Bellwether by Connie Willis

Published in 1996

Bellwether is less a science fiction novel than a novelization of Office Space. Not that it matters, because anything Connie Willis writes is worth reading. She uses a light touch to illuminate human nature. The results are not always pretty but they are always funny.

Sandra Foster works for one of those think tanks that suck up as much grant money as they can while urging scientists to develop anything that might turn a profit. Sandra is a "soft" scientist, a statistician who researches fads. Her value to her employer, of course, is that predicting a fad before it becomes a fad is a key to vast wealth. Who wouldn't have wanted to be in on the ground floor of the hula hoop?

Sandra becomes stuck as she ponders the origins of the bob, a hairstyle that was fashionable during the early 1920s. She decides to help another scientist who would like to be studying chaos theory but, in the absence of grant money, is studying information diffusion. He eventually does that by trying to teach the leader of a flock of sheep (known as the bellwether) a simple task to see how that knowledge is transferred to the other sheep. The project is complicated by the fact that sheep are too stupid to learn anything.

The story has a bit of romance and a lot of humor, most of it focused on Flip, a whiny office assistant who is about on the same intellectual level as the sheep. Bellwether does, however, make two serious points. The first comes from Willis' exploration of fads. Every chapter is introduced with a fad, ranging from fashionable colors to dance crazes to chain letters to coonskin caps. The sheep become a metaphor for human behavior, as people follow a fad until it loses it trendiness and then give their loyalty to the next fad that comes along. The serious point, of course, is that independent thinking is a valuable but scarce commodity.

When Bellwether is not discussing fads, it explores the nature of scientific discovery, which leads to the second serious point. Happenstance figures prominently in "eureka" moments (a spore drifted through a window and contaminated a culture, leading to Fleming's discovery of penicillin), although a variety of unexpected factors have contributed to scientific breakthroughs. Science is about hard work but inspiration is not so easy to explain. Willis attempts an explanation in Bellwether, and her thoughts (which partially derive from chaos theory) may have some merit.

Serious thinking aside, it would be difficult to read Bellwether without smiling, so you may need to take some breaks to give your smile muscles a rest. This isn't by any means Willis' best novel, but her second-string novels are better than the best efforts of most writers.

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