Boston after the Civil War is blossoming into an industrial powerhouse, and the science and engineering breakthroughs fueling its advances are known by a fancy label: technology.
But what if, as author Matthew Pearl posits in a contentious but familiar premise, technology were used to destroy rather than to build, to displace not empower, or exploited by a powerful few? Pearl sets these questions ablaze at a place that matches the zeitgeist: the beginnings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where members of its first graduating class rally to the defense of science.
The plot in brief: Some dastardly hand unleashes panic in the city with mystifying acts of technology run amok - one that confuses navigational devices on boats inside the harbor, causing the maritime version of the interstate pileup, and another that vaporizes glass windows throughout the busy financial district to deadly effect. The hidden source of this violence leaves the Lilliputians in the crowd to damn technology as a sinister alchemy, and soon by proxy, MIT and science itself are on trial.
