I fell into reading a fair amount early this year and that put me on the track to wanting to continue and finish the year strong, with a good amount of reading under my belt. When I consider the handful of books I ordinarily pick my way through over the course of a year it is evident that I am not a prolific reader. In fact it would be difficult to say that I do much reading at all. Even so, the number of books that I
want to read, that I tell myself I will read
one day, only continues to grow in number.
I started the year off intending to finish off the manuscript for a novel that I began writing in earnest back in November of last year. The story had been gestating in various forms for years with half-written scenes scattered here and there, but remained only the vaguest outline. Having gotten myself fairly stuck in the process, I decided that what I needed was
more research. True, there were and are a number of aspects to the story that require significant behind-the-scenes heavy-lifting on my part (calculations, design work, etc.) in order to enable the whole to fit together, but this was perhaps moreso a way of procrastinating while feeling like I was making progress. It is undeniable though that the act of reading prodigiously helped my own creative juices to flow and made the process of writing more significantly less daunting. For some context, the story I was writing is a hard science-fiction set in the future where humanity has colonized Saturn's moon Titan. As such there is a common thread to a lot of my reading (space colonization, hard science-fiction, Titan). I did finish the first draft for my manuscript (at the end of April, taking far longer than I had liked), but also ended up generating ideas for a lot of new stories as well. But this post isn't about that, it's about what I read, and what I thought of it.
Strange New Worlds by Ray Jayawardhana
This is a non-fiction account of extra-solar planets and the hunt for them. I remember getting it years ago when I was quite interested in the subject and then never got around to reading it. Unfortunately I found the whole thing rather forgettable. If you're completely new to the topic of extra-solar planets and planet-finding then this may be of interest, but it lacks a captivating narrative or sufficiently eloquent narrator to guide the layperson along. Reading it I felt like I had absorbed so much of the content already through reading countless articles on the subject, and as the most tantalising discoveries in this field tend to be the most recent, found it out of date with its subject.
The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin
A non-fiction detailed description of a plan for a human colonisation of Mars. Zubrin can come across as single-minded and a bit eccentric (?), but there's no denying that he's done his homework. Zubrin presents hard science, along with some light delving into equations of orbital mechanics and chemical reactions, to demonstrate how present-day civilisation can boot-strap itself into a long-term colonisation effort on Mars. There's a lot of detail and consideration of challenges here, which makes it an excellent read for anyone looking to imagine a possible future where humans are on Mars. Less compelling than his science is his ideology, the reasons for going to Mars, although Zubrin presents enough of a case to make the whole prospect seem
just plausible. In 2016 I read Zubrin's Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, which I found more relevant to my writing research and more interesting in general, as it covers not just the colonization of Mars but of the whole solar system, inner and outer, along with sketches of how such a civilization would evolve over time.
The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley
I came across Loren Eiseley by thumbing through my old combustion textbook of all places. The text opens with a quote by Eiseley, and reading it perhaps for the first time (I presumably ignored it in my University days) I resolved to discover more about the author. Eiseley is a contemplative and imaginative naturalist, and The Immense Journey is a collection of writings by him, a mixture of his thoughts and experiences with the natural world. Writing in 1957, Eiseley displays little of the stuffy euro-centric, anthropocentric perspective generally associated with that era. The writings are broadly accessible to the layperson, managing to capture the ordinary miracles of nature that surround us at every moment. It's refreshing to step into Eiseley's shoes, to see the natural world with both a sense of understanding and deep wonder. If you feel that maybe you need to slow down but you have trouble appreciating or recognizing the special-ness of the natural world then I would definitely recommend The Immense Journey. It's a brisk read, so it's hardly a commitment.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Somehow I had never read this. One of the earliest examples (in the modern sense) of science-fiction, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea tells the story of the journeys aboard Captain Nemo's Nautilus, an electric submarine in the late 1860's. It remains an eminently readable and entertaining adventure story that is bristling with science. Sometimes this is to the book's detriment, such as the various accounts of the marine life encountered on the travels, which at times seems to drag on and on, simply lists of things that soon become tiresome. Verne's writing is often cited as an example of the old guard of science-fiction, for pioneering the public perception that science could solve every problem, and for failing to realize the potentially dangerous effects of new technology. I found the novel surprisingly, and rather refreshingly, much more ecologically minded than such accounts would suggest. Verne writes with an acute awareness of the excesses of the whaling practices of his time, the depletion and plundering of the wonders of the natural world by man, and in fact it is these excesses which motivate Captain Nemo's crusade against other ships at sea. Nemo is essentially an eco-terrorist, who is painted as sympathetic and as misguided and dangerous, and is not himself above committing his own crimes against nature. Verne seems to be right at the forefront of scientific knowledge for his day, from the details of the submarine itself to his endorsement of the then new theory of evolution by natural selection. The book falters in ways that became typical of science fiction: the characters and their conflicts are not realized to the extent necessary to make a lasting impression, so the story is more about ideas than people, there is a complete absence of women of any kind in the story, which while consistent with the times does at least reflect a lack of interest on Verne's part in discussing gender roles, and sex is completely removed from existence. I don't mean to suggest that Verne's novel should have included sex or explicit discussion of it, but how it influences the characters is notably absent. The crew of the Nautilus is all-male and always at sea. They get their supplies from the sea, not from shore, and so do not go ashore. For typical crews, shore leave has all kinds of implications for sexual (mis)adventure, but such a brotherly fraternity presents interesting questions that are not explored: have they all vowed to celibacy? If so, is the resulting sexual tension ever released in some way, perhaps through a strange ritual? Or are there darker aspects to the behaviour of the crew-members to satisfy their urges (assuming they have them)? It's worth noting that while Verne is often conflated with the fantastical, he is very much writing hard science-fiction from the perspective of his time.
Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman
An interesting collection of autobiographical stories from the life of Richard Feynman, an important theoretical physicist of the 20th century. For someone so brilliant, Feynman comes across as so ordinarily odd that it suggests his accomplishments were as much to do with his endless curiosity than with anything else. Not exactly essential reading but interesting nonetheless.
Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics, and Population Taboos by Garrett Hardin
Hardin sums up the problems of the modern age as stemming from unchecked growth, our unwillingness and inability to live within our limits. There are some good points here, but it also gets rather preachy and repetitive in places, not to mention Hardin's strange obsession with quoting scripture where he seems simultaneously contemptuous of those who are ignorant of it and afraid of the unwashed masses who Jesus promises will inherit the earth. It's worth a read, but if you're about a third of the way through and feel like nothing new is being said... well, not every book needs to be finished.
The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard K. O'Neill
Nowadays the idea of space colonisation seems old hat, but back in 1976 Gerard K. O'Neill laid down the first real practical, seemingly plausible road-map for how it might all go down. O'Neill sought to solve the coming energy crisis and trend toward a closed society by expanding outward into space, utilising the resources of the asteroid belt to continue the expansion phase of the human race far into the future, buying us time to become significantly more advanced as a species before having to deal with managing our growth. The High Frontier is basically a treasure-trove of ideas and plans for colonies in space, even if its underpinning philosophy has holes big enough to steer an asteroid through.
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
I really had no idea what to expect with this. I first heard about it while watching a talk by NASA astrobiologist Chris McKay, who mentioned re-reading it while on a flight. I added it to my "research" list without much thought. Turns out it is the furthest thing from hard science-fiction as one could get, being essentially fantasy, and yet, it's brilliant. Bradbury presents the anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist perspective on human space travel, shining light on all the unsavoury egocentrism and bigotry of his day. It has a sort of anthology format, and each story is packed with interesting ideas and relevant social commentary. Sometimes a spaceship is just a spaceship, and sometimes it's a metaphor, in The Martian Chronicles we are certainly in metaphor territory. It's a short but dense read, and slots in alongside Borges as the kind of fantasy that just clicks for me.
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond's 1997 work is generally highly regarded, and for good reason. It takes an ambitious and expansive look at human history, asking the question of why societies developed the way they did in the places that they did. What makes Diamond's work especially significant is its shift away from racist thinking that attributed the fates of peoples to something innate within them (also a non-explanatory line of thinking since that "innateness" remained indefinable and non-quantifiable), and its critical look at the real environmental factors at play. Diamond's work goes so much farther than most others in looking at the oft-neglected peoples of the world and is really required reading for any student of human history, which really should be all of us.
Life Beyond Earth by Athena Coustenis and Therese Encrenaz
A fairly unimaginative work of speculation about life beyond our own sphere. While there is admittedly no data on this subject, that also means that for non-fiction purposes there is little to write about. While I had hoped to perhaps gain some interesting information on novel possible alternative life-forms, Internet resources are better than what is found here. Also, I mostly forget what's in this.
Titan: Exploring an Earthlike World by Athena Coustenis
A semi-detailed survey of Titan that I nevertheless have mostly forgotten. I might have learned a few new geology terms, but just about everything was treated in more detail in Titan from Cassini-Huygens.
The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells
I'm not sure what I expected from this, perhaps a dry and plausible account of a journey to the moon, complete with a detailed description of a rocket ship and of space suits. Wells instead posits an anti-gravity material and sends his characters hurtling off to the moon where the real adventure begins. The moon is here not a barren lifeless world, but a fascinating alternate-Earth, with air that freezes at night and boils in the day, and a society of insect-like inhabitants who live deep underground. Vast tracts of the book are given over to description which at once seems overdone while also being insufficient. Insufficient because even with all the copious description (or because of it) I often had to take pauses to carefully construct the imagery in my head. There's a certain sense of English whimsy in the story which starts in the countryside that soon turns more sinister, reflecting perhaps England's own dark period of industrialization.
Titan from Cassini-Huygens by Robert H. Brown, Jean-Pierre Lebreton, J. Hunter Waite
This is a textbook that compiles the various findings from the Cassini-Huygens mission to date and compares them with the state of knowledge on Titan prior to the mission. It is extremely dense, and yet seems somehow light on hard data about Titan - there is so much that we still don't know! My reading of it was perhaps ill-advised, as more readable information on Titan can be readily found on the Internet. It assumes a great deal of prior knowledge on the part of the reader, which can make it seem opaque at times, but at the very least it is a rich source of field-specific vocabulary. Ultimately though I don't think reading this was very necessary for my writing, and even as a reference to look up answers to various questions I had I found it to be of limited utility.
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
This has long been on my list of "things to read" going back as far as my high school days. Going into it my vague understanding was of a global takeover by a race of alien plants called triffids. Well, it's not
quite that story. It's really a story about surviving and living in a post-apocalyptic London, a world where all but a few have gone blind. By now this all feels like well-worn territory, it recalled to my mind Stephen King's The Stand which I read in 2016 as well as countless post-apocalyptic fiction since. It's notable perhaps for being one of the very earliest examples of this type of fiction; as our world has become increasingly dependent upon layers of convoluted and poorly understood technologies there is a parallel rise in the desire for escapism into a world comprehensible to our primitive sides. It's a short read, and enjoyable enough, but I didn't find it particularly gripping or brimming with ideas that were novel to me.
Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John S. Lewis
Warning, this book is all about rocks, and basically nothing else. My interest in it lay primarily in seeing a realistic sketch of how asteroid mining might fit into a future civilization and the practicalities of how it might be accomplished. This is treated briefly, but not with sufficient detail or novelty of ideas to justify the reading of the text. The bulk of Asteroid Mining 101 is concerned with the identification and classification of the various types of rocks out in our solar system. The '101' is apt, as this slog of a read comes across as more of a textbook than anything at times, but the 'Mining' is not, dealing as it does so little with this aspect of things. A more fitting title would perhaps be Asteroids 101: An Introduction for Geology Students. If that doesn't deter you from reading this, well... you were warned.
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
It had been years since I had read Origin (a decade?) and I hadn't been the most attentive reader at the time. There was a lot I had forgotten, and I no longer had a strong impression of the book. Returning to it I found what I had once found to be a bit of a slog to be an exhilarating crash-course on the natural world. I wrote about it
here.
Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
After completing Origin I decided to move on to Descent, which I had never read. It's not on the same level as Origin, but is still fairly foundational. More thoughts
here.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
This was one of the fastest re-readings I've probably ever done. I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for the first time just last year and was quite impressed. It's a political yarn about an uprising on the moon and the emergence of a powerful artificial intelligence, told from a boots-on-the-ground perspective in an invented colloquial speak. Heinlein makes it all seem effortless and while there's plenty of politics here, the framing of it makes it feel very much a part of the world rather than simply Heinlein preaching to the reader his own personal views. The sole female character of note doesn't have much to do, but there's a lot of world-building done to show that this isn't just some typical patriarchal society copy-pasted from the US of A circa 1960. It's a good read.
Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
I originally read Altered Carbon a number of years ago. Somehow I had come across it as an example of
good sci-fi which seemed like something I would enjoy. I was rather unimpressed. I found it juvenile and action heavy, with plenty of sci-fi
things (hovercars, consciousness downloading, neon lights) but none of the ground-work done to make those things plausible. I decided to re-read it, having recently completely turned around my opinion of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson upon a years later re-reading just last year. While my second reading didn't turn me around completely, I found a lot to like and a lot more depth than I had initially given it credit for. Altered Carbon's world is one where dualism is literally true: your consciousness exists on a computer stack and can be transferred from one body to the next (called sleeves) or put on ice. This leads to a de-valuing of the physical world, of the material, and lots of parts of the novel explore the negative consequences of this in the daily lives of ordinary people. I still found it excessively violent and juvenile, but that is part of its tone, and doesn't mean that it has nothing to say. Altered Carbon's treatment of violence is actually noteworthy for how brutal and visceral it is made to feel. It's not clean and comfortable or quick. It's always messy, always unseemly. Morgan gives the reader the adrenaline rush of the action, but makes them deal with the hangover afterwards. Did he really have to describe all that? One might ask. And the answer is most certainly yes. By refusing sanitization the book goes a little beyond pulp, offering hefty doses of discomfort to go along with all that escapism. Morgan also wrote the story for the video game Syndicate, which I wrote about
here.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
So I never read Brave New World, okay! Well, I finally got around to it, and it was... fine. In Brave New World Huxley envisions a utopian/dystopian future where everyone is bred and conditioned into a specific caste within society. This theme of breeding and conditioning actually flowed quite naturally through my readings of On the Origin of Species, Descent of Man, The First Men on the Moon to Brave New World, quite unintentional on my part. Huxley sketches the outline of his world but I felt at a loss for the details, and neither the characters or the plot are especially compelling. The book seemed to be crying out for further exploration of its world, for how this centralised totalitarian society plays out in a variety of circumstances. I ended up writing some of my thoughts on the world presented in it
here.
Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years by Vaclav Smil
This is basically a textbook looking at energy trends on a global level along with some assessment of the likelihood of various catastrophic events. It might be worth probing for some data, but I've since forgotten most of it.
UBIK by Philip K. Dick
Somehow I've been
aware of Philip K. Dick for the longest time (since I was an early teenager) and have read
about his writing, but read vanishingly little of it. Prior to UBIK I think the only Dick novel I had read was The Man in the High Castle, which I enjoyed at the time but found somewhat confusing, and in any event I now remember little of it. Dick's stories have been adapted to movies, from Total Recall to Blade Runner to Minority Report, but forget what you know of that. UBIK is great. I was hooked from the first few sentences and devoured it. Dick has a way of conjuring up such vivid imagery and sounds from a minimum of verbage. UBIK is filled with the feeling of Americana, and the way Dick manages to make high-technology slot right into everyday life, alongside the old and the familiar makes the world feel not science-fictional at all. UBIK is filled with ideas and humour, and if you haven't read it, you should.
Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight by Kelvin F. Long
In some ways this is a useful reference book for strategies for interstellar flight, but only in broad terms. Long presupposes the benefits of reaching out to the stars with embarrassingly naive optimism, never making a case for development in this direction, and covers well-worn ground without offering up any new ideas. There are exercises (do your own rocket science) here, which could make it a useful primer to the subject, but I found it unimaginative, uninspiring and more than a little disagreeable. There are far superior web resources out there for carrying out rocket calculations and for designing all kinds of interesting possible (if still implausible) trips to the stars.
Skip.
Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
Perhaps not one of Clarke's better remembered stories, but it features Titan, so onto the list it went! This is a strange read, as it seems to not have much of a cohesive thread and is instead more of a grab-bag of things that happened to be in Clarke's head at the time. Not much time is spent on Titan, and the protagonist travels to Earth (or the U.S.A. which seemingly is the Earth) on a semi-diplomatic mission. The rest of it unfolds like the entries in a travel journal, with a series of far-future, yet rather tame happenings occurring. It's forgettable but is over soon enough to not inspire any hard feelings.
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
I watched the movie years ago, but never read the book. The book is an interesting companion to the film. While the film is vague, spartan, and symbolic, the book is literal, detailed, and traditional in structure. The film is clearly the superior of the two, but in this case the two really do work together. The imagery of the film informed my reading of the book, providing the text with some fantastic production design and sense of place that the prose alone is not so great at providing. Meanwhile the book contains all kind of background detail that can be used to explain and inform a viewing of the film. If you're sufficiently well-versed in the themes and ideas that inform the book prior to viewing the film then you may not get much out of the book, but for myself I very much appreciated the additional context provided by the text.
Playing with Planets by Gerard 't Hooft
I've forgotten how this ended up on my list, and I would've done well to forget this as well. Gerard 't Hooft is a Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist, but he is not a particularly entertaining or informative writer. 't Hooft lightly touches on a number of science fiction topics, offering his own take on their possibility and probability. It's not particularly novel or detailed and thankfully my brain has ejected what little I gleaned from it to make room for
important stuff.
Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche
Maybe
this year I'll finally get around to reading Nietzsche. Phew, it seems I've been
meaning to read Nietzsche for over a decade now. Few philosophers seem to be as quoted, or as reviled, so it just seems to be necessary to discover for one's self what all the fuss is about. I'm always a bit timid when it comes to philosophy. While I am interested in the ideas dealt with and their discussion, so much of philosophy seems to be written in a nearly impenetrable way, covering the barest minimum of ideas in thick slathering layers of turgid prose. My expectations going into Nietzsche were little different, although the slim size of the book was certainly encouraging, and when I actually got down to reading I was pleasantly surprised. Nietzsche is swift and direct, commanding his words with careful economy. As such he is difficult to read for the opposite reason of most philosophers: he says so much with so little. If you think you've understood something he's written, you're sure to encounter a seeming contradiction a few passages later. If you've found something to agree with, another passage will serve to puzzle or just plain tick you right off. There's so much to unpack here, that it is worth reading for that reason alone. A fair warning though: don't go into it thinking you'll be able to understand it all or that you will be able to build some kind of consistent ideology from it. I haven't read any of Nietzsche's other writings, and these would doubtless aid my understanding. I'll be going back to some of his other works, and returning to these two when I am a little more ready.
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
Remember string theory? The Theory of Everything. The idea that deep down, all the subatomic particles are actually made of vibrating strings in eleven, or twenty-six, or (how many is it?) some other number of dimensions. As a kid I gobbled up episodes of NOVA that touched on the search for the Grand Unified Theory and I remember the PBS adaptation of the book as well. As enthused as I was, watching these programs soon gave way to frustration as they all repeated the same small pool of examples while failing to provide any real justification for all of the theorizing. On television Greene comes across as a bit of a snake-oil salesman, eager to excite the mind with tantalizing speculations while offering precious little in genuine insight or hard-won knowledge. The book fairs much better, as it avoids the overly broad strokes adopted by the adaptation that prevent real understanding. Much of the book isn't really about string theory per se, and is instead a survey, or rather an introduction, to modern physics. In this regard it's actually pretty good, holding the reader's hand but allowing them to stop and poke and prod at the things along the way. The non-discriminating reader may be unable to perceive where exactly the established physics ends and where the string theory begins, but there is no wilful obfuscation of such details that I could find. When it comes to the question: why string theory? the book is of little help. Greene is of the persuasion that the theory is so mathematically beautiful that it must be true and paints a false image of this being the case for (nearly) all physicists, but he stops short of diving into the math, or a discussion of the math, that would make a proper comparison between the Standard Model and string theory possible. The careful reader, however unlearned in particle physics, should be able to see string theory's creeping disconnection from experimental reality and may begin to suspect why we've all been told so much about this idea even as they read Greene's proselytizing, trying to win new converts. Despite my deep disgust with string theory, I'd still recommend Greene's book. It provides a lot of good background on particle physics and on string theory that goes a lot further than most in explaining what's actually being talked about, while also providing a small window into this seemingly misguided idea.
Titan by Stephen Baxter
Having finished my manuscript I figured it behooved me to read some of the existing science-fiction involving Titan. There's not a lot out there, so I ended up digging up this
gem. This is the kind of book you find yourself reading when you've travelled for too long in one particular niche. It is incredibly, nauseatingly, mind-numbingly long, and yet it has precious little to say. Baxter's prose is punishingly bland, and he endlessly mines recycled ideas from Carl Sagan to serve as the scaffolding, covering and furnishing of his narrative. There's some very detailed descriptions here reflecting the research that Baxter has done: the space shuttle program and the U.S. Air Force's X-15 space plane which will be of interest to some readers. If the entire novel was written this way I feel it would have been for the better, but as it is these detailed descriptions stand in stark contrast to that which is imagined by the author himself, which seems sketchy and unbelievable by contrast. The book predicts a disaster with the space shuttle Columbia, but it is due to an avionics malfunction rather than the heat-shielding as occurred in real-life, and it predicts the ascendancy of a far-right protectionist president, a sort of ultra-religious Donald Trump years in advance. There's not a whole lot that takes place on Titan (curious about that name) and its description of the surface seems to have been rendered somewhat obsolete by the Cassini-Huygens mission. The novel jumps ahead millions of years and enters pure fantasy, all the while never really finding its footing or giving much of a voice to its characters. Did I mention it's really long? Reading this scared me off fiction for awhile.
Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit
If The Elegant Universe is the pro-string theory book, then this is the anti. Peter Woit does a bit of a tear-down of string theory and string theorists, explaining how they are all going down a misguided path. This is far less accessible than Greene's mass-appeal book and requires much more familiarity with particle physics and the supporting mathematics (familiarity of which I fell rather short). Woit argues for the mathematical beauty of the Standard Model, the current model of particle physics that is commonly maligned by string theorists as being
ugly and
cobbled together. In the end I don't really have the knowledge to really understand Woit's book.
Inventors and Inventions by Richard Fisher
This is essentially a coffee table book with large pictures of various inventions and short text on them. Basically a brief encyclopedia, it contains nuggets of interesting but seemingly useless information on all manner of things, from in-floor heating to the light-bulb. Most interesting is the meta-narrative that emerges: inventions are never the product of a solitary genius, great inventions are often "rediscovered" when the proper context for their usefulness finally exists, and even the simplest of inventions are actually a series of smaller inventions tracing back a long lineage of continuous invention. A light read that avoids the cavernous endlessness of an evening Wikipedia binge.
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory by Albert Einstein
Einstein's attempt to explain his theories to a general audience. It's mostly successful, although it seems to end rather abruptly. It got me going off in some idle speculation that I wrote over
here.
Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley returns to the ideas that he developed in Brave New World. Brave New World was primarily a novel about ideas, with the plot and characters being quite secondary, and in Revisited he dispenses with the set dressing altogether and instead presents essentially a long essay. I think Revisited is better for it, while Brave New World left me feeling a little ho-hum about the world-building and the characters, Revisited got me much more engaged in the ideas that it presented. It's an enjoyable read and its concerns about technology enabling encroaching totalitarianism are even more relevant today than they were in 1958. After reading it I wrote about some of the thinking that it spurred me off to
here.
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis is an readily readable dark fable about family life, work life, and the role of the male in modern society. In it a young man awakes one day to find that he has metamorphosed into a hideous insect-like creature, and really that's all I'm going to say, you can read the rest. I won't add my thoughts to the ocean of blabbering inanity out there dissecting every word of Kafka's sentences with calipers and micrometers, I'll only say that it's worth reading, and much of the "analysis" on it is not.
The Moral Animal by Robert Wright
I've had this on my reading list for probably close to a decade now. It introduces the science of evolutionary psychology and attempts to begin to explain human morality through the perspective this framework provides. It's interesting, although less in-depth and compelling than I perhaps thought it should have been. What I did not know going into the book, and was not expecting, was the fact that it uses Charles Darwin himself as its principle subject, the
moral animal with which to study. This ends up being the most memorable aspect of the book, and it's certainly of interest for those of us who aren't too familiar with the life of Darwin himself. Wright offers explanations for how Darwin was able to remain the perfect Victorian gentleman, even as his fame grew and while many of his contemporaries succumbed to various vices. For those who have wondered how humans have come to have the wonderful diversity and peculiarity of behaviours, this book offers a primer into the power of evolutionary thinking applied beyond mere biology, while raising far more questions than it answers. Some twenty-three years on from its initial publication, it seems that a lot has been accomplished in the field and a more recent text might provide for some interesting reading.
Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku
Michio Kaku, camera-friendly physicist, speculates on what technologies will shape our lives out to the year 2100. This isn't really a broad view of where things are heading, and instead more of a bunch of extrapolations on currently promising technologies, liberally sprinkled throughout with heavy doses of optimism. While Kaku's saccharine optimism can get grating at times, he does at least introduce a very sensible idea in the 'Caveman Principle'. As Kaku articulates it, this principle states that humans are biologically essentially identical to our hunter-gatherer ancestors and so our deepest needs are still the same. We are a high-tech,
high-touch species, and any technology that ignores this basic fact of biology does so at its own peril. There's not a lot here, but it's an easy enough read.
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hoftstadter
Hoftstadter's "scripture" is dense and long. Through the use of a cast of characters inspired by Lewis Carroll (Achilles, Tortoise, and Crab), it attempts a certain playful whimsy, but this more often frustrates than amuses. The book contains plenty of exercises for the ambitious, and many of these can become quite taxing, while skipping them can leave one feeling that some key insight has been missed. Ultimately it's worth sticking with, there are interesting ideas here on recursion, intelligence and consciousness and machine intelligence, even if it's preferred avenue for achieving machine intelligence has proven fruitless in the years since its publication.
Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems by Vaclav Smil
A fairly dense tome that deals with what it says, in many ways a survey of the world's energy consumption. Useful for the extraction of facts and figures, not so much for a long read (as I did).
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
For a book titled Superintelligence I found a lot of it rather dumb. Nick Bostrom sounds the alarm bells of a superintelligence emerging and sketches out some of the potential hazards and the problems that we need to solve if we are to successfully survive such an occurrence. I was put off by the format, which is loaded with more notes than text, with seemingly every other sentence digressing into a series of notes further explaining things. I tried ignoring these notes but found that what they addressed was too crucial to the rest of the text and feel that they should have been made more succinct and incorporated into the text proper. As for my overall feelings on the text itself, it seemed to be bereft of certain necessary content. Bostrom proposes solving many potential problems through a sort of bootstrapping (think along the lines of 'we'll design a superintelligence in order to build a superintelligence!') and seems to give the ethical concerns little attention. A superintelligence that is designed to avoid all the potential pitfalls is supposed to be universally good for humanity, with little consideration given to how a happy and prosperous civilisation no longer in control of its own destiny might actually not be that compatible with our biology. Ultimately though I found the read worthwhile as a compendium of sorts of all sorts of ideas surrounding superintelligence, including whole brain emulation - the idea of replicating in software human brains so that, while no more intelligent, they can run at hyper-fast speeds, accelerating the development of revolutionary technology.
The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos
While Nick Bostrom is afraid of all that could go wrong with a superintelligence, Pedro Domingos has no such worries. To be fair, they're not exactly talking about the same thing. Domingos introduces the reader to the broad categories into which various machine learning algorithms fall into. Machine learning algorithms are now ubiquitous, and they are only getting moreso. From Netflix to Amazon to Google, these algorithms are hard at work learning your preferences and trying to anticipate your needs, while learning algorithms are making self-driving cars a reality and promising (or threatening, depending on your perspective) to redefine many a workplace. This book is actually a pretty good introduction to this topic, accessible to non-programmers, and it sketches out the territory of learning algorithms, their unique strengths and limitations, and the desire to create a general purpose learning algorithm, a sort of universal learner. While such a general learner could potentially be bootstrapped into Bostrom's feared superintelligence, that is not guaranteed or even necessarily likely, and Domingos offers a contemporary and pragmatic view of the state of machine learning. If you want to get in on the next big thing money-wise, this book should probably be near the top of your list.
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
I encountered We after reading about Brave New World, of which We is reportedly a strong influence. We chronicles a futuristic dystopian city of identical people in identical glass apartments. Everything is steel and glass - privacy has been eliminated - and everything and everyone is reproduced endlessly. Zamyatin attacks Taylorism, the obsession with efficiency and timing out the motions of workers propounded by Frederick Taylor, by having just about every aspect of the protagonist's life (and therefore of everyone else's) planned by the state. As in Brave New World and 1984 that would follow (We was completed in 1921), there is an attempted rebellion against the state that ultimately fails and an ultimately submissive protagonist. We is a cry for help against the dehumanising effects of modernism, a theme that is as relevant today as it was then, albeit manifest in different ways. Recommended for those hooked on dystopian fiction.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
This is the Dick story that was adapted into the cult-classic film Blade Runner. While a synopsis of the novel and the film would share numerous similarities, the entire
texture of the future as presented by Dick feels entirely different to me from that in the film. Blade Runner is often praised for its world-building, the production design, its depiction of a used future that looks old, overbuilt, re-purposed. But the world of Blade Runner contains always the strain of sci-fi otherness, if it ever really was like our world it seems to have departed from it long ago. Dick's world feels more natural, more historical, and also, more eccentric. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a fun and brilliant little story on its own, with world-building that simply outclasses anything seen in the film. There is a religion called Mercerism by which humans try to connect with one another by grabbing hold of the handles of black empathy boxes - a powerful metaphor for television, and read from a modern perspective, more fittingly for the Internet. The world of the future is not over-crowded, rather it is nearly abandoned, gradually succumbing to entropy as everyone emigrates to the off-world colonies. I couldn't help but envision the very real rural depopulation seen all across the Western world, as young people move increasingly to ever more concentrated city centres, now applied to those very same cities. Ridley Scott's (the director of Blade Runner) admission in a 2007 Wired interview [
Source] that he couldn't get into the book is both hilarious and sad. Unless one is dyslexic it's hard to describe as a particularly challenging read. Don't let such aversions to the source material deter you though, Dick's novel is supremely readable. Not quite as good as UBIK, but still highly recommended regardless of one's feelings towards the film adaptation.
The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard
I no longer remember how I came across this book, but at some point I added it to my list of books to read and decided to finally get to it. J.G. Ballard imagines a future where humanity is dwindling, temperatures are rising to intolerable levels, water levels have risen and... not much else. There's a slow, reptilian lethargy to the story that spends most of its time scene setting. I never found a way to get invested in the story, finding myself continually bouncing off like a stone skipping on water. Once the story introduced
negroes and
mulattos, any lingering enthusiasm I had for it evaporated and I finished the rest of it as chore. Despite writing about the future (an unspecified future that is), the Drowned World was written in 1962, so it naturally reflects the gender and race relations of its time. However, the degree to which it so closely hews to the worst stereotypes of its day, and does so uncritically, ranks it among bad pulp genre-fiction in my mind. The
sole female character is little more than a damsel in distress, who does nothing but look pretty (dressing herself up fantastically even as the world slips away) and act irrationally. The
negroes and
mulattos are introduced as part of the crew of the story's villain, and it's not just the use of those words that offends, it's how they are used. Other characters are not
whites or
browns, but the author feels completely comfortable with the
othering of blacks in this way, again done so uncritically, so it is difficult to see it as a comment on the status of race relations of the time. In many ways it feels like a product of an earlier time, like a pulp serial from the 30's, where the valiant hero takes on the
animal-like
negroes and saves the girl. To its credit it doesn't play out in pulpy heroic fashion, a much more downbeat low-key story is told, but that's faint praise. It's primarily concerned with the idea of regression, of a sort of evolutionary regression, and a pseudo-scientific idea of genetic memories. I don't like to criticize science-fiction for its ideas that are wrong or that I simply disagree with, after all it's how these ideas are used that is important, and some of my favourite science-fiction contains pseudo-scientific ideas that are nonetheless used to interesting effect, but Ballard's treatment of his concepts is laboured and uninteresting, so that as a reader I felt that there was little for me to do but consider the potential validity of them. Bad ideas and an uninteresting treatment of them does not make for compelling fiction. Casual and systemic racism and sexism throughout only serve to sour the dish.
Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett
Dan Dennett wants to study religion as a natural phenomenon. In doing so he wants to break the taboo of not talking about religion (at least critically, with an aim toward real understanding), and put the world's religions under scrutiny. Dennett raises a lot of interesting questions, but doesn't get around to providing any answers; his is more a call to arms to start treating religion as something to study, rather than the accumulated knowledge gleaned from said study. That's fine, but the book is overlong in this respect and could perhaps be better communicated in an essay form. Dennett doesn't just want to reach academics with this book, he also wants to reach the religious (at least the more open-minded of them), and in this respect I think he takes too much for granted the rightness of a scientific worldview and dismisses too lightly the world of feelings and superstition. I'm not sure how exactly he could better make his case, but I suspect trying to have this argument with the religious is a bit like trying to teach a dog calculus.
Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
This came my way by way of the recommended reading list as part of my course studies in illustration. It is a collection of some of Benjamin's more highly regarded essays, with a preface by Leon Wieseltier and an introduction by Hannah Arendt. As these make clear, Benjamin was a well regarded and influential literary critic, although I wasn't able to discern why from his essays. The introductions note that Benjamin was a collector, first of books, and later of quotes, and this is evident in his writing, much of which feels like an elaborate excuse for him to drip feed his favourite "collected" quotes onto the reader. To be sure there is insight in Benjamin's work, but where there is it is buried in needlessly verbose mounds of words that state and re-state the same points in various guises. Brevity was not his forte. Perhaps insultingly, Benjamin is compared to Kafka (insulting to Kafka of course), since one could write, while the other could at best quote. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is perhaps Benjamin's most straightforward essay in the collection, and it benefits from it, although by the end of it the ideas seem roundly beaten into the ground just the same.
The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster
This also came to me by way of my course of studies and I couldn't regret reading it more. Forster depicts a bland uninteresting world of the future, painted with the broadest (and laziest) of strokes, where humanity has become wholly dependent upon The Machine. Then The Machine begins to break down and... people don't quite know how to cope. There really isn't anything more to this short yet agonising read besides the far too on-the-nose metaphor, forgettable wafer-thin characters and a non-existent plot. It was written in 1909, so some respect is perhaps due to its ideas, but in 2017 there really isn't anything for it to say that isn't just terribly cliché.
Illustration: A Theoretical and Contextual Perspective by Alan Male
Another course-work book, but despite its textbook-title it is surprisingly readable. Really only useful for someone entering the field of illustration, Illustration offers a lot of practical high-level advice for the discipline.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Strangely enough I had never even heard of Invisible Cities until coming across it as part of my course. In the book Marco Polo describes his travels through various cities to the emperor Kublai Khan. It's a short read, and each city description is quite brief as well. This is for the best, as it allows the reader to better find the connections and relations between the various descriptions. It's... interesting I guess, probably requires multiple re-readings to be appreciated.
Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? by Metahaven
An interesting read, especially in a world where Trump is president, that looks at how the Internet, humour, and activism all intersect in the modern age to undermine the current system of technocratic globalism. In hindsight, the lack of attention paid to the destructive power of this combination becomes a glaring oversight, as we now live in a world where fascists trumpet hate and then hide behind a curtain of "humour". Having seen the destructive power of Internet culture (in fact simply an amplification of the destructive power of the mob), I think the world is now looking for signs of its creative potential in the political sphere. It contains some interesting insights into memes and why activism is now expressed the way it is, with nonsensical "out-of-the-system" responses to carefully choreographed "questions". The book ends with perhaps its most memorable phrase: "Jokes are a continuation of politics by other memes."
Comics and Sequential Art by Will Eisner
While illustrated, I'd stop short of calling Eisner's book a graphic novel. It aims to provide advice to practising and would-be comics artists, with plenty of Eisner's own work used as example. Having already read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Making Comics, I didn't find much here that was particularly useful or insightful beyond what I already knew. It didn't help that I was not a fan of Eisner's art, which often seemed convoluted, rushed, and stylistically uninteresting. Even still, it's perhaps worth a quick flipping through just to see if it inspires any ideas for panel layouts, transitions and page composition.
Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte
A kind of survey of good information design practices, Tufte enumerates and illustrates a number of principles for the successful graphical presentation of information. It is interesting precisely because it is so usable, and Tufte does not presume low intelligence or lack of interest on the part of the audience, instead anticipating that those reading the information are likely to be more informed than the one who is presenting it. Whether you need to make a map, a schedule, a chart, or any other form of graphical information presentation, this is a recommended read with good advice to keep in mind.
Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval
An interesting look at the history of the office, from its beginnings as countinghouses to the rise of the office and the sprawling campuses of modern tech companies. Despite the title, Saval isn't strictly concerned with the cubicle, and instead investigates the development of the oft-neglected interior space of the office. There's lots of little tidbits of information here that I didn't know and it's overall a fascinating perspective on the 20th century that incorporates the rise and fall of modernism, women's role in the workplace, the privatised socialism of the corporate world and the rising and falling fortunes of the white-collar. One area that I felt was a bit under-served was that of the copy-cat offices, which are mentioned but never interrogated. While the landmark buildings get all the press, it is the poor imitations where the majority of workers would inevitably find themselves, and their particular shortcomings are perhaps more resonant with most office workers than the flaws of what were held up as ideals of their time.
