The Double-Edged Gift of the Long View: Edward McPherson's "Look Out"

By Tony Huang

Look Out, by Edward McPherson (Astra House, Oct 2025)

There is a certain primal thrill in gazing out from a height — whether a mountaintop, an airplane window, or the sleek screen of a satellite — where the world beneath suddenly snaps into clarity. Edward McPherson’s forthcoming book, Look Out, brilliantly captures this universal human fascination with perspective. Yet, as McPherson compellingly argues, this desire to see “from above” is both a gateway to profound understanding and a portal to troubling illusions.

From antiquity to modernity, Look Out unspools the tangled history of our yearning for the long view. McPherson invites us to join him atop ancient mounds of Cahokia or within the mythical flights of Alexander the Great’s chariot — moments when humans first sought control, knowledge, or divine connection from elevated vantage points. He reveals how this impulse later morphed into the panoramic “bird’s-eye” maps of 19th-century America, beautiful lithographs serving civic pride and economic ambition alike, their sweeping views as much about wishful futures as hard realities. Here, McPherson introduces what he terms “useful fictions”: images that include and exclude, distort and idealize, shaping collective memory sometimes as much as documenting it.

The narrative sharply pivots from these historical moments to the iconic “Blue Marble” image of Earth, captured in 1972 by Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmidt. This photograph, McPherson illustrates, sparked a new global consciousness — a fragile, vulnerable planet shimmering against the void. Yet even Schmidt’s own ambivalence about the photo’s significance underscores the central tension of Look Out: the limits of perspective itself. No matter how high we rise, the map is never quite the territory. The satellite’s panoramic gaze can inspire but also obscure the messy, immediate realities below.

It is in this tension that McPherson’s exploration of the militarization of the long view becomes chillingly poignant. From early aerial bomb tests in St. Louis to the devastating precision strikes by today’s drones, Look Out lays bare how distant surveillance can desensitize operators and detach strategists from the profound human costs of warfare. The clinical, bird’s-eye gaze abstracts lives into “targets” and “casualties,” while tragic misinterpretations claim innocent victims — a sobering reminder that “to see is to control,” but control is never neutral.

McPherson does not stop there. He interrogates the creeping expansion of mass surveillance into civilian life, exposing the myth of objective sight in technologies like facial recognition and neighborhood cameras. The algorithms behind these tools carry inherent biases, shaping realities with errors that trigger real injustices. It is a powerful caution: even machines inherit the fallibility of human perception.

Finally, Look Out confronts the most urgent perspective of all: our relationship with the Earth itself. Through personal vignettes — such as a haunting encounter with a sickeningly retreating glacier — McPherson evokes the overwhelming scale of climate change and our collective struggle to grasp it. His account of the “Clock of the Long Now,” a literal timepiece built to tick for 10,000 years, offers a defiant beacon of long-term thinking in an age dominated by shortsightedness.

Look Out is a remarkable meditation on the double-edged nature of perspective. It dazzles with historical depth, technological insight, and ethical weight. Above all, McPherson reminds us that clarity gained from afar is always partial; it may illuminate broad patterns but risks blinding us to the human stories beneath. The ultimate challenge he leaves us with is how to bridge that gulf — connecting the cosmic view to personal experience, balancing knowledge and empathy, mastery and humility.

For anyone captivated by the intersections of history, technology, and power — or simply fascinated by what it means to see and understand — Look Out promises to be a profoundly illuminating read when it is released next month.

Tony Huang

Tony Huang, PhD, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Hong Kong Review. He is also the founder of Metacircle Fellowship, Metacircle (Hong Kong) Culture and Education Co., Ltd. and Metaeducation. He works as a guest-editor for SmokeLong Quarterly. His poems and translations have appeared in Mad Swirl, The Hong Kong Review, The Best Small Fictions Anthology Selections 2020, Tianjin Daily, Binhai Times, SmokeLong Quarterly, Nankai Journal, Large Ocean Poetry Quarterly, Yangcheng Evening News and other places.

Copy editor: Nancy He