Books — hermiene.net

Manfred Macx, a heavily augmented transhuman in the early 21st century, is a visionary and a so-called venture altruist: He roams the world, giving ideas away for free and turning paradigms upside-down as a matter of course. The novel follows him towards a technological singularity, his daughter Amber through it, and her son, Sirhan, after it.

This novel is somewhat special in that it is chuck full of jargon (e.g. 419) and techno-speculation (e.g. utility fog). Have a dictionary handy if you want to avoid being drowned in it. It's when you understand all of it, if only superficially, that the novel becomes the brilliant flair of wild ideas that it is.

This book gives a really good and detailed story of LSD, the drug of the sixties. If you want to get a general overview of that part of history without too many extraneous details, go for this book. It was written in 1986, which gives it some distance from the events described.

The first part explains the Law of Accelerating Returns, discusses the idea of an intelligence (us) creating a greater intelligence (computers), and how a machine would deal with ambiguities of language (there are at least four ways of interpreting the sentence "time flies like an arrow", laid out in the book). The second part deals with preparing the present, and discusses different ways of building brains (and uploading already-built brains to another substrate). The third part is a journey through the twenty-first century, with stops for snapshots at 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. At the end of each chapter is an imaginary talk with an imaginary reader, Molly, which helps explain things.

A passenger plane goes into a series of deep dives and climbs, killing three and injuring many. The novel spans the week following the accident, and follows the team who tries to clear it up.

An allegorical story of a boy who follows his dreams and heart and eventually discovers his true self and finds his treasure.

I found it a little too naive to be entertaining, but it's a cute story nonetheless.

Contains Grow Old Along with Me (which became Pebble in the Sky), The End of Eternity (which became a novel with the same name), and two versions of Belief (the unpublished and the published versions).

Grow Old Along with Me takes place in the Galactic Era (when humans have colonized millions of worlds) and deals with an Earth plot to take revenge at the rest of the Galaxy for its poor treatment of the Earth, and to establish the Earth as the ruling world. (As a side-note, no one in the Galaxy really knows if humanity originated on a single planet, or if they originated on several worlds more or less simultaneously and, when each planet became space-faring, met and interbred to form the humanity that is the Galactic Empire. Most adhere to the latter, which they call the Merger Theory. The former is called the Radiation Theory and is believed by a small sect on Earth calling themselves the Ancients.)

The End of Eternity is a time travel short story about the so-called Eternals who live in Eternity and alter the realities of different centuries by making quantum changes.

Belief is a story about Roger Toomey who one morning discovers that he can levitate, and centers around his attempts at getting his fellow physicists to believe him. The two versions (the unpublished and the published) differ only in the endings. My favorite of these is by far the published version of Belief (Asimov preferred the unpublished one), because it tells a beautiful story in a beautiful way. My least favorite is The End of Eternity, because time travel is full of paradoxes (and I really dislike paradoxes).

As the title says, this is an introductory anthology to American poetry. The introduction devotes around three pages to a synopsis of a selection of the authors' lives, and the book itself has a handful of poems from each author.

This book is pretty dated, but I still enjoyed the selection.

A history book about life, in reverse chronology.

This 600+ pages book could easily be called Dawkins' magnum opus. It's a history of life, written in reverse chronology, starting with humans and working backwards to the common ancestor to all life. The book is divided into chapters, called Rendezvous, and each rendezvous would be where two twigs on the tree of life meet. If you picture the tree of life, then the book starts at one tip of the tree, humanity, and moves progressively backwards (inwards) to the root of the tree. (Actually, this is slightly misleading. The entire tree of life is an unrooted phylogenetic tree, not a rooted one.) At each rendezvous, a joining pilgrim (sometimes several) gets a chance to tell its Tale, and the tale usually illustrates a point about biology. This is what makes this book such a joy to read. While you're reading you can (and are in fact encouraged to) imagine that you're on a pilgrimage (see subtitle), à la Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But unlike The Canterbury Tales, this isn't a work of fiction, and you'll inevitably learn a lot of biology while you're at it.

In the book, like with most of Dawkins' books, he doesn't shy away from using technical words, but he's very meticulous about explaining ones that may be unfamiliar to the reader. Being a hobby etymologist, this is the kind of writing that I love. (The word 'Neanderthal', for instance, comes from Neander, the valley in Germany in which the original fossil was found, and 'thal', which is German for 'valley'.) And besides, it's a fun challenge for the reader to go look up the words she doesn't understand.

This is a thoroughly excellent and riveting book, but be warned that it's also a long and difficult book. Set aside a good chunk of uninterrupted time for it. I read about one-fifth of it (straight) in bed, and the rest during a thirteen-hour bus trip, and I was in a daze for a week. (Maybe partly because I read it on a bus, but mostly because the book itself is so eye-opening.)

The Illuminati steals a quarter gram of antimatter from CERN, places it somewhere inside the Vatican, and kidnaps four cardinals from under the Vatican's nose. Robert Langdon, a symbologist from America, is flown in to investigate.

An asteroid of respectable size plunges into the Pacific, starting the apocalypse. The novel follows a group of people through it.

Overall the story is very gripping, but at times I felt there were too many characters to make each of them stand out, which made it harder to sympathize with them. The writing is good and the pacing is OK; I definitely recommend it.

Phileas Fogg, a London gentleman of the Reform Club (which is actually a real club), and his French valet, Passepartout, make a £20 000 bet with the other gentlemen of the Reform Club that circumnavigation of the Earth is possible in fewer than eighty days.

One would suspect that the novel would be boring nowadays, when circumnavigation can be done in far fewer than eighty days, but this is not the case. It's not so much the feat itself as the sense of adventure that makes the novel really good (and there is plenty of adventure to go around).

The Art of War is a classic treatise on war (and tactics in war) and covers topics such as the real purpose of war, different types of ground, how to treat your soldiers, and the use of spies.

Unlike Asimov's previous compilation of jokes, Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor, this one isn't divided into categories; rather, it's a long story of one joke flowing neatly into the next one, with banter inbetween.

I like this style much better, as evidenced by the copious amount of dog-earing in my paperback edition.

Let me give you some samples.

One psychiatrist met another and greeted him with, "You're fine; how am I?"

A German was giving an impassioned speech at the United Nations and the interpreter was silent.

"What's he saying?" someone whispered to the interpreter.

"I don't know yet," said the interpreter. "I'm waiting for the verb."

An astronomer said, "What's the use!
Our classical knowledge is loose.
There can be nothing stupider
Than to name that world Jupiter,
When we all know it should be called Zeus."

"As for screwing," said Little Miss Muffet,
"I proclaim here and now that I love it.
I defy the authority
Of the Moral Majority.
They can take all their preaching and stuff it."

This is a collection of essays by Asimov on numbers and mathematics. It discusses how we got the concept of zero (from India via the Arabs), exponents, factorials, aleph numbers (there are actually different kinds of infinities), pi, imaginary numbers, huge numbers (like googol, but that doesn't even scratch the surface), the metric system (yum), and a host of other stuff. It also has an essay on animals and their sizes.

As with most essay collections from Asimov, this one is a sure-fire good read. Asimov explains in detail (but not too painful detail) a lot of difficult mathematics, step by careful step. Unlike a lot of his other collections, this one feels a little miscellaneous, but that doesn't at all detract from its quality.

This is a thick door-stopper of a book, dealing with all of science (and the history of science in general). It's divided into two major parts, The Physical Sciences and The Biological Sciences.

Asimov wrote very well fiction, but I think non-fiction is where he shines, and this book is no exception. Go buy it, and get an overview of the vast fields of science!

Perhaps The best non-robot non-Foundation science fiction of Isaac Asimov would be a more fitting, if longer, title for the book. This is an anthology of stories chosen by Asimov himself, with commentary preceding each story.

A very good synthesis of and commentary on the nature-nurture debate from the point of view of an evolutionary psychologist. The book is divided into six parts named "The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine" (in which Pinker outlines the debate and discusses the three doctrines in the title), "Fear and Loathing" (in which he describes the reactions from scientists and lay people to the discoveries of the modern sciences of human nature), "Human Nature with a Human Face" (in which he discusses four fears — inequality, imperfectibility, determinism, and nihilism — that seem to flow from the dismantling of the three doctrines outlined in the first chapter), "Know Thyself" (in which he attempts to allay fears by making human nature explicit), "Hot Buttons" (in which he deals with five topics — politics, violence, gender, children, and the arts — and explain how the sciences of human nature touch on these), and "The Voice of the Species" (which is a single chapter where Pinker draws examples from poetry and literature to illustrate his main points and bring the book to a natural end).

A very good book about human nature, and why gut feelings and folk theories on psychology are often wrong (or not right enough). This is the first book on evolutionary psychology I've read, so I had a little trouble keeping up with the parts of the book that described its history and methods, but I think I got the gist of those parts. I especially enjoyed the last part of the book, titled "The Voice of the Species", where Pinker quotes various poets and authors (such as Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Kurt Vonnegut), in passages illuminating human nature. I can wholeheartedly recommend this book!

The Blind Watchmaker demolishes the argument from design, which was first advanced by the theologian William Paley. In short, it goes like this: If you're walking somewhere and you find a rock, you don't require an explanation for why it's there. But if you find a watch, you'll assume that the watch had a maker. Organisms are complex things, like a watch, so they, too, should require a maker (evolution is the blind watchmaker that the title alludes to). The book introduces biomorphs, creatures in a computer program that can evolve a multitude of shapes based on nine different "genes" (variables) which control how the form grows. Even with only nine genes, the number of forms that can be generated is huge, and the reader is invited to imagine walking through the (nine-dimensional!) space of possible shapes.

A collection of virtually every short story of Arthur C. Clarke. See Structure for links to some of them.

The stories are of varying quality, although most are very good (and some are truly excellent). As this is a compilation, it's hard to give a verdict, but I definitely recommend it to you if you're a Clarke fan.

This is a collection of robot stories that he wrote between 1940 and 1976. They're not grouped chronologically, but by theme (and this works really well). The stories, of course, revolve around robots; non-humanoid, immobile, metallic, and humanoid (there's even an android in the last story, but I've already spoiled too much).

Some of these stories are amazing, and you should go pick up this anthology now. My favorites are A Boy's Best Friend, Victory Unintentional, Segregationist, Evidence, Feminine Intuition, and The Bicentennial Man.

An anthology with short stories which each presents a "dangerous vision" (although I would call them "visions for thought").

These thirty-two stories are all excellent in their own ways, but some stand out as superbly excellent. I've transcribed these and put them on my Short Stories page. They are Shall the Dust Praise Thee?, Evensong, The Malley System, Carcinoma Angels, and A Toy For Juliette. These are teasers, and I believe no further review is necessary. Go buy this book.

A review, synopsis, and a criticism of Dawkins' The God Delusion, The Dawkins Delustion? examines the issues raised there.

The book is pretty well presented, but unfortunately it was very boring and lacks substance. It really could be shortened down to an essay. The main message from the book is that Dawkins' book doesn't take enough into account, and that his criticism of religion is unfounded.

A group of people (including the author's alter ego, crime author Bernhard Borge) travel into the woods to explore the mystery around the eponymous Lake of the Dead.

NASA discovers a meteoric rock under the Milne Ice Shelf which contains a fossil, and the story centers around this remarkable find. Involved in their own ways are a senator, a senator's daughter, a senator's aide, the U.S. President, and several organizations.

The Demon-Haunted World deals with human imagination, science, and scepticism, in a nutshell. In reality it's so much more: It's a defense of scepticism, an advertisement for science, a crash course in wonder, and an explanation of science and what it's all about. My favorite chapters, I think, are The Dragon in My Garage and The Fine Art of Baloney Detection.

The Doors of Perception is a very short book about Huxley's experience with mescaline (a psychoactive compound found in the Peyote cactus). He takes it in his own home with a friend and muses on the wonders he sees.

The title is a reference to a book by William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which contains these lines:

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

Even thought it's short, it's sweet and to the point. I highly recommend it.

A business man decides to re-purpose an old house on the southern coast of Norway to a summer hotel. There's a superstition among the locals that the house is haunted, and a gang of friends travel down to stay there. Scary things ensue...

I don't normally read crime novels, but André Bjerke is really good at setting the mood, and he writes with wonderful wit, humor, and knowledge. (For instance, there's an Omar Khayyam poem in it!)

A riveting read, and definitely recommended.

This is a collection of Poe's works. It's a big and beautifully-bound book, with illustrations for all the stories and poems.

If you've never read anything by Edgar Allan Poe before, you're in for a major treat. I can highly recommend some stories: The Pit and the Pendulum (about a man being kept captive during the Spanish Inquisition), The Gold Bug (about a man discovering an ancient treasure map), The Premature Burial (about exactly what the title says), The Cask of Amontillado (about a drunk man meeting a horrifying death), The Tell-Tale Heart (about a murderer who hallucinates his victim's heart beat), and Shadow — A Parable (about whispers in the night, not to spoil it). I can heartily recommend this book, or any other Poe collection, for that matter.

Mankind has opened Eternity, and a group of people there constantly interfere with the Centuries to iron out mistakes and keep mankind safe.

I normally don't like time-travel stories because they're confusing. This one is also pretty confusing, but it's well-written confusion, and I can recommend it on that point alone.

The central thesis in End of Faith is that faith is dangerous, because beliefs unsupported by evidence, when put into action, can't be reasoned with. Harris gives a lot of historical examples of this (indeed, the book has a pretty extensive bibliography in the back), and the book is peppered with endnotes (and a few pages-long ones, at that!).

The last two chapters are called A Science of Good and Evil (where Harris tries to map out an emerging science of morality) and Experiments in Consciousness (where Harris basically advocates meditation as a rational way of garnering knowledge about subjectivity, and where he doesn't reject the notion of consciousness surviving physical death). While I reject the notion that personhood survives death (that is, I think consciousness is dependent upon the brain being able to function properly and that when it eventually succumbs to decay, that'll be the end of us), I can wholeheartedly join Harris in admitting ignorance on that question.

While I can't say the book was an entirely enjoyable read, it's definitely well-written and engaging. What turned me off was the incessant referencing to past atrocities. However, that was in part (I think) the intent of the book, and in that sense it succeeded. I can definitely recommend it, nonetheless.

This 1986 Drexler book is a seminal work on molecular nanotechnology. It's very well-written and very well-paced, and charts some of the possibilities and dangers with upcoming technologies such as nano-sized robots and true artificial intelligence. Despite being extremely future-optimistic (which it has every right to be, of course), it's also extremely rational; it gives examples of disagreements and somewhat tries to refute these.

The book describes how tiny robots might build a light-weight and sturdy rocket engine in a vat, how a person might be frozen and then thawed several years later (cryonics), and how tiny robots might act as a tight-fitting and light spacesuit. These are very excellent descriptions, and it's very hard not to imagine these things with awe.

The book is very quotable, too. Check out this one, for instance, which criticizes Jeremy Rifkin's Entropy: A New World View, a controversial book about entropy and how it relates to human activities:

"The entropy threat is an example of blatant nonsense, yet its inventors and promoters aren't laughed off the public stage. Imagine a thousand, a million similar distortions - some subtle, some brazen, but all warping the public's understanding of the world. Now imagine a group of democratic nations suffering from an infestation of such memes while attempting to cope with an era of accelerating technological revolution. We have a real problem."

Or how about this one (describing a limit of molecular technology):

"Trying to change a nucleus by poking at it with a molecule is even more futile than trying to flatten a steel ball bearing by waving a ball of cotton candy at it. Molecular technology can sort and rearrange atoms, but it cannot reach into a nucleus to change an atom's type."

Go read this book now.

Being one of the few surviving early epic poems in the world (dating to the third millennium BCE), Gilgamesh tells the story of Gilgamesh, a god-king of Uruk who the gods see as arrogant. They create Enkidu, a wild beast that eventually befriends Gilgamesh. They travel together to the cedar forest and battle Humbaba, a fiendish guardian. They successfully defeat him, but eventually Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh becomes painfully aware of his own mortality. Not liking that, he sets out on a journey to find ever-lasting life.

The paperback edition that I read is only 62 pages, so it's a very light read. The story is engaging, but not really engagingly written (doubtless because of its age and the act of translation). Nevertheless, I recommend it if only for its prominent status. (Note: There are several free online translations. I originally read it online, but I can't find the version I read, so you could Google it if you want. However, my guess is that a translation from a proper book is best.)

A collection of short stories and essays, the essays focusing for the most part on WWII and the atomic bomb.

A really nice read. I especially liked How to Be a Survivor, Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon, and Paul Dirac, Antimatter, and You.

Miniaturization is reality, but indefinite miniaturization isn't; that knowledge resides within the brain of Jan Benes, a scientist who defects to the West. Unfortunately, there is an assassination attempt which leaves Benes comatose, and a blood clot develops in his brain. A team of scientists are miniaturized and injected into Benes' body in a submarine rudimentarily outfitted with a laser and have only 60 minutes to remove the clot before they are de-miniaturized (which would make the submarine expand and in the process kill Benes).

Not a sequel to Fantastic Voyage, this novel revolves around neurophysiologist Albert Jonas Morrison and his crew's journey into the brain of a scientist by way of miniaturization. Morrison has some fringe theories on how the mind works and how it is theoretically possible to amplify brain waves and, in effect, sense thoughts. For this reason, his fellow scientists don't respect him very much, and for this reason, he is hired (read the book and you'll understand) by a team of Russian scientists who want Morrison and his computer to join them in a mission inside a man's brain to sense his thoughts.

The story, in essence, is the same as that of Fantastic Voyage, except that FV is a straight novelization of the movie script (the novel appeared before the movie, interestingly) while FVII is the same story as Asimov would have told it. I prefer the latter because the conundrums of miniaturization are discussed in much greater detail as Morrison is extremely sceptical about it at first.

Fifty short-short stories from fifty different authors are collected here.

Almost all of the stories are truly excellent, and I have transcribed some of the best ones and put them on my Short Stories page (Men Are Different, Texas Week, The Haunted Space Suit, and Counter Charm). Go there for a sample before you buy the book. (You will buy it, remember.)

Flatland chronicles the adventure of A. Square, a being in Flatland. Flatland consists of only two dimensions, as opposed to Pointland, which consists of zero dimensions, Lineland, which consists of one dimension, and Spaceland (the one we inhabit), which consists of three dimensions. It describes at length the society in Flatland, and how they go about tasks that we Spacelanders find trivial. For instance, everyone is a Polygon. The more equal all its angles and the more sides it has, the higher its social rank. Lowest are women (or the Frailer Sex, as they are often called) who are mere Lines and have no chance of rising in rank. Then come the Triangles, which are men. Then Squares (of which the narrator, A. Square, is naturally a member), Pentagons, Hexagons, Heptagons, Octagons, etc. The more sides a Polygon has, the closer it gets to being a Circle. They're the top leaders of every aspect of Flatland's society.

Flatland is a classic, and even though it's written in the 1880s in Victorian English, it's still eminently readable (and funny). You might have to read a little carefully at first to get used to the age of the language, but once you've picked it up you'll have no trouble enjoying this excellent story.

Flatterland is sort of an unofficial sequel to Abbott's classic Flatland, written in modern non-Victorian English. Although Victorian English gave the original a pretty classy feel, Flatterland doesn't disappoint. Its aim is similar to that of the original: To explain new mathematical concepts to lay people in lay language.

The book succeeds brilliantly. It's filled with illustration to help visualize the concepts, and the stories around which the concepts are introduced are reminiscent of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (well, the fact that chapters have names like The Topologist's Tea-Party and Along the Looking-Glass probably helps), and this gives the book a whimsical tone (that's a benefit). Here's a sample:

"Is Planiturth's universe built from mathematics? Or is mathematics built by the minds of Planiturthians? Planiturthian mathematicians would like to think that their universe is built from mathematics, but that's only natural, after all. Planiturthian physicists would like to think that the Planiturthian universe is built from physics. Planiturthian biologists would like to think that the Planiturthian universe is built from biology. Planiturthian philosophers would like to think that the Planiturthian universe is built from philosophy. (Let me tell you a secret: it is. The fundamental unit of the Planiturthian universe is the philosophon, a unit of logic so tiny that only a philosopher could hope to split it.)"

The book also ventures a little into physics, explaining things like the Schrödinger's cat, the double-slit experiment, time travel, and forces. But the meat of the book is mathematics.

This is a book about applying statistics to unconventional problems and seeing where that leads you. For instance, the book argues that Roe v. Wade was a more contributing factor to the recent drop in crime rates in the US than any other. The explanation? The people who are most inclined to become criminals (children of poor single-parent blacks) simply aren't there when, had they been born, they would have begun their criminal careers.

This is a book about copyright — what it meant originally, what it means now, what it regulated originally, what it regulates now — and about how new technology should force us to rewrite old laws so that common sense prevails.

In my opinion, a must-read for anyone interested in freedom, culture, and copyright. Parts of the book are unfortunately very dull and not very well-structured (and also written in Lawyerese), but the subject matter is more important (besides, the parts that aren't dull are exceedingly good).

This is a book about the immediate human future; its perils, its hopes, its possible solutions, its possible unfoldings.

Like Asimov's Counting the Eons, this is an excellent book about the future of the world, but unlike Counting the Eons, the meat of Fremtiden limits itself to only a few millennia into the future; the beginning and ultimate fate of the Universe are discussed, but with far less detail than Counting the Eons and with far more emphasis put on the future of the human species and how it can survive (or become extinct). Especially eerie, I think, is the chapter discussing space lifts to geostationary space stations 36 000 kilometers above the Earth's surface. Reading about that gave me the same fuzzy feelings as seeing the space walk between the spaceships Alexei Leonov and the Discovery over Jupiter in 2010: The Year We Made Contact did. I mean, just imagine that! The book unfortunately contains a lot of typos, but I actually forgive him for that; the book is too interesting to dismiss on that ground.

The Prince is the book which made the term "Machiavellian" enter language as meaning someone willing to ignore morality in favor of keeping power. The book is divided into many chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of keeping a prince in power.

As I'm not a prince nor a real student of history, it didn't really speak to me, but it was an interesting read if only for the historical perspective.

The God Delusion unapologetically criticizes religion (as the title implies, belief in gods is a delusion, on the same level as believing you're Napoleon). First off, he tries to avoid confusion with the way Einstein and Hawking have used religious terms to express their appreciation of contemplating the universe, by invoking what he calls Einsteinian religion (neither Einstein nor Hawking are theists, by the way). In that respect, Dawkins tells us that he's a deeply religious non-believer, but dislikes using the word, instead preferring to reserve it for traditional religion.

Details the history of physics from Thales in antiquity up to the present.

The title of the book refers to the Higgs boson, a particle now (at the time of writing, September 2009) being sought by the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) particle accelerator in Geneva. The book does a good job of explaining particle physics, and it's funny, too. The book is a little out-dated in that it refers to the now-cancelled SSC (Superconducting Super Collider) accelerator. There are some very entertaining passages in the book where Leon talks physics with an imaginary Democritus (Democritus of Abdera was the first Greek to suggest that the world was made of atoms), which I immensely enjoyed.

I heartily recommend this book if you want to learn a little bit of particle physics.

The first part is an anthology of short stories, while the two last parts are non-fiction dealing with concepts in science fiction and on writing science fiction, respectively.

A demon and an angel, Crowley and Aziraphale, having become good friends on Earth, decide to postpone the end of the world by keeping a close eye on the Antichrist, making sure he doesn't make a choice between good and evil.

The Grand Design is a book about how the universe can come from nothing. It explores and explains M-theory and speculates about the elusive Theory of Everything.

"One can't prove that God doesn't exist, but science makes God unnecessary."

A book about scientists from Euclid, Archimedes, and Ptolemy to Faraday, Darwin, and Hawking, and the science they invented or practiced.

A book about the evidence for evolution.

The first chapter begins by inviting the reader to imagine that they're a teacher of Roman history, and that they have to waste their time with a rearguard defense against people who try to persuade your pupils that there never was a Roman empire (which is akin to how biologists today have to spend their time).

The rest of the book is devoted to laying out the actual evidence for evolution, while debunking some claims against it (for instance, that there are missing links, which is simply based on a Victorian misunderstanding). I found the chapters dealing with radiometric dating and dendrochronology especially enlightening.

The last chapter takes the last paragraph of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and unpacks and explains it, with each sentence being a sub-heading.

Dawkins says in the book that he wrote this book, a book about the evidence for evolution, because none of his other books explicitly lay this out (they only assume evolution is true). In contrast, this book lays it all out, in meticulous detail.

It's a relatively light read, but as with most books of this kind, you have to pay close attention when reading, or you might miss important points. I definitely recommend it.

This book is a collection of essays from Paul Graham, most of which can be found on his web site (with the exceptions of Good Bad Attitude, Mind the Gap, Programming Languages Explained, and The Dream Language). The essays deal with the hacker culture, startups, and how to make good things.

Goes through the human body, from head to torso, muscles to blood, skin to genitalia, explaining in good detail how it all works.

As always, it's written in clear prose, and is easily accessible. If you have a moderate interest in human anatomy, this is the book for you.

This is Asimov's third and last autobiography, started in early 1990 after a complicated operation, and finished in May 1990 (Asimov died in 1992). His two previous autobiographies are called In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt, and their titles, Asimov tells in this book, are from a poem by Asimov himself:

"In memory yet green, in joy still felt
The scenes of life rise sharply into view.
We triumph; Life's disasters are undealt,
And while all else is old, the world is new."

From this, Asimov wanted to call this third volume The Scenes of Life, but sadly that title didn't survive editorial tampering.

This is a more or less chronological account of Asimov's life, arranged in 166 smallish chapters, each dealing with a different subject or person (Asimov had a lot of well-known friends), and everything is thoroughly entertaining. If you pick up this book, I promise you'll have a hard time putting it down.

The first part of the book is all about Ayaan's upbringing in Somalia (and her later emigrations elsewhere), while the latter part is about her career in the Netherlands and beyond.

Ayaan describes her life in such vivid detail that it's impossible not to be drawn in by her writing. I found the first part of the book, if not boring, then at least not gripping, but by the latter part of the book, I was totally absorbed. She writes with intelligence and wit, and hers is a most amazing story. Highly recommended reading.

As advertised on the front cover, the book contains 640 jokes, anecdotes, and limericks, complete with notes on how to tell them. The jokes are sorted into eleven chapters (Anticlimax, Shaggy Dog, Paradox, Put-down, Word Play, Tables Turned, Jewish, Ethnic, Religion, Marriage, and Bawdy), more or less successfully (apparently it's hard to classify jokes).

Most of the jokes are pretty good, and some stand out. Here's a little selection:

Science has a language of its own which sometimes puzzles laymen. The word "obvious" is a case in point.

Thus a professor of physics, deriving some profound point of theory for the class, scribbled an equation on the board and said, "From this, it is obvious that we can proceed to write the following relationship —" and he scribbled a second equation on the board.

Then he paused. He stared hard at the two equations and said, "Wait a while. I may be wrong —"

He sat down, seized a pad and started to write furiously. He paused for thought, crossed out what he had written, and began over. In this fashion, half an hour passed while the class held its breath and sat in absolute silence.

Finally, the professor rose with an air of satisfaction and said, "Yes, I was right in the first place. It is obvious that the second equation follows from the first."

Two gentlemen, both hard of hearing and strangers to each other, were about to ride the London Underground. One of them, peering at the station they were entering, said, "Pardon me, sir, but is this Wembley?"

"No," said the other, "Thursday."

"No, thank you," said the first, "I've already had my little drink."

The Latin professor arrived home in a state of utter confusion, and much the worse for wear. His jacket was torn, his trousers muddy, his hat a battered ruin, his eyeglasses bent askew.

His wife ran to him, startled. "Septimus," she cried, "whatever has happened to you?"

"Why, my dear," said the professor, seating himself carefully, "I scarcely know. I was passing the corner of Second and Main when, without provocation of any sort on my part, I was suddenly assaulted by two hoodla."

The curator of one zoo was shipping several animals to another zoo, and wrote an accompanying letter which said in part, "Included are the two mongeese you asked for."

The curator paused. "Mongeese" looked funny.

He tore up the letter and tried again, saying, "Included are the two mongooses you asked for."

That looked funny, too.

After long thought, the curator began a third time and now completed it without trouble. He wrote in part, "Included is the mongoose which you requested. Included is also the other mongoose which you also requested."

Tell me why the stars do shine;
Tell me why the ivy twines;
Tell me why the skies are blue;
And I will tell you why I love you.

Nuclear fusion makes the stars to shine;
Tropisms make the ivy twine;
Rayleigh scattering makes skies so blue;
Testicular hormones is why I love you.

I highly recommend the book.

Follows the life of a simple fisherman named Mark, interspersed with his thoughts and commentaries.

Even though the story is simple, it's very gripping. Gabriel Scott has a very engaging way of writing, and is especially good at describing situations.

This book is a criticism of religion. Specifically, it criticizes the inherently stupid things being done by humans in the name of the particular branch of religion that they happen to have been brought up with (like opposing abortion, stem-cell research, and embracing the idea of martyrdom). It's written as an open letter to a Christian, so it didn't particularly speak to me, but I imagine a Christian might have a mind-opening experience if he read it.

A biography of David Livingstone, written as part novel, part history.

The book gives a good account of the life of Livingstone, from his early years in Scotland to his arrival in Cape Town, South Africa, and his subsequent journey across Africa. However, the book I read is a Norwegian translation of the original, and it's evident that the translator made a poor job of it (never mind the simple spelling errors; if you're bilingual like me and read this book, you'll see that a lot of passages look like direct translations, instead of having been adapted to the language). The most damning part of the translation job is the way "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" is rendered. The accepted translation to Norwegian is "Dr. Livingstone, formoder jeg?". This book renders it "Dr. Livingstone, hvis jeg ikke tar feil?" which means "Dr. Livingstone, if I'm not mistaken?"

I might get my hands on the original English version, but until then, the only point on which I can recommend the book is that it's a nice, concise history of the man's life.

A cautionary novel about the consequences of letting children run their own society without adult supervision. A plane crashes on a deserted island, and the batch of school boys are left to fend for themselves. The title is a reference to Beelzebub, which is a Hebrew word meaning "lord of the flies" (it's a Philistine god worshiped at Ekron, and is mentioned in the Bible, in 2 Kings 1:2-3), but it's also a reference to a literal lord of flies, namely a pig's head on a stick (it attracts so many flies, you see, that the children start calling it by that title). The novel chronicles how the children conceive of and develop their society.

The Axis powers of Japan and Germany wins WWII and divide the world among themselves. The story follows a small number of characters in this alternate history. The title comes from a fictitious novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, written by Hawthorne Abendsen. Grasshopper is about an alternate history (from the novel's point of view) where the Allied forces won WWII. Being a heretical notion, Abendsen perpetuates a myth that he lives in a fortified house (castle); hence the title.

It was a riveting read, but I was left wondering what the point of the novel was.

A collection of short stories woven together into a coherent whole. The stories concern Mars, and humanity's efforts to colonize it.

I really enjoyed all the "chapters" (short stories), but "Usher II" really stood out, being an homage to E. A. Poe. Definitely recommended.

Based on articles written for Scientific American, every chapter has an addendum, explaining further points or elaborating new ones, and some chapters have letters from people sent in after the article in question was published.

An awesome book with lots of interesting things. Read the chapter titles in the Structures for a preview.

This 98-page little book is a very short, critical introduction to the life of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, known popularly as Mother Theresa.

This book is written in the same vein as Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions.

I truly loved this book. My favorite chapters are The Five Platonic Solids, Mazes, and Eleusis: The Induction Game.

This book tells the story of a man in his mid-twenties who suddenly feels that nothing in his life matters and describes the things he does to combat this feeling.

Follows the planet Kalgash, a planet with perpetual daylight due to having six suns, through a devastating astronomical event that only occurs every 2049 years (termed a Year of Godliness by the book's religious fanatics, the Apostles of Flame). The Apostles of Flame propagate the idea that on a precise day (Theptar the 19th, as it happens), there will be total Darkness, everyone will go mad, and the Stars will shoot fires from the skies, all as a vengeance from the gods for the wicked and sinful ways of the planet's inhabitants. A band of scientists, initially opposed to the Apostles' ideas, eventually realize, through new evidence (archaeological and astronomical), that some of what the Apostles propagate is true. Unfortunately, the population at large believes neither the Apostles nor the scientists.

Nightfall was originally a short story and people generally prefer the short story version because the book just draws it out. I will have to read the short story before I can draw a proper verdict, but I'll tentatively say, "read this book."

A pretty short book about a boy's adventures in Asgard (land of the Gods in Norse mythology).

The story is short, but thoroughly enjoyable. There's not much more to say since there's so little content.

The story of an old man setting out to sea, and his struggle when he catches the biggest fish of his life.

This is a pretty short book, and a pleasant read it is. It's about an old fisherman in Havana, Santiago, whose luck has run out (he hasn't caught a fish in several months). He has a young apprentice who is then forbidden by his parents to fish with Santiago, because of his unluckiness. The old man sets off in his skiff alone, far out in the sea, and catches a marlin, the biggest fish he's ever caught. The fish is tenacious, and the fight with him lasts for two days.

If you want to know whether or not the old man succeeds, read the book. I definitely recommend it.

This is an anthology book of post-1900 science writings (essays, anecdotes, poetry) written by working scientists, as opposed to written by non-scientists, and it is supremely excellent. Richard Dawkins has collected them, sorted them, and written introductions to each of them, which put them in context.

I liked this book so much that I transcribed a few of these and put them on my Essays page ("On Being the Right Size", "One Self", an extract from Man in the Universe, "Seven Wonders", and an extract from The Periodic Table); you could read those if you want a short taste of what the book is about. I strongly recommend this book.

Pale Blue Dot is about the Earth, humans, our place in the Cosmos, and the Solar System and our exploration of it. The title comes from the eponymous image taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. It tries to convey a sense of how small and fragile the Earth really is (if you want to get a real sense of it, I recommend Celestia), how the Universe really isn't made for us (sulfuric acid on Venus, for instance, or the black vacuum that covers most of the Universe), and how we've traditionally viewed the Universe. A large chunk of the book goes into explaining the exploration of our solar system and the findings we've made. It also advocates that we use the other planets as warnings for what may happen to our own if we spoil it (after all, so far this is the only place we've got).

This is a very engagingly-written account of the history of space flight, as well as a beautifully arranged advocacy of prudence when it comes to dealing with our planet.

A group of computer programmers working under a professor discovers that the 2D simulation program they've developed, 2Dworld, is somehow connected with an actual two-dimensional world inhabited by intelligent creatures. They establish contact with Yendred, and through him, they learn a lot about his world.

This book is a sort of unofficial sequel to Abbott's famous Flatland, and it's one hell of a riveting read. I'm having a hard time making up my mind as to which of the unofficial sequels (Ian Stewart's Flatterland and Dionys Burger's Sphereland) are the superior; they're all simply really, really good.

A huge collection of writings by atheists about religion, faith, non-religion, reason, science, and logic, with biographical information on each author. Some of them are pretty dated, but they're interesting nonetheless.

Quirkology is a word coined by the author, and is the study of the more quirky side of human activity. The book draws a number of conclusions, such as that women van drivers are more likely to take more than ten items through the express line at supermarkets, that words containing the letter K are funny, and that women's personal ads would garner more replies if written by a man (the opposite is not true).

Richard Wiseman has spent twenty years studying these matters, but the book also briefly mentions other seminal studies in psychology (such as Milgram's obedience study and studies concerning memory and the manipulation thereof).

I can thoroughly recommend the book, although as the title suggests, it's mostly about quirky little things about human behavior. The book wasn't all that interesting, but it's definitely entertaining.

Explains atoms and isotopes, planets and satellites, novas and supernovas. It also contains a title essay, which is available online. In it, he explains that there is a continuum from right to wrong, and that it's possible to be righter and wronger. For instance, if you think the Earth is flat you are wronger than if you think the Earth is a sphere. You're still wrong, because the Earth is more like an oblate spheroid, but even that is wrong. And so on.

Larry Stark, a Space Patrol Academy cadet on board the Carden, is completing his post-graduate space cruise (required to become an officer), a trip to Alpha Centauri's colonized fourth planet. Unknown to him and his crew, the planet is under revolt, and Stark is required to make some hard choices about where his loyalties lie.

It was a very pleasant read; the book is definitely a page-turner, but the ending is rather sudden. I'd like to read more of what happens after the end.

A quote:

Larry caught glimpses of the great beasts living below—living without any suspicion that the planet was no longer theirs, that its possession was being contested by two groups of absurd pygmies from another star.

This is only partly a book about evolution. In the last chapter (The Replication Bomb) Dawkins speculates on ten thresholds that life goes through on its way to interstellar emigration. (The analogy is to a supernova. Just as a star can go supernova, a planet might explode with life.)

The book also goes through some very neat experiments on bees and the evolution of a bee dance that codes for location of food.

This is an anthology of a few stories that are (perhaps paradoxically) not found in The Complete Robot, and a few essays about robots and computers in general.

This is the book in which Gould lays out in full detail his concept of NOMA, Non-Overlapping Magisteria, the idea that science and religion are masters over different (and mutually incommunicable) realms. It's an attempt to reconcile the recent intellectual hostilities between scientists and people of faith by appealing to NOMA, saying that there doesn't have to be a conflict.

I'm not sure if this book is winning me over to Gould's way of thinking, but it's extremely well written, interesting, and full of siren arguments and pretty poetry. I can definitely recommend it if you're interested in the history of the conflict between science and religion.

A pretty comprehensive guide to evolution, and the second book that introduced the gene-centric view of evolution (namely, that genes use bodies — survival machines — to pass themselves on, rather than organisms using genes to pass their traits on). The main goal of the book is to explain altruistic behavior and to dispel the myth that just because genes are selfish, we must (or should) be selfish, and I think it succeeds. The book also introduced the concept of memes (supposed to rhyme with genes), which are units of culture (like a catchy tune or a piece of trivia or a certain way of walking) that are capable of being copied from mind to mind.

Details the history of rock'n'roll from the perspective of gender and sex, and tracks musical trends from the beginning of rock'n'roll until the present.

A good work with lots of wit and detail. I'm not that interested in the history of music (I just listen to it), so perhaps this book will be more interesting for someone whose interests lie in that direction.

A collection of all of the Sherlock Holmes short stories in one neat volume.

What struck me while reading the short stories is how ingenious Sherlock Holmes is. It's a very fun exercise to try to second-guess what Holmes' solution to each case turns out to be.

Somewhat of a sequel to Flatland, Sphereland continues in the same vein, explaining three dimensions to two-dimensional creatures. The pace and mode of writing is pretty similar to the original, and I very much liked that. The novel things that Sphereland does is two-dimensional space exploration and explaining a curved line to a one-dimensional being (and thus setting up the explanation for why two-dimensional beings would have problems understanding a plane curved into a sphere, and by extension how three-dimensional beings would have trouble understanding how to curve a sphere around a hyper-sphere).

A classic military SF book. An alien arachnid race launches a meteor upon unsuspecting Earth which crushes Buenos Aires, plunging the two races into war.

There's a lot of monolog from the protagonist's teacher in History and Moral Philosophy, Jean V. Dubois. For me, this is really the meat of the book. The rest is character development and furtherance of the story.

There is a movie based on the novel with the same name, and it follows the novel really closely. The only things missing from it are the jump-suits the troopers wear and the so-called neo-dogs, dogs with their intelligence amped to approximately human retardedness level that are used for reconnaissance.

A man born of human parents but raised on Mars arrives on Earth and goes on to learn as much about it as possible. He learns about religion and eventually founds his own church (which turns out to be more of a school than a church) where he teaches Martian so that Martian concepts can be readily communicated and understood; things like levitation, teleportation, and telepathy are available so long as you learn the language. The title is a reference to the Bible. From the KJV, Exodus 2:22:

"And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land."

This book is also the book from which the term 'grok' comes. See the Jargon file entry on grok.

I think the portrayal of Michael (the man from Mars) as he learns more and more about Earth is very well-written and his progression is reflected in his speech pretty well.

The book is a fascinating look into the mind of one of the 20th century's top physicist, the eccentric free spirit Richard Feynman. It's a mostly chronological account of the interesting moments of his life, from his childhood when he fixed radios, to his mischief at MIT, to Princeton, to Los Alamos (where he worked on the bomb and cracked safes for fun), to Cornell, to Brazil, to Japan. The stories are engagingly told as anecdotes, which is partly why it's such an interesting read (and partly because the stories are inherently interesting).

I think I can honestly say that this book is excellent all the way through. At no point was I bored. In fact, I grinned to myself at least three times and almost cried once (honest).

The story, despite taking up a meager two hundred pages, is pretty epic, spanning almost a century, and follows a small cast of long-lived characters. Earth has colonized Venus and Mars, and two religious factions, The Brotherhood of the Immanent Radiance and its offshoot Transcendent Harmony both have a piece of the puzzle that would allow man to reach the stars. In reality, the religious orders are merely fronts for scientific research (to say much more would spoil). Their icons and litanies and prayers are entirely scientific, and merely take on the clothing of a religious order. The book opens with The Electromagnetic Litany, which I can't help but quote in its entirety:

And there is light, before and beyond our vision, for which we give thanks.

And there is heat, for which we are humble.

And there is power, for which we count ourselves blessed.

Blessed be Balmer, who gave us our wavelengths. Blessed be Bohr, who brought us understanding. Blessed be Lyman, who saw beyond sight.

Tell us now the stations of the spectrum.

Blessed be long radio waves, which oscillate slowly.

Blessed be broadcast waves, for which we thank Hertz.

Blessed be short waves, linkers of mankind, and blessed be microwaves.

Blessed be infrared, bearers of nourishing heat.

Blessed be visible light, magnificent in angstroms. (On high holidays only: Blessed be red, sacred to Doppler. Blessed be orange. Blessed be yellow, hallowed by Fraunhofer’s gaze. Blessed be green. Blessed be blue for its hydrogen line. Blessed be indigo. Blessed be violet, flourishing with energy.)

Blessed be ultraviolet, with the richness of the sun. Blessed be Xrays, sacred to Roentgen, the prober within.

Blessed be the gamma, in all its power; blessed be the highest of frequencies.

We give thanks for Planck. We give thanks for Einstein. We give thanks in the highest for Maxwell.

In the strength of the spectrum, the quantum, and the holy angstrom, peace!

McKenna uses this book to detail the trip to La Chorrera, a town in South America, that he, his brother Dennis, Ev (a translator), Vanessa (a photographer and anthropologist), and Dave undertook in search of Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew made from the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and DMT-containing plants. Instead they become entangled with Stropharia cubensis, a hallucinogenic mushroom (called that at the publication of the book, but now classified as Psilocybe cubensis). The rest of the book is a long musing, interspersed with details of the travel through the Colombian Amazonas itself, on the contents and meaning of the several encounters with this mushroom the troupe experience.

A riveting read; McKenna draws many interesting conclusions from his travels. I can definitely recommend the book.

A compilation of the funniest Chuck Norris facts, with illustrations.

A good read if you're just looking for something to pass your time.

A collection of 101 essays divided into seven sections: The Future, Space, Science, SciQuest, "Foreword by Isaac Asimov", Science Fiction, and Personal.

Almost all Asimov essays are excellent and when you pick up an anthology of them you're almost bound not to be disappointed, and this book is no exception except for the section "Foreword by Isaac Asimov", which is simply a collection of forewords to various books. This isn't too bad in itself (in fact, they are all rather well-written), but I, at least, when reading positive forewords and blurbs and reviews, positively want to get the book being foreworded/blurbed/reviewed. Other than that section, I can thoroughly recommend the book. (For a taste of the book, read What Is the Universe?)

In the introduction Asimov says that the title of the eponymous essay (The Tyrannosaurus Prescription) is whimsical, but I disagree. It is actually a prescription for an ill, and it's not at all whimsical. Read the essay if you want to find out why I think so.

This book is a celebration of science, and an explanation of its beauty.

Dawkins discusses the probability of your birth (it turns out to be very low), the notion that knowing things about the universe diminishes its beauty (like Feynman before him), sound waves, DNA fingerprinting, astrology (always witty to condemn), genes, brains, and, finally, memes.

This is an essay collection broken into four parts: Biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. As the subtitle says, it's a brilliant overview of the exciting realms of science. The title invokes the image of viewing science from above, to get an overview of it, and in the introduction Asimov likens science before 1800 to a well-managed orchard. After 1800, it's overgrown and even though there's still an underlying order to it, each wanderer through the orchard only gets to see a small part of it.

"So I have here a collection of essays with little internal unity. They are glimpses, here and there, of the orchard of science, as viewed from a height."

This book is a collection of very small essays by a bunch of leading scientists, philosophers, writers, and intellectuals on the title question. The topics range from artificial intelligence to consciousness to epistemology (and a lot in between).

This was an immensely satisfying read. You get a lot of perspective just reading the speculations of these people. I highly recommend this book!

This book is part-novel and part-autobiography, interspersed with Chinese folktales. It describes life for a Chinese-American woman living in California.

The style of the narration (with fantastic tales woven seamlessly into the main autobiography) was at first a little confusing, but one soon gets used to it, and then the book becomes a delight to read. I can definitely recommend it, though I prefer the more traditional form of autobiographical writing.

The book explains Greek mythology and its relationship to the English language in the form of its words ('chaos', 'cosmos', 'gigantic', 'atlas', 'ocean', 'Europe', 'cereal', 'phobia', 'demon', 'martial', 'vulcano', 'jovial', 'music', 'hygiene', 'siren', 'hubris', 'nemesis'). Asimov describes a lot of Greek mythology in-depth, but primarily for the purpose of explaining the origins and meanings of those words (and many others). He covers the titans, the Olympians, monsters, heroes and the siege of Troy.

Asimov explains, as the book is titled, the words in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.

This is actually more than simply a list and explanation of the words used in Genesis. It goes into great detail into important verses in Genesis, explaining the history behind the verses as well as the etymologies of the words used (Asimov was Jewish by descent and spoke Yiddish, which helps). There are even appendices with maps of the relevant areas of the time, and genealogies of antediluvian (pre-Flood) and postdiluvian patriarchs.

An alphabetical listing of common words in science, with one page of explanation for each of them.

Asimov explains a whole bunch of common scientific words, from abacus to zodiac, in great detail and with particular care to their etymologies (it should be no surprise that many of today's English words are derived from either Latin or Greek, and this book makes that point more than clear). The book is in a sense an encyclopedia, and it can be read straight through or used as, well, an encyclopedia.

How to survive the zombie onslaught, written in a modern Art of War-esque style. Although a work of fiction, it's written as non-fiction which makes it all the more eerie. So if zombies do exist and they do attack, you should be ready for them.