Tag: 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.

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”

The X-Men Diet

The other day, I was inspired to think about creative ways to lose weight. “Creative” meaning solutions that allow one to eat tasty food. That pretty much leaves us with quackery or increasing energy expenditure. Unfortunately, quackery, being quackery, generally does not work, and increasing energy expenditure usually means doing things that are either boring (e.g., jogging) or hard work (e.g., jogging) or both (e.g., jogging).

What really increases your energy usage, isn’t boring, or hard work? Shooting energy beams from your eyes, like Cyclops[1]. Shooting energy beams from your eyes has to require lots of energy, doesn’t it. I mean, they are beams of energy. And, Cyclops always seems to be in pretty good shape. Could the two be connected? Where does the energy for the beams of energy come from? Continue reading “The X-Men Diet”

Vote for sci-fi favorites at NPR

NPR has a nice list of 100 great sci-fi novels, and they’re trying to narrow it down to the 10 best. Head on over there and vote, or at least scan the list and see how many you’ve read.

Decancelliation

I imagine that very few species would consider not having to worry about leopard attacks a bad thing. The enthusiasm for any story claiming that human beings continue to being driven upwards and onwards by natural selection suggests that we pine for those halcyon days of yore when being eaten alive by jungle cats was a major source of morbidity[1]. We worry about a lack of selection for things like good eye-sight and gobble up cheap, pop evolutionary psychology[2] stories of adaptive behavior.

We really want to know are human beings still evolving and how can reclaim the benefits of natural selection without feeding our offspring to leopards?

Continue reading “Decancelliation”