Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

First Post-apocalyptic sci-fi for 2012

I picked up Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife for Christmas, and can’t wait to start reading it. (Alas, I must first make a little room on my stack.)

Here’s what Paul de Filippo has to say about the book that io9 called this year’s weirdest post-apocalyptic novel:

With his new book, Blueprints of the Afterlife, Boudinot takes this finely wrought but perhaps thematically underpowered mimetic-absurdist vehicle and drops in a rocket-powered speculative engine. If Misconception took off from “So Little Time,” Blueprints launches hypersonically from “Written by Machines.”

The bulk of the novel unfolds about a century from now, in a postapocalyptic future barely emerging from an interregnum called the Age of Fucked Up Shit. We will witness at several removes, in the form of interview transcripts with one Luke Piper, the birth of FUS, an enigmatic era whose full meaning and dimensions Boudinot sternly and bravely refuses to fully resolve. With its leitmotif of “superposition,” the physics riff most familiar from the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, this novel pinwheels out multivalent explanations for almost everything, demanding that the reader navigate his or her own best-determined path of causality through the sly and shifting narrative.

But do not take that to mean that Blueprints of the Afterlife is an impenetrable nest of hypertext. Far from it. Its linear propulsion, studded with bravura set pieces, is compulsively readable in the manner of any consumer-friendly epic fantasy novel, overstuffed with unforgettable freakish characters (in the Age of FUS, freakish is the new normal); laugh-out-loud or cringe-worthy incidents; and rafts of genuinely innovative scientific, spiritual, and philosophical speculations delivered in sleek and colorful prose.

On days like this I wish I was a mathematician

Titles of the references on the Hawaiian earring Wikipedia page, clearly designed to make math actually seem fun:

“The big fundamental group, big Hawaiian earrings, and the big free groups”

“Anomalous behavior of the Hawaiian earring group”

“The fundamental groups of one-dimensional wild spaces and the Hawaiian earring”

“The singular homology of the Hawaiian earring”

“The topological Hawaiian earring group does not embed in the inverse limit of free groups”

Confusing data with theory

Maybe because experiments can be so much work, molecular biologists are just happy to have the data:

Krakauer, et al. “The challenges and scope of theoretical biology”, Journal of Theoretical Biology Volume 276, Issue 1, 7 May 2011, Pages 269–276:

The current absence of a strong theoretical foundation in biology means that there is weak guidance regarding what quantities or variables need to be understood to best inform a general understanding (an explanatory basis) for biological features of interest. An unfortunate result of the absence of theory is that some researchers confuse just having data with ‘understanding’. For example there is a base for collecting and analyzing the most microscopic data: experimental procedures and measurements in a high-throughput transcriptomics study are built around the assumption that transcripts are the primary data to be explained, and in neuroscience, recording from numerous individual neurons. This bias reflects a rather naive belief that the most fundamental data provide a form of explanation for a system, as if enumerating the fundamental particles were equivalent to the standard model in physics.

And here is this kind of thinking in action:

Nurse and Hayles. The cell in an era of systems biology. Cell (2011) vol. 144 (6) pp. 850-854: Continue reading “Confusing data with theory”

Most inappropriate sentence ever written in a biophysical chemistry textbook

In fact most of our modern interest in the structure of biological molecules and systems is the foreplay related to our passionate interest in function.

– P.R. Bergethon, The Physical Basis of Biochemistry

Michel Houellebecq does post-apocalyptic clones

I just read Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island. It was a mistake for me to do so. Given my literary tastes (Pynchon, Nabokov, Kafka, Borges, Cortázar, Calvino, DeLillo, etc.) I’ve long thought that Houellebecq would just my style but unfortunately, instead of reading what is likely a better Houellebecq novel, Elementary Particles, I picked up up The Possibility of an Island. On the surface, this book sounds great – a provocative, imaginative French writer does a sci-fi-ish, post-human, post-apocalyptic novel. What’s not to love?

Well, the tedious writing for one. While there are some good riffs in here, in general the flat prose is repetitive and tiring, executed with a light ponderosity that quickly becomes boring. I’ve got nothing against ‘novels of ideas’, but my experience is that a novel centered around ideas (as opposed to say, one focused on plot or character sketches) is generally a failure unless it also succeeds as art, because without art this kind of a novel typically is about as compelling as the classic dinner party bore who spends the whole evening droning on with poorly articulated banalities. Continue reading “Michel Houellebecq does post-apocalyptic clones”