[M]y Iris kept working on a detective novel in two, three, four successive versions, in which the plot, the people, the setting, everything kept changing in bewildering bursts of frantic deletions—everything except the names (none of which I remember)…. All the odd girl could ever visualize, with startling lucidity, was the crimson cover of the final, ideal paperback on which the villain’s hairy fist would be shown pointing a pistol-shaped cigarette lighter at the reader—who was not supposed to guess until everybody in the book had died that it was, in fact, a pistol.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!

Anything can be turned into a weapon—a handful of sand knotted in a stocking can bludgeon a person, and a wisp of air, as a bubble in a hypodermic needle, kills the patient without arousing suspicion; that we know from mystery novels. Nothing is too trivial to become a deadly riddle;  generations of readers have learned that a tiny bit of water can kill a person without leaving a trace—if you put an icicle in a thermos flask and take it into the Turkish baths (Edgar Jepson and Robert Eustace, “The Tea Leaf ”). That is the hallmark of our private, artisanal infatuation with death. Nothing is too trivial. And so the detective in mystery novels is classically seen huddled over barely perceptible details, and the forensic pathologist, the detective’s most powerful current incarnation, searches for tiny perforations and microscopic lesions. At the opposite end of the spectrum is a criminal, indeed military force with a virtually infinite reach: nothing is too big for a murderous plan. The extent to which trashy films merge with military strategy is seen in the way Star Wars has colored our language. The military sphere, more than any other, is governed by breathless innovation that seizes on every detail: an endless sequence of inventions. The historical inability to stop for a moment and ask whether a new invention is actually necessary most easily finds its alibi in the military: everything that is possible must be developed, otherwise we’ll be defenseless (because it is possible).

This inability to ignore novelties goes hand in hand with the fear of failing to grasp the significance of a crucial technological advance. It inspires stories that reflect the fairy-tale trope of scornfully rejecting a magical object out of ignorance. One classic anecdote is related by Baron Hermann von Eckardtstein (Lebenserinnerungen und politische Denkwürdigkeiten, 1919). According to the author, Bismarck once spoke of himself as lacking any feel for technology whatsoever; to bolster his—possibly correct—view that in a statesman this could not be seen as a shortcoming, he claimed that Friedrich...