The Latest on Quantum Mechanics and Gravity?

Posted on Saturday 15 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Frederik Pohl, the SF writer and editor who wrote Gateway and many other novels, once wrote a book called Chasing Science: Science as a Spectator Sport, which was about him not being a scientist, but interesting in following new scientific developments.

This is roughly where I am. I have a degree in math, took some science courses in college, but most of my understanding of science has come through reading books, beginning with Isaac Asimov’s collections of F&SF essays (beginning with Only a Trillion) and onward through books by Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson; Gregory Berns; the Myth of a Lost Golden Age

Posted on Friday 14 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

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Yom Kippur, Belief in Belief, Doctrine of Discovery, the SBC

Posted on Thursday 13 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

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Jim Al-Khalili, The Joy of Science

Posted on Wednesday 12 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s a short little book that is basic but substantive. Familiar yet essential. Frankly, if I had seen it in a bookstore, I would have glanced through it and likely set it back down. Seeing it online made it difficult to tell how small a book it is. Still, it’s good to once in a while review the very basics, and this book does so nicely.

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Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility, and Its Reviews

Posted on Tuesday 11 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is what would be called a “literary science fiction” novel in that it’s clearly SF yet is written by a writer with a “literary” background rather than one in the SF genre, and so whose approach would be expected to vary from the interests of genre science fiction writers and readers. Mandel (the St. John is a middle name) came to prominence a few years ago with STATION ELEVEN (2014), which I haven’t read but which I gather was about the aftermath of a worldwide plague (it won an Arthur C. Clarke Award); after that came THE GLASS HOTEL (2020), which seemed to have such a slight genre element that haven’t even bought a copy. (Too many books…)

SEA OF TRANQUILITY is about time travel and the idea that the universe might be a simulation, focusing on a situation the author calls an “anomaly” and which is likened to a “file corruption” (as if the simulation is run on some huge computer). The “anomaly” manifests via various people in different times and places (including the Moon) who experience a momentary connection. That’s the boiled down technical summary.

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Today’s Links and Comments about Politics and Religion

Posted on Monday 10 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Andrew Sullivan and Connie Willis on the current state of affairs; End-times thinking; Edsall on Two Americas; the crushing of American socialism; more items about politics and religion.

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Ian McDonald, “Tendeléo’s Story”

Posted on Sunday 9 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This week’s Sunday novella is “Tendeléo’s Story” by Ian McDonald. It was first published as a chapbook by PS Publishing (in the UK), both in hardcover and paperback, in 2000. Subsequently it’s been published, aside from in the Dozois anthologies under review, in The Best of Ian McDonald in 2016 and in Neil Clarke’s anthology Not One of Us in 2018. I have the paperback edition of the chapbook, copy 25 of 500, signed by the author (whom I’ve never met).

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Julia Morgan and Julia’s

Posted on Saturday 8 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Last night we had dinner in a restaurant in the Berkeley City Club, a structure just south of Cal, UC Berkeley, designed by the famous architect Julia Morgan, who was the subject of a KQED profile last week. She designed hundreds of structures built in the Bay Area.

It was a nice dinner, but there was some party going on in one of the other rooms, perhaps a wedding party, and so service was slow. We took some photos. I’ll crosspost this to Facebook.

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Other posts in work. A take on SEA OF TRANQUILITY. And this week’s novella by Ian McDonald.

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Republicans and Socialism

Posted on Friday 7 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

So many political links, so little time. I do think I should scale these back, and focus on what I can say that nobody else is saying. On the other hand, there are so many crazies in the land, so many who are clueless about the world and their own craziness, and so many others who are unaware of what’s going on.

I have substantial links to comments by Connie Willis and Andrew Sullivan, but they will have to wait.

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Never Ending

Posted on Thursday 6 October 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

Big Think, Nirit Weiss-Blatt, 4 Oct 2022: Bombastic eulogies: Let’s put an end to cynical “The End of” headlines.

Subtitled: “We can never hope for a future with no problems. The solutions to problems create new problems, which in turn require new solutions, as WIRED founder Kevin Kelly explained recently.”

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