Favorite ultra-weird sci-fi

io9 has two posts on ultra-weird sci-fi, which is just my kind of thing. Why? Well, first, it’s not boring, and second, weird sci-fi is where you find authors discovering new means of expression, which makes the reading the book a more powerful, or at least trippy experience. Below are my 10 choices for best ultra-weird sci-fi, and I’m always looking for new book recommendations, so what are your picks?

In no particular order:

1. Blueprints of the Afterlife, Ryan Boudinot:By the end of this book, you still won’t know what’s going on, but it’s a time-beinding, post-apocalyptic trip. Boudinot’s world is Philip Dick meets Snow Crash meets The Simpsons. Some time after a catastrophic, corporate-sponsored civil war, Manhattan is now being recreated in the Pacific Northwest, down to the last detail. Just who is doing this recreating isn’t clear, nor is it clear why or how a pre-war architect was able to draw up the blueprints out of the, uh, blue. That the narrative is non-linear is putting it mildly, and the book has an appropriately weird cast including a world-champion dishwasher, government-sponsored, genetically engineered humans who are farmed for tissues, a celebrity whose legal name is Neeman Fucking Jordan, and of course, a Last Dude. Continue reading “Favorite ultra-weird sci-fi”

Michael Dirda on John Carter and Edgar Rice Burroughs

Over at BN Review:

In 1911 Edgar Rice Burroughs, having failed at everything else, decided to write a novel. He was then in his mid-thirties, married with two children, barely supporting his family as the agent for a pencil-sharpener business. In earlier years he’d served in the Seventh Cavalry, worked as a rancher and gold miner, started an advertising agency, sold light bulbs and candy and uplifting books door-to-door, and not really made a go of anything.

As a thirty-something who’s barely supporting a family after a string of not-successes, Burroughs sounds like my kind of guy.

Pi Day?

In the irrational American way of denoting dates, today is 3-14-2012, which makes it Pi Day as the irrational, mathematical constant π=3.14… The suitability of 14 March as Pi Day is highly dependent on cultural context.

What π really represents is the ratio between the radius of an ideal circle and its circumference (C=2πr) or its area (A=πr2). We can determine the day of the year that best expresses this ratio if we treat the 365.25 days of the calendar year as either the circumference or area of the circle and calculating the day that would be the “radius”. In the case of the circumference, r~58 or 27 February. In the case of the area, r~11 or 11 January. Personally, I prefer to think of the year as the circumference, as it is linear and repeating, but you may pick your poison. I have both on my calendar and like to think of them in the same way as Catholic and Orthodox disagreements about the timing of Easter.

And, now is the point where I retract my earlier assertion that 16 February should be Phi Day. The more precise expression of the ratio gives us Day 226 (Φ~365/226) on the calendar, which is usually 14 August (except in the leap year). Please revise your calendar’s appropriately.

Mining industry takes on peer-review

It’s really not a new storyline: A big science study is examining whether some industry product or practice is harmful, and industry lawyers and scientists pull out all the stops to block the results. In this case, the question is whether miners’ exposure to diesel exhaust increases their risk of lung cancer. (Really, is there anything about being a miner that does not increase your risk of lung cancer?)

A post over at the Natural Resources Defense Council lays out the details (h/t Climate Progress). Several scientific journals received threatening letters from a mining industry lobby, warning these journals not to publish, or even peer-review papers from the diesel/mining/lung cancer study. The mining industry is trying to block publication of scientific studies they did not pay for, and whose results they did not like. A society in which any scientific study can be blocked by third party that possesses enough legal firepower is not the kind of society we should be.

According to Science, several journal editors received legal threats from a mining industry lobbyist:
Continue reading “Mining industry takes on peer-review”

A very graphic Graphic Princess of Mars

The Disney version of Burrough’s classic too tame for you? Check out James Killian Spratt’s graphic novel version, with all of the graphic nudity and violence you could hope for. Currently free online, and to be published at some future point.

(h/t io9.com)