Cole resists two out of three temptations. “The Hole in the Universe” covers current physics and cosmology in simple, energetic prose, without much knee-bouncing or idle following; but Cole indulges in such a tangled thicket of overly cute nothing puns in the first chapter that I’m tempted to say the real book starts on Page 25. Only then does she get down to explaining, clearly, why the vacuum of space is a deep modern riddle.

She starts with a brief, engaging history of zero as a mathematical idea. (The ancient Greeks avoided it; the Italian Fibonacci introduced it with the Arabic number system to Europe, in 1202, where “it was promptly denounced as ‘heathen.’”) Then she details the 19th century notion of a luminiferous ether, which Einstein discredited. “To physicists of Newton’s time and after,” Cole writes, “the ether was the necessary mode of transportation for waves of light. After all, if light was a wave — as most people at the time thought — then there had to be some medium for it to wave through.” The luminiferous ether supposedly filled the vast reaches of space like an ocean.

Einstein disposed of it, though, by proving that light acts as a particle as well as a wave. “Light didn’t need a carrier, or even space, to travel through,” writes Cole. By clarifying the nature of light (and matter), Einstein simplified a mess of contradictory theories and worked a revolution that physicists are still trying to understand. The result, ironically, is a modern version of the old ether, a vision of so-called empty space cluttered with neutrinos, dark matter, antigravity and multidimensional strings. The fact that the void of space doesn’t act like a void is the problem (Einstein predicted it wouldn’t); and modern physics has a menagerie of strange theories to explain why.

One of the strangest, of course, is superstring theory, or M-theory, which Cole explains in a brief, lucid chapter. “As described by M-theory, the entire universe arises from the harmonics of vibrating strings, membranes, and blobs in eleven dimensions.” These strings underlie particles as fundamental building blocks of the universe, meaning their “mode of vibration” determines the identity of a particle (electron, proton, etc.). My favorite part of this chapter is the segment titled “Strings of what?” I was happy to see a science writer pose this question point-blank. But then Cole quotes the Harvard string theorist Andrew Strominger: “You’re not allowed to ask that question. That’s it. It’s just the thing.” Oh.

String theory makes sense only because it solves certain insoluble problems. In the last five years it’s moved from the faddish fringes of science to a more central, respectable place, mainly because it “resolves the glaring mismatch between the laws that rule the large-scale cosmos (Einstein’s theory of gravity) and those that run the microcosmos (quantum mechanics).” No one claims to understand it fully; string theory just seems to work.

One extension of it by Stanford’s Lenny Susskind proposes to explain the universe we know as a holographic projection (via vibrating strings) from a lower, simpler dimension.

“It would mean [writes Cole] that if you want to describe the universe and everything in it — gravity, particles, planets … — the correct information you need to do that lies not on the three-dimensional ‘interior’ we take to be the real physical world. Instead, it is encoded on a lower-dimensional surface. Like a hologram, the universe is a projection of the information on this boundary into space.”

This sounds suspiciously like Hindu dogma to me, but Susskind stumbled on the theory while he was studying something else, and the mathematics have been worked out in detail by the Harvard physicist Juan Maldecena. “Most of us think it’s an absolute fact,” says Susskind.

“A Hole in the Universe” covers roughly the same territory as Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” with the benefit of 10 years’ additional research. Since Cole is a science columnist for the Los Angeles Times, not a physicist, her style is breezier and less exact than Hawking’s. She goes in for too many of the nothing puns and uses certain analogies that aren’t airtight, but overall the book is a strong and sometimes mind-blowing introduction to the edges of modern physics. Its real problem is the tantalizing, unfinished state of physics itself: The book leaves behind so many baffling contradictions that the most glaring void, by the end, seems to be the lack of a present-day Einstein to make it all make sense.

It’s hard to say if Burroughs is being funny here, because he’s certainly full of it. Cloning cannot create armies of consciousnesses tuned in to some central brain. It also won’t undermine individuality, as his imaginary Men of the Cloth worry, by printing cheap replicas of somebody’s precious individual character. This is point No. 1 in any debate about cloning. The process just copies a genome, and poses no worse a threat to the human sense of self than does any identical twin.

From there things get complicated, though, and a new anthology of articles on the subject is meant to help navigate this weird, still-uncharted moral territory. “Cloning: Responsible Science or Technomadness?” wants to be a complete overview of the debate so far, mixing religious declarations with philosophical arguments, scientific findings and governmental decrees; the original Nature article on Dolly the sheep even shares space in these pages with a (very bad) story by Douglas Coupland.

The writers brood over the question of individuality and self in the aftermath of Dolly’s birth in 1997. So far the debate relies on language borrowed from older arguments, like the ones over abortion or slavery. Whether you’re for or against human cloning in the abstract seems to depend, right now, on whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice. And almost every philosophical writer in the book refers to Immanuel Kant, who (in the context of slavery) insisted on treating all people as “ends in themselves, not as means to an end.”

So, the philosophers ask, what would Kant think of cloning? Answers fall into categories. Some writers can’t get past the sickness of the idea of replicating a person. They insist that anyone intentionally cloned, for whatever reason (vanity, infertility, minor body-part transplants), would live under a psychological cloud. “The cloned individual will be saddled with a genotype that has already lived,” writes Leon Kass, an ethicist at the University of Chicago who leads the anti-cloning charge. “He will not be fully a surprise to the world.”

Other writers argue that a cloned person could be just as fulfilled and independent as any biological twin. Even humans conceived — or concocted — as a means toward some end could grow up to be treated as ends in themselves, and live out dignified lives. David Elliott, a philosopher at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, gives the strongest argument out of this camp:

[Kant's] idea is not that every person is valuable in virtue of being empirically different from everyone else. Rather, dignity is grounded in the rational capacity to conform one’s will to the moral law, and there is no reason to think that this capacity would be diminished by duplication.

Moral will, in other words, belongs to a dimension of human consciousness not fully decided by genes. The argument has a whiff of religion, and one surprise in “Cloning” is that not a single church paper makes the same point with quite so much clarity or force.

The Kantian debate over means and ends has lots of other fine points, which “Cloning” covers in detail, but it isn’t really interesting for 300 pages. If a human clone became absolutely necessary, creating one seems no worse, morally, than breeding a sheep. The interesting part of the book is the argument over what might make a human clone worth so much expensive effort. The list of good reasons is short. Vanity? No. Infertility? We already have end runs around that, not to mention kids waiting for adoption. Medicine? Maybe. Some patients now dying of leukemia, say, or kidney disease might survive if a clone of their bodies were made for the sake of a bit of bone marrow or a single genetically identical kidney (unlethal to give, in both cases). But the clone would also need to be born, raised and loved — and the notion of raising a child to harvest a whole organ seems brutal.

What about improving the race? Or breeding an army of Napoleons? To start with, a genetic copy of Napoleon wouldn’t be a resurrected Napoleon, but only a twin, raised far from the time and home that made the ambitious Corsican who he was. “No one steps twice,” wrote Heraclitus, “into the same river.”

The closer we get to human cloning, generally, the less fantastic it sounds. In 1999, scientists associated with the Roslin Institute reported that the DNA of their famous charge, Dolly, was aging faster than an ordinary sheep’s, leaving her vulnerable to cancer and maybe an early death. Her genetic mom’s DNA — derived from a mature udder cell — might have an absolute age. If this proves true, and universal, the creepiest Hitlerite arguments for cloning will crumble, because DNA transfer will be revealed as the quickest way to wear out a bloodline. God, or someone, built diversity into us for a reason. From horse breeders and farmers (and dog breeders and royal families) we already know that too much genetic refinement isn’t healthy; so maybe the worst risk posed by cloning humans is not the loss of any individual “selfness” or dignity but the loss of our biological heritage, some part of our wild and vigorous past.

A problem with the current cloning debate — and this book — is the sheer amount of stuff we still don’t know. “Cloning” in some ways exaggerates the problem by leaving out recent discoveries. Nothing in the book deals, for example, with Dolly’s life as an adult. (I found a news report about her mature genes.) The anthology is a good sourcebook on a hot topic, but it’s not definitive. It simply takes a snapshot of the murky debate in what might be called the immediate post-Dolly period, which has already started to fade.

The characters in “The Bridegroom” live in northeastern China, in and around Muji City, where Jin’s last novel, “Waiting,” is set; but the trajectory in this collection is toward the West. The first story, “Saboteur,” is immersed in provincial corruption; it follows an instructor at Harbin University who finds himself suddenly under arrest. The last three stories show the strain of American influence after market reforms in the 1980s. By following the stories in order, a reader can almost feel China liberalizing. But Ha Jin’s characters hardly notice, because what counts as freedom in the West looks to them like a bad idea.

In “After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town,” an entrepreneur named Mr. Shapiro sets up a fast-food franchise in Muji City and instigates a series of cultural misunderstandings and misperceptions. First the business almost fails because the locals know American fried chicken is just imperialistic nonsense, “more batter than meat.” Then Mr. Shapiro tries an all-you-can-eat buffet. This concept is new in Muji City, and the restaurant fills with customers who eat “like starved wolves” and pocket pieces of chicken for their relatives. Shapiro loses money. Then a prominent local man wants to use Cowboy Chicken for his wedding feast: “He wanted something exotic for their wedding dinner.” The comedy culminates in an ill-conceived strike by the kitchen staff. The story is an amusing and maybe unintentional comment on globalization, which comes off as a laughable dream, even for Mr. Shapiro.

A less amusing story is “The Woman From New York.” The title character loses not just her job but also her reputation, her husband and her daughter for leaving Muji City to live in New York for several years:

Now she was back. She looked like a different woman, wearing a gold necklace, her lips rouged, her eyelashes blackened with ink, and even her toenails dyed red … In a way, her makeup and manners verified the hearsay that she had become the fifteenth concubine of a wealthy Chinese man in New York City.

What she actually did in New York isn’t clear. She seems to have worked in a restaurant with the hope of earning a lot of money. Maybe she wanted to improve her position in China by learning English; perhaps she planned to move her family to New York. But the dreams have collapsed, and now her husband and jealous in-laws can’t forgive her hubris. Even her daughter calls her a “bad woman” and refuses to see her.

Saying “The Woman From New York” is one of the weaker stories in the book is only a way of praising the rest. Jin’s focus wanders here more than it does, say, in the title story, which tells about a sensitive, handsome, clean-living bachelor, Huang Baowen, who surprises the narrator by proposing marriage to a homely young woman. Months after the wedding Baowen is arrested at a secret gay men’s club. Almost everyone in the story, including Baowen, displays a shocking, near-superstitious ignorance of homosexuality, and the narrator uses his modest influence to make sure the authorities give Baowen the mildest form of “lifestyle cure” — a program of electric baths:

Baowen was noiseless in the electrified water, with his eyes shut and his head resting on a black rubber pad at the end of the tub. He looked fine, rather relaxed … Then the nurse gave him more electricity. Baowen began writhing and moaning a little. Obviously he was suffering. This bath couldn’t be so soothing as he’d claimed. With a white towel Nurse Long wiped the sweat off Baowen’s face and whispered, “I’ll turn it down in a few minutes.”

Jin delivers all his stories in this modest documentary style, without surrealism or emotional heat. His everyday weirdnesses accumulate like coral. The writing is as restrained as the society he describes, where bureaucratic suppression becomes a medium, even a language. And every story here is cut like a stone. My favorite one is “Flame,” about an abortive romance between a military commisar and a nurse. The commisar sends a letter asking to see the nurse, years after she’s married another man. She turns quietly giddy, but on the big day he doesn’t show up. Instead, two soldiers arrive in a jeep, to deliver what’s either a sentimental tribute from the commissar or an ironic gesture of revenge. Jin’s characters always hope for special advantage, what you might call Party favors; and in this case the commisar has sent his old flame 60 pounds of fresh salmon and several gallons of soy oil. It’s a typical Ha Jinism, a finely wrought sublimation. In a society where certain feelings are illegal, passion as well as pettiness can be expressed though bureaucratic pull.

Nasaw’s book draws from thousands of recently uncovered letters, interviews and private papers; it tries to avoid anecdotal information and rest on provable facts. The result is a solid, workmanlike chronicle, less colorful than the last full biography of Hearst (W.A. Swanberg’s “Citizen Hearst,” published in 1961) but not that much different in broad outline. Hearst is pretty well mapped out. The man was a blustering American extrovert with a paradoxically high, sensitive voice and welkin-blue eyes. He could be scornful of high society as well as immensely social, devoted to fine European art as well as chorus girls, smart about the world as well as ignorant of himself.

Nasaw’s most interesting thumbnail of the man, to me, is almost a throwaway. After winning a seat in Congress at the age of 39,

he held a huge fireworks display in Madison Square, as he had done so often before. This time, something went wrong … The New York Times reported the next morning, “a terrific explosion of fireworks occurred, transforming in an instant the entire east side of the park into a scene of death and carnage which a battlefield could scarcely have surpassed in its horror …”

Months later, Hearst and his entourage sailed for Europe on the Kaiser Wilhelm II. At the dock, “A process server was waiting for them — ever since the fireworks disaster in November, Hearst had been followed by them — but Carvalho [an editor] got rid of him.”

Swanberg tells that same story in denser, snappier detail; Nasaw just summarizes, but he relates the events to Hearst’s unreflectiveness and his vanity. I just wish Nasaw did this sort of thing more often. He sums up Hearst’s life and personality in a few well-argued pages near the end, but the biography overall could use a stronger narrative frame, with more summing-up moments along the way.

The bulk of the new information fattens Nasaw’s sections on Hitler, FDR and the 1937 crash of the Hearst empire. The Chief, as he was known, comes off as a boyish millionaire with a taste for overspending whose credit dried up during the Depression partly because investors couldn’t stand his politics. Hearst was always a populist: For the first three decades of his career, he threw his newspapers behind the most important American labor reforms — he led the trust-busting movement and skewered corporate control of Congress. (He was friends with George Bernard Shaw, too.)

But in the ’30s, he veered to the right, ordering his papers and newsreels to go easy on Hitler and resist Roosevelt’s New Deal. These positions ruined circulation, but he stuck by them because he hated any whiff of “foreign entanglements” or of communism. By 1940 he had rebounded by starting a patriotic Red scare that would culminate in the rise of Joe McCarthy. Hearst became an archenemy of the Left, yet he continued to consider himself a progressive until his death, in 1951. Nasaw is a historian, and he’s especially good at tracing the vagaries and shifting currents of Hearst’s demagogic liberalism.

But the Chief’s lasting legacy is the concept of the media empire: He showed what could be done with that power. The Hearst Corp. these days is richer than ever, with assets in network TV, cable channels, magazines, newspapers and the Web. But can you name the chairman? At least while Hearst was alive everyone knew he dictated and horse-traded editorial policy. But when Tim White, the publisher of Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, admitted last month to promising easy editorial treatment to San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown in return for support on a deal to buy the San Francisco Chronicle — in what looks like a bid by the Hearst Corp. to monopolize San Francisco’s daily market — everyone acted surprised. White is on punitive, indefinite leave. This is pure, blinding, sulfurous hypocrisy. Hearst pulled that shit all the time.

Evers didn’t believe in very much at the time, and he was socked in under a long horizon of bloodless indifference as thick as paste; he had the look and air of a cur mother suckling another gang of mongrel babies, her head and side lying flush on the ground, her fur clumped in a few spots, too weary to do much more than shift her eyes and half-ass growl if someone happened by.

After that passage — in Paragraph 3 — the adventurous writing dissolves, and what starts as a promising debut turns into an uneven murder mystery.

But not a bad one. The best aspect of “Mobile Home Living” is its loping sense of humor. Too much of the book, though, relies on rusty plot devices. A woman named Ruth Esther English corners Evers one morning and offers him part of a lost inheritance in exchange for letting her brother, Artis, who’s up on a possession charge, go free. Artis holds the missing clue to a puzzle that might reveal the money’s location. Evers doesn’t need the cash and neither does Ruth Esther, so Clark spends a lot of energy explaining why Evers agrees to corrupt himself and fly with two other people on a moonshine quest for a safe-deposit box in Utah. The most interesting reason has to do with the eerily pure “albino mystery” of Ruth Esther’s tears, which Evers collects and keeps in the cap of a ketchup bottle. The tears haunt him even after his quest to Utah — which is brief — and maintain some kind of mystical significance through the rest of the novel.

Evers’ love-hate relationship with his estranged wife, Jo Miller, reveals a number of his weird, deep neuroses about women, and when she starts to win their divorce trial (after being caught in flagrante with her lover in a motel room), somebody kills her with a pistol. The subsequent investigation smears both Evers and his brother, Pascal, who lives in a mobile-home park, but a self-sacrificing act by Pascal leaves Evers with a quavering faith in Something every bit as absurd as the pure white tears in the taped-up ketchup cap.

A lot of the characters feel thin, but the trial scenes are engaging. Clark himself is a judge in Virginia, and he has the talent to show just how “yes” becomes “no” in the convolutions of a circuit court system. Such sickening legal peristalsis could drive a novel all by itself; Clark doesn’t need any treasure quest. He captures the hustling and incompetent lawyers, lying and manufactured witnesses and strong and weak personalities that steer a trial more decisively than due process. Evers the judge hides women’s magazines (Cosmopolitan, Self) in big lawbooks to read when a trial drags on; Evers the client can’t behave himself in the courtroom. Evers, in fact, can be unfathomably strange, yet his craziness makes him the clearest character in the book. When Jo Miller brazenly lies during an alimony hearing, for instance, he lapses into a hallucinatory fugue:

Her face — very suddenly — changed, came on like an electric fan on a hot day … Out of the middle of the maelstrom, Evers saw two sharp eyes appear … The spiked eyes looked right at him, and Evers hunched forward and stared back, leaned across the table on his elbows and clenched his fists. The circling mess balanced on his wife’s head didn’t leave until White [his lawyer] kicked Evers under the table and pinched his biceps. “Stop staring at her, Evers. You look menacing or crazed or something.”

Evers also likes his beer mixed with tomato juice and doesn’t think that’s strange. (“Do you want tomato juice in your beer or just beer?” he asks Ruth Esther in a liquor store.) He’s flawed but intensely likable. The trouble with “Mobile Home Living” is that no one else has been painted with so much paradoxical detail. Jo Miller is a one-dimensional bitch; Pauletta, a black lawyer, could be any black lawyer on TV. Clark wastes his time with rickety pulp-fiction conventions to make what’s ultimately a good and serious point about religion and irrationality. It would be nice to say he’s “filling up the genre” of legal fiction, letting his artificial story twists serve his theme, but no: The incessant plotting feels more like a failure of faith.