable pirates, and he knew it would be a lost cause to attempt to elude whatever this boat was.
“Who are they?” he marveled.
“Blaikie,” Bob explained as the three of them pulled as hard as they could. “His is the best Harvard six there ever was, they say. Will Blaikie—he’s the stroke oar. I’d rather stare into the mouth of the serpent.”
Edwin wheezed between strokes, “Blaikie . . . was . . . at Exeter . . . with Bob and me.”
The other vessel came on with a spurt too powerful to shake, now just a length behind.
“Plymouth!” cried the lantern-jawed lead rower on the lightning bolt. The boat went by theirs and then reversed and ranged alongside of them.
“Why, it is you, Plymouth!” said the stroke oar, Blaikie, to Bob with a gleaming smile. Even seated in his shell, he presented the particular mincing swagger of a Harvard senior. “It’s been ages. You’re not forming a randan team, are you?”
“We’ve been borrowing a shell from the boat club,” said Bob, motioning for his friends to stop rowing. Marcus could not remember seeing his classmate so deflated.
“Don’t tell me you’re still dragging your heels over at that embryo of a college, Plymouth?” Blaikie asked.
“We are seniors now, like you.”
“Tant pis pour vous,” interjected one of the Harvard boys, eliciting chuckles from the others.
“I fear civilizing your classmates into respectable gentlemen will take more than teaching them to grip an oar,” Blaikie went on cheerfully. “Science cannot substitute for culture, old salt. I used to agonize, Plymouth, what I would most rather be, stroke of the Harvard, president of the Christian Brethren, or First Scholar of the class. Now I know what it is to be all three.” He was reminded by one of his oarsmen not to forget president of one of the best college societies. “Yes, Smithy! But it is best not to speak of the societies to outsiders.”
“We are doing things far more important—things you wouldn’t begin to understand, Blaikie.”
“Just how many of you Technology boys are there?”
Throwing out his chest, Bob answered, “Fifteen men in the Class of ’68. About thirty-five in the other three classes, and we expect more than ever in the next freshman group.”
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation Between Classmates:
ABOUT WRITING, TECHNOLOGY, AND MATTERS PUGILISTIC AND OTHERW ISE
Matthew Pearl and Benjamin Cavell were college classmates, but met and became friends about six years after graduating, at a photo shoot for a Boston magazine. Benjamin is a producer and writer of the FX drama Justified as well as the author of Rumble, Young Man, Rumble, an award-winning collection of short stories. In honor of the technologi- cal themes of the novel, Matthew and Benjamin decided to discuss The Technologists via an online chat.
Benjamin Cavell: Each of your previous books has focused on the work of a particular literary figure as a source of or a solution to the various mysteries. Was it a conscious decision to move away from that model? Wait, now it’s telling me you’re offline.
Matthew Pearl: No, I’m here. I just went invisible so nobody would interrupt us.
BC: I meant to phrase the end of that question better but then I rushed it because it said you disappeared.
MP: That’s fine how you have it.
BC: But obviously it’s conscious. I guess the question should be why you decided to move away from it?
MP: I think it was more that writing three books tied together—by lit- erary history—had at some point become my plan, and then when that “set” was completed it was a matter of looking over my list of ideas and deciding what was next. Many of my ideas are centered around literary history, but a number are not, and this one, originally listed in my idea document only as “MIT novel,” jumped out at me and at the few people (you included) whom I asked for input. In some ways, it would have been easier to continue with literary history because that had become a sort of security blanket.
BC: Your previous books were set at a time when publishing and American literature were entering some kind of early modern age; this book takes place at a moment when science (or technology) is doing the same. Is that why you chose MIT as your setting as opposed to Harvard, which is obviously a place you have an association with and a place that has featured in your previous work (with varying levels of significance)?
MP: I definitely had more connections with Harvard as a place, but the idea started with MIT and then went from there (rather than start- ing with the history of science). Before writing the book, I’m not sure I even knew more than one or two people who had any affiliation with MIT, but my removal from the place made me more interested in peeking inside its origins. It is and was such a unique world in itself. Counter to the axiom, I tend to want to write about what I don’t know. Actually, I didn’t know Harvard would play any part in this story until I started doing research and found that Harvard and its professor Louis Agassiz were opponents of MIT and all the new sciences that MIT represented.
BC: How closely does the book hew to the actual history of MIT’s founding?
MP: I don’t think I’ve ever used “hew.”
BC: I don’t think I have either but I’ve always wanted to. The Marcus character is wholly invented, yes? But many of the others are based on people who were actually in that first graduating class.
MP: Wait, I didn’t answer the last question!
BC: I’m expanding the question.
MP: The story of MIT’s founding is pretty accurately represented, with some of the details streamlined or simplified so not to weigh the plot or reader down. It really was this controversial place at the start, very different than what had come before it, or even what would come after it established its foothold.
I think the academic politics and tensions were what got me into the story before the fascinating science, which of course is splashier mate- rial. Marcus is fictional but his circumstances are drawn from very real people who were among the first students from the “industrial” class, while most of the others are historical (except Hammie). At one point, I wanted at least one appearance from each of the historically first gradu- ates, though I think by the final draft some of them were left behind.
BC: You mention the fascinating science. How did you come up with the various technology-based attacks?
MP: That was an uphill climb. There was a moment early on when I almost gave up the whole book because in spite of the fact that I loved my characters, I didn’t know if I could create attacks that were interest- ing enough. I had some help from scientist friends and contacts, but most of the ideas that made it into the final version started with the sci- entific journals from the time period. Really tedious to read through, then you’d come upon a nugget about an experiment or an accident buried in there somewhere and that would expand outward. Dissolving the glass, for example: that was actually inspired by a scientific journal column written by an MIT student about experiments they were doing there. Then I’d build on that and convert it into something malicious and dangerous.
BC: What about other difficulties? I think people would be interested to hear about your main sticking points.
MP: Well, you heard about most of them at the time because I would call you for advice.
BC: True.
MP: One was how to start the novel. Do you remember we talked about that? At first, I thought I would start with a scene of Marcus being re- cruited while he worked at a machine shop. You had the idea that there could be an accident, some kind of malfunction on the shop floor, and after Marcus shows his quick thinking, Rogers, the MIT founder, would recruit him to go to the college. I started writing that scene and still have it saved somewhere. For some reason, the transition felt choppy from that to the “present” (i.e., four or four and a half years later, when Mar- cus is a college senior), so instead I started the book with the first disas- ter, and at some point early on we flash back to Marcus being recruited, though no accident is involved. I used the accident idea in a classroom scene, but then ultimately took that scene out, too. There were many things like that that you (and other trusted readers, as well as my editor and agent, of course) helped me with when I got stuck along the way. It’s a tough part of novel writing, trying to get help and input, because it’s such a complex, long-term project. For example, I knew I wanted Marcus to get into a fight so I consulted with you, since you were a boxer and are generally more capable of being in a fight than I am. When was the last time you got into a real fight?
BC: Outside the ring? College, I guess.
MP: Really? With another student?
BC: Yeah, but it wasn’t terribly serious. We were messing around and it escalated. Maybe we should talk a little about the war stuff. Research, etc.
MP: Is he still scared of you?
BC: I haven’t seen him since graduation.
MP: I’ve never been in a fight in my life.
BC: Why are you interviewing me all of a sudden? I liked where we were headed, to the war and your research. You’ve never actually put us into a war or a prison camp that I can remember.
MP: Not in the same way as here. Originally, I thought Marcus would be a war hero, but actually, I ended up having it that he never was in a battle, he is captured early on while helping an injured soldier. He has this insecurity, these regrets, that he wasn’t a big enough help to the war. Bob Richards has different trauma from not having served in the war at all.
BC: And was the torture-by-technology really used in Civil War prison camps?
MP: The details of prison-camp life come out of research, especially from firsthand accounts of what it was like, which generally I prefer to secondary sources. I researched many prison camps, so some of what I say happened at Smith might have been more likely to have happened at another prison camp, and certainly conditions like this weren’t limited to the South; the North had similarly awful camps. One thing that was terrific to discover, from a storytelling point of view, was the use of a former tobacco warehouse as a prison. There would be these tobacco presses, complex machines, not being used, and the prisoners would start trying to take them apart, which I thought was a great way to show Marcus and Frank using and learning engineering while prisoners.
BC: Did you exaggerate at all the general mistrust and even fear of tech- nology that seems to pervade the world of the technologists—or, at least, the city of Boston?
MP: I don’t think I exaggerate the fear, though of course I’m spotlight- ing it. Just as there are today, there would have been people fearful of and other people inspired by technology, though much more in the former category, proportionally, and with far less understanding, plus more in- tense religious hesitations about changes on that front. That was impor- tant to the novel in establishing the alienated position of MIT, which is obviously underscored by its location in a sort of swampland of Boston.
BC: But do you think we have gone from that extreme mistrust to an almost worshipfulness? I.e., that technology will ultimately save us from ourselves.
MP: We’ll get fearful again, though, I think, as more of our technologies run to their logical conclusions. I think many of the same fears, maybe rightfully in some cases, will come back to us about what is natural or not. For The Technologists I tried to find lots of representations of scien- tists in literature from that time. You can probably guess what I found. That’s your cue.
BC: Evil? E-vil.
MP: Well, sometimes. Very strange, confused, amoral, and areligious figures, for the most part. That era really is when the mad scientist figure is hammered out. Most of those scientific characters, like Henry Jekyll and Victor Frankenstein, end up doomed in those stories.
BC: But isn’t part of what we’ve learned about technology/science and part of what The Technologists is ultimately about is that technological advancement and discovery is fairly inevitable and that by marginalizing the scientists themselves we cede power to the individuals or corpora- tions who see the potential and make sure they’re the only ones capable of exploiting it.
MP: I mention in my historical note to the novel that one of my grand- father’s cousins was at Los Alamos and was the metallurgist for some of the atomic bomb development. I think that additional moment of his-
tory really captures that feeling of inevitability and grasp for control. My relative apparently felt it would mean the end of war forever. I don’t know that the novel tries to put forth any answers but the characters believe in science, and I let them. Novelists in the nineteenth century seemed to feel too conflicted or confused about science to allow scien- tists as characters to keep their faith in its powers.
Ben, thank you for agreeing to talk about the book again . . . after listening to me chatter about it for so long while it was being written and completed.
BC: You’re very welcome. Can’t wait to start reading drafts of the next one.
1. A major theme of the novel is the end of the Civil War and its lasting reverberations. Discuss the impact of the war on various characters— whether via their direct participation or through their failure to actively take part—and how society was changed as a whole. Compare and con- trast Marcus and Frank, whose wartime experiences transformed them in vastly different ways.
2. Agnes Turner and Ellen Swallow both wish to gain entrance to a world that has traditionally been closed off to them, and each faces her own set of challenges in doing so—Agnes in breaking free from her fam- ily’s expectations, and Ellen in the fierce ostracism she faces from her classmates. While this attitude toward women may have been customary for the era, were there any aspects of it that particularly surprised you? On the other hand, what characters or trends ran against the prevail- ing sensibilities? Did you ever feel that Agnes and Ellen were treated unjustly within the special microcosm represented by the Technologists society? How might the members’ feelings toward their female cohorts have evolved over time?
3. One reviewer called Marcus Mansfield “an American archetype—the plucky outsider” who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to lead the charge of technological advancement. What does this say about what it means to be an American and, based on that, are there any other characters who might also qualify as an “archetype”? Why or why not? How is Marcus’s situation echoed by other elements of the novel?
4. The clash of religion versus technology—faith versus reason—is a key conflict within the novel. At one point, Agassiz accuses Edwin of not believing in God because he also sympathizes with Darwin’s the- ory of evolution. On a larger scale, Tech is condemned for not requir- ing its students to attend chapel—to which Marcus responds, “Our laboratories are our chapels. . . . It is not a matter of holding religious sentiment.” What is the significance of Tech maintaining a separation between the church and the institution of education, and how might this have enabled its students to maintain ties to both pursuits? Are there elements in the novel that suggest the two must be mutually exclusive? Does Harvard’s stressing the importance of religious practice somehow ground it in the traditional ideals that MIT was striving to transcend? How does the tension between science and religion embody some of the novel’s greater themes?
5. The novel explores the idea that those who own technology also own power, whether that power is used for good or for evil. Similarly, it examines the fear that science will advance so quickly that mankind will essentially become the “tools of our tools.” Do you think this struggle for power goes hand in hand with technological progress, and do you see this as still being an issue in the twenty-first century?
6. Matthew Pearl is known for his colorful metaphors and references. At one point, he draws an allusion to the book of Genesis, in which we’re told there is a flaming sword placed to the east of the Garden of Eden so that mankind would never be allowed to enter again. Did you make anything of Cheshire’s deeming himself the “avenging angel” whose tongue is a “flaming sword”? Elsewhere, did you see any significance in Frank’s Ichabod Crane sculpture and its destruction at the hands of the Med Fac members? Were there other metaphors and images that you found especially resonant?
7. Several of the characterizations were inspired by Pearl’s research into actual Tech students—Bob Richards and Edwin Hoyt were real people, Marcus and Hammie are compilations of several Tech boys, Ellen Swallow was the first female to attend the college, and, of course, William Barton Rogers was the original founder, among others. How did these renderings inform your reading and what did you find most interesting or unexpected about these individuals? How would you compare or contrast these students and their world with today’s aca- demic precincts?
8. Did you find that Marcus had a stronger loyalty to MIT as a “working-class” student than those who came from more privileged up- bringings? How else did you see the class struggle manifest, both within and outside of Tech?
9. Were you surprised to learn that MIT wasn’t granted the power to present degrees until weeks before its first graduation, even though it had been seven years since the college was founded? How does this co- incide with the following claim: “Those who embrace the new sciences, who experiment forthrightly and dare search for truth, will be seen as harboring secrets and dark intentions. Science explains so much, any- thing unexplained is pinned to it.” Do you think there’s a tendency to try to limit the boundaries of scientific exploration, and what can be gained or lost by doing so? What else about this period in education struck you?
10. Ellen tells Bob that her father has always lived by the motto, “Where any one else has been, there I can go,” to which she responds, “It was not a bad working motto, but I like to think adventurous spirits do what has never been done before. That is a pioneer.” Discuss how the defini- tion of a pioneer is exemplified throughout the novel, both in terms of characters and institutions. Are there any who might fit the bill even though their intentions are unsavory?
11. Like The Technologists, Matthew Pearl’s first three novels—The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, and The Last Dickens—have all been set primarily in the vibrant milieu of mid- to late-nineteenth-century America. What scenes and motifs from The Technologists were the most memorable to you, and did you draw any similarities to these prior works? The Technologists might also be said to be somewhat of a depar- ture from Pearl’s other novels, which are all rooted in literary history. What do you make of his transition into the realm of historical science and education?
12. Were you surprised when the source of the catastrophes was re- vealed? How do you interpret the motivation and psychological turmoil behind it? What do you think it is that makes some characters abuse their superior knowledge of science and technology, while others who are equally as capable are never tempted to use these tools as a means to exert their authority?