This week’s Sunday novella is “The Cost to be Wise” by Maureen F. McHugh. It was first published in the anthology Starlight 1, published in 1996. Subsequently it’s been published, aside from these Dozois anthologies, in the author’s collection Mothers & Other Monsters (2006), and it formed the first part of the author’s novel Mission Child (1998). Continue reading
Let’s do something different today. What is this blog about, and what am I trying to support, or promote?
It’s about the idea that science fiction is a key way of thinking about the world, maybe the best way. Continue reading
Picking up from where I left off yesterday.
My basic summary of this book is: humans are not “stupid”; the issue is that human intelligence has both good and bad consequences, and apparently we can’t have the good without the bad. The bad is that humans don’t anticipate long-term consequences, such as climate change, and the issue is whether humanity can overcome short-term thinking to save itself. Yet the overall theme is that animals have intelligence, and consciousness, in their own way; and humans are not necessarily ‘happier’ than any of them. And many animals may long outlast the human species.
Here’s a recent nonfiction book with a provocative thesis and some interesting points which nevertheless I give a mixed review of.
Perhaps helpful to consider scoring the book along several independent parameters, like on some of those cooking shows, e.g. Iron Chef.
The author is an adjunct professor at a university in Nova Scotia. This seems to be his first book.
Busy day today, including dialogue about the future of Locus Magazine, so here it is 5:23pm and I have time only for a very brief post.
Jerry Coyne: Why you should read books
The drenching storm anticipated for Sunday was mostly a bust. Intermittent showers, even a squall or two, but mostly dry. We got only a quarter inch in our neighborhood. No rain today at all. (The storm had been predicted to linger into Tuesday.)
Today was the 15-month interval check-in with my cardiologists, in the city. Fifteen months since my heart transplant. All is well.
We were alerted weeks ago that our local water department would be digging up our streets in order to install new water mains. Continue reading
This week’s novella being covered by the Facebook Group that I post about every Sunday is “Forgiveness Day” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was first published in the November 1994 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and less than a year later was included in the author’s collection Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) along with three related stories.
Our visit to Lake Anza today, plus the usual daily dose of headline links following.
No backlog of links from this morning or yesterday, so I’m sitting down right now (4:30pm PDT) and surfing all my favorite website to see what jumps out. …Posting at 5:20pm.
Slate, Marissa Martinelli, 15 Sept 2022: Deep Space Whine, subtitled “There’s a war over what’s ‘the real Star Trek.’ It’s highly illogical.”
Math, Existential Security, and Lots of Links
Abstract matters
NYT, Alec Wilkinson guest essay, 18 Sep 2022: Math Is the Great Secret
This is by the man who wrote a book, published earlier this year, A Divine Language: Learning Algebra, Geometry, and Calculus at the Edge of Old Age, about learning those topics in his 60s.
Continue reading →