Tag: Books

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”

The half-life of zombies

Over at SF Signal, a post on the post-post-apocalypse by author David Moody:

We’re taught from early days that all stories must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Take my genre of choice – post-apocalyptic fiction. You have the beginning – the event – then the middle as our cast of characters inevitably have to fight to survive in what’s left of their world, but what about the end?…

I get frustrated by the lack of development in much zombie fiction…There’s a blatantly obvious issue which usually gets totally overlooked, and that’s that the zombies are rotting. They might be a deadly threat today and tomorrow, but what about in six months time?

Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit

If a famous novelist visited your lab, would you remember it?

Jeffrey Eugenides’ latest novel The Marriage Plot features a bipolar yeast geneticist. While writing the book, Eugenides, who lives down the road from several world-famous yeast genetics labs at Princeton, decided to do a little research. He visited David Botstein, one of the elder eminences of yeast genetics, got a tour of the lab, and nobody there seems to remember the visit. From the New York Times: Continue reading “Pulitzer-prize winning novelist visits genetics lab, scientists have no recollection of visit”

Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die

In honor of Darwin’s Birthday, I lay out the case for The Voyage of the Beagle as great literature:

Sitting on a rickety homemade bookshelf in my living room are the fifty volumes of my Great-Grandfather’s Harvard Classics. Once a teenaged political refugee from the Russian revolutionary turmoil of 1905 and later an accomplished bacteriologist with Merck, my Great-Grandfather exemplified Harvard President Charles Eliot’s American middle class, “twentieth century idea of a cultivated man,” the kind of person for whom Eliot’s “five foot shelf of books” was intended. A respected Mr. among professional scientific peers of Drs., my Great-Grandfather was fiercely committed to self-education. I never met him, but I imagine that my Great-Grandfather would have subscribed to Eliot’s notion of individual and civilizational progress, progress that is the result of “man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining.” The Harvard Classics were selected to be a survey of how this process has played out over the millennia.

Eliot’s words, “observing, recording, inventing, and imagining,” describe several thousand years of human intellectual activity by invoking the process of science. This is appropriate because Eliot, and my Great-Grandfather, were living when the modern scientific view of the world was well on its way to world domination, becoming a new belief system with as much cultural heft as the major religions, and one whose conquest occurred even more rapidly than the spectacular rise from obscurity of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam over the last two thousand years. Continue reading “Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die”

Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos

A little preview from a forthcoming Darwin Day essay on The Voyage of the Beagle, here are the contrasting styles of Darwin and Melville in their descriptions of the Galapagos. Melville’s imagery is impressionistic and improvisational, while Darwin’s approach to imagery depends, naturally, on observational precision and tight organizations of his thoughts, which can be just as successful as Melville’s more consciously literary style.

Melville’s description of the Galapagos from The Encantadas: Continue reading “Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos”