NYT, Soumya Karlamangla, posted 2 Oct 2022, in today’s paper: Once Known for Vaccine Skeptics, Marin Now Tells Them ‘You’re Not Welcome’
Subtitled: “The wealthy California county just north of San Francisco has one of the nation’s highest Covid-19 vaccination rates after years of being known for parents who opposed shots for childhood diseases.”
This week’s Sunday novella is “Oceanic” by Greg Egan. It was first published in the August 1998 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Subsequently it’s been published, aside from in these Dozois anthologies, in the author’s collections Dark Integers and other stories in 2008 and Oceanic in 2009, the former in the US and the latter in the UK, and then in The Best of Greg Egan in 2019 in the US.
Egan is perhaps science fiction’s greatest mystery man. He does not attend conventions, he does not appear in public, he does not release photographs of himself. He lives in Perth, Australia.
Old Teeth, Hurricanes, Government support for me not thee, Andy Borowitz, Liz Truss
Here is another older book out of my library, one to set alongside George Gamow’s One Two Three… Infinity, which I reviewed back in August. This book is even older. Published in 1940, this is Mathematics and the Imagination, by Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, with a Wikipedia page that oddly summarizes only the first four of its nine chapters. This book, like the Gamow, is still in print, from Dover. (The Amazon “Look Inside” samples includes the complete high-annotated table of contents.)
My edition, in the photo here, is a Simon & Schuster/Fireside trade paperback with a 1967 copyright. I bought it in 1980. After I’d graduated from college but before I began my aerospace job. I read it back then, and have spent a couple three hours paging through it this week in order to summarize here.*
Two items about abortion today, one from Richard Dawkins about the illogical premise of the anti-abortionists; another about continued Republican efforts to criminalize abortion to the point of executions of women.
Do people really not want to work? Why do people have anxiety dreams about school long after graduating? Plus items and politics and religion.
Washington Post, Eugene Robinson, 26 Sep 2022: The only agenda that unifies the Republican Party is revenge
How do I choose which books to buy, or read? A case example. Also: about dumb politicians, and about politics as a joke.
A few times here I’ve discussed my methods and thought processes to identify which books to read, or in particular which new books to buy with an eye toward reading. Here’s another chapter. Never minding the thousands of books that I own, and the several dozen from recent years that I definitely intend to read but have not yet, there are more new books that come out each year than I have time to read. Well, maybe I could read all of them if I started from scratch and *only* read new books.
There are different thought processes for different kinds of books. For novels, for example, reading one does not preclude reading any other, any more than seeing one movie rules out another, hours in the day aside. In contrast, nonfiction books might seems redundant after a point, for those on similar topics. Everyone has their favorite topics, subjects of interest, but do you need to read every basic book about cosmology or evolution that comes along? Only those by experts in the field? Only those that claim some new perspective or detail some recent discovery?
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
