science fiction
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On self-importance.
We aren’t the stars of other people’s stories — and that’s okay.
addiction, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, anxiety, Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom, Blake Crouch, career, caretakers, caretaking, children or career, clone battle, clones, dark matter, decoherence, drug, drug addiction, drugs, Exhalation, family, family or career, family versus career, Hugh Everett, infinity, jail, love, macaques, many worlds, many worlds theory, many-worlds interpretation, Nezhukumathil, opiates, postponing children for career, prioritizing caretaking, prioritizing family, Pulp Fiction, quantum decoherence, quantum measurement, quantum mechanics, Quentin Tarantino, rehab, sci-fi, sci-fi thriller, science fiction, taking care of family, Ted Chiang, thrill, World of Wonders
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On domestication and Sue Burke’s ‘Semiosis’
With every generation, our species changes. If we found ourselves on the cusp of survival, an alien world could easily reshape us to fit its needs.
aggression, alien life, artificial selection, Belyayev, coevolution, conscious plants, directed evolution, domesticated foxes, domestication, evolution, flowering plants, fruiting plants, future humans, human domestication, human evolution, intelligent plantlife, intelligent plants, Russian fox experiment, science fiction, selective breeding, selective pressure, self-domestication, Semiosis, Semiosis review, Sue Burke
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On ‘The Overstory.’
Trees made our world livable. Will we show gratitude … or destroy all the forests, wrecking our own chances of survival in the process?
AI, algorithms, artificial intelligence, atmosphere, bees, biomass, book review, brains, carbon, carbon cycles, chemical communication, climate, climate change, cognition, Collapse, communication, computers, consciousness, cycle of life, deforestation, Earth, environmentalism, environmentalist, evolution, extinction, forest, Fruitful Labor, global warming, Go, greenhouse gases, Jared Diamond, Mike Madison, nature, neural networks, neurology, neurons, old growth forest, origin of consciousness, oxygenation, plant communication, Richard Powers, robots, science fiction, smartphones, speed of life, sunlight, tech, technology, technology addiction, The Overstory, The Overstory review, tree communication, tree talk, trees, vegan, Walden, woodlands, woods
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On Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Underground Railroad.’
In Colson Whitehead’s new speculative fiction, he condenses a century of racial injustice into a single fugitive’s journey. I hope readers realize the reality was even worse, that some of these crimes spanned the century and reverberate still.
alternate history, animal welfare, Blood at the Root, Carol Anderson, Colson Whitehead, curses, Douglas Blackmon, emancipation, evil, Forsyth County, fugitive slave act, graduate school, Harriet Washington, incarceration crisis, Lewis Hyde, Medical Apartheid, Michelle Alexander, oppression, Patrick Phillips, police brutality, review of The Underground Railroad, science fiction, slavery, Slavery By Another Name, speculative fiction, Stanford, The Gift, The New Jim Crow, The Underground Railroad, Thirteenth Amendment, trust, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, vegan, vegetarian, whose pain matters, witchcraft
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On ‘Cat’s Cradle’ and whether or not it’s sci-fi.
The science is realistic, but, more importantly, the science doesn’t matter. The story is about people. Oh, and, the world ends. Whatever.
Cat’s Cradle, catalysis, classics, energy barriers, fate of the universe, ice-9, Kurt Vonnegut, literary fiction, mad cow disease, math analogies for non-math people, Pages to Prisoners, prions, qwerty keyboards, resistance to change, sci-fi, science fiction, science versus philosophy, speculative fiction, the big freeze, the meaning of life is protein?, the stickiness of bad ideas, thermodynamics, transition-state energy
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On redemption and Christianity in The Book of Strange New Things.
So, I read a couple reviews that didn’t like Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. The problem was, in the reviewers’ eyes, that the novel as science fiction was bland (e.g. this piece from NPR). And I’ll admit, I wasn’t having fun for most of the time I spent reading it. But at…
Frank Brown Cloud 