NONFICTION - Dec. 22, 1991

STRANGE WEATHER: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits by Andrew Ross (Verso: $59.95, cloth; $16.95, paper; 275 pp.). Andrew Ross, a teacher of cultural studies at Princeton, has a thing for what can be called, broadly, weird science: the parallel universe of off-the-wall, often mocked explorations and explanations of the natural world. Bioenergetics, computer hacking, cyberpunk writing, futurology, even the Weather Channel--these are a few of the ways in which science has materialized in popular culture, with various degrees of legitimacy. In “Strange Weather,” Ross examines informally the ways in which quasi- and pseudo-scientific subcultures have made use of traditional science, one underlying theme being that science is not, as many modern dissenters would have it, inherently evil, though it may be, at least in the form of technology, “an instrument socially organized for the purpose of domination.” Don’t like the sound of that phrase? Well, be forewarned: Verso is a self-proclaimed “New Left” publisher and Ross is a devotee of critical studies, which means “Stormy Weather” overflows with words like ideology, sublegitimate, paradigm, privileged, signifying, coded, textuality, essentialist, valorized, dialectic, ad nauseum--not to mention the prefixes post-, meta-, inter-, trans-, and ethno-. There are truffles to be found here, in short, if you’re willing to nose through mounds of verbiage.