May 29, 2012 • 36 mins
Need new ideas for your summer reading? In this episode, Julie and Robert share their favorite books as well as a heads-up on what they intend to read this summer. Tune in to learn more about mind-blowing science fiction, non-fiction and literary fiction.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
We're always talking about books on here. We read books
when we're researching podcasts. We're fairly big readers, so we're
reading books outside of the office as well. You'll hear
(00:25):
us mentioned a title here title there. As the subjects
between our work life and our entertainment and personal enrichment
reading kind of overlap. So every now and then we
throw up book recommendations. You guys write in and ask
us about this book or another asked for us spelling
on an author's name, and we chat back and forth.
And we've been talking about doing a summer reading episode
for a while now where we just go ahead and
(00:47):
eliminate any other content from a short episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind and just talk about a few
books that are both near to our hearts but also
near to the heart of the show and close to
the themes that we often discuss and Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. Yeah, and the presumption is that it's summer's
coming up, and we're all gonna laze around for at
least two weeks, uh, you guys over in Europe, I
(01:09):
don't know, a month or two. We'll have some time
here to tackle a reading list and hopefully you guys
will be interested in some of the stuff that we
have to recommend. Yeah, you know, so you can hunt
these down, check them out from your library, load them
up on your kindle. I can't speak for your list.
I know on my list all these things are pretty
readily available, so you shouldn't have to do any deep
digging to find them. I like dusty books, like to
(01:30):
crack them open, so but I'm assuming that most of
the stuff is available. Yeah, I mean I do too,
though I just switched. I finally jumped on the bandwagon
and have a kindle. Now. Yeah, I'm going to get
there soon, but it just hasn't happened yet. Put it
that way, I mean, they don't smell near is nice.
I'm just a cheap jerk and I'm not there yet.
Like when it drops to fifty nine, probably without any
(01:51):
further ado, let's roll this baby out. Well, I'll go
first then, and I'm just gonna let you know most well,
all my choices here are actually fiction sci fi kind
of books, and you're gonna bring more of the non
I'm gonna bring the nonfiction. There's definitely some nonfiction books
that I've been reading or I've read recently, but they're
not necessarily things that I would say, yes, you should
plow through this as well, because there are books that
(02:13):
are informative and enriching and well worth the time you
spend with them, but it's not necessarily the kind of
thing you might want to take on a vacation with
you or you know, squirrel away for a little personal
enjoyment reading. Although you might be a nonfiction reader like
I am. Mostly I enjoy great fiction, but a lot
of times I just like to cozy up to something
(02:34):
that's really going to stirre my brain. Said, I don't
feel like I'm trapped in a certain world for a
certain amount of time, because I tend to when that happens,
you know, I get a really good piece of fiction,
I want to squirrel myself away for seventy two hours
and not eat or drink or talk to anyone else.
So that's a really big time commitment for me. So
nonfiction I really love because it's a balanced way to
consume some really cool bits of information. Okay, Well, my
(02:58):
first pick is a non by an author by the
name of our Scott Baker. Sometimes he's just so listed
as Scott Baker, depending on if you're getting a like
a Canadian, British, shore Us version of one of his books.
He's the author of a really thought provoking epic fantasy
series called well overall. It's called The Second Apocalypse, and
that includes the novels The Prince of Nothing. The Darkness
(03:18):
That Came Before is the first trilogy in that series,
and it's all very thought provoking stuff. He's a philosophy guy.
He invokes a lot of neuroscience in his worlds, even
if he's writing about a world full of magic. But
those fantasy books are not always as accessible, I think
to some readers. Luckily, he has written a couple of
non fantasy books, and one of these is a book
(03:39):
called Disciple of the Dog, and that's the one that
I'm gonna recommend here. It's a really fun read. It's short,
and it is about a sleazy, pothead private investigator with
an abnormal capacity for memory. He cannot forget anything that
it's said to him. The capacity doesn't allow him to
remember everything that he's read. But if somebody has said it,
(04:00):
if he's seen it, then it's cemented in his mind.
Is that similar to some people who have ability to
recall dates like from twenty years ago or in in
the events connected to them. Yeah, that kind of thing
should be helpful if you're a private investigator and you know,
we've seen this kind of investigator before. To a certain incidentally,
give me Sherlock Holmes is the classic investigator character. And
(04:20):
certainly with Sherlock, you have a character that has just
a phenomenal brain and it distances himself from various human
experiences and makes him kind of an enigma to normal people. Well,
the character and disciple of the dog who's the character's name,
is a disciple manning just kind of gimmicky but fun.
He is kind of screw up because of his condition.
Like his condition is he cannot forget anything, so anything
(04:42):
that traumatizes him is there forever. So he's a character
that has had some severe bouts with depression and self
loathing based on this ability, but he's also managed to
use it for financial gain as a private investigator. And
so our Scott Baker injects a lot of philosophical pondering
into this because we get into questions that we've raised
in the podcast before, to what extent are we shaped
(05:04):
by our memory? And what to what extent are we
shaped by our memory errors. We discussed the seven Deadly
sins of memory, the various ways that we misremember something
or alter the memory of something in our head, and
these are things that the character Disciple Man and cannot do.
So it's interesting to see Baker play that out in
the novel and Disciple the Dog. The character is looking
into a missing person's case that concerns a new age
(05:27):
cult where the believers are of the opinion that it
is actually the year A D fifty million, and life
as we know it is all just the dream of
a quantum computer, and the sun is actually about to
swallow the earth as it goes into a red dwarf stage.
So you also end up with ponderings about what is
our future and the idea that you know, when yeah, yeah,
(05:50):
what would it look like? And ideas that what is reality?
You know, what is it possible that reality could be
the dreams of a quantum computer? And then this is
all just a backward fantasy. The world around this is
just this backward fantasy that we project for ourselves. So
there are various levels of, to my mind, mind blowing
ideas that Baker has fun within this. And then on
top of that, it's entertaining because you have a wonderfully
(06:12):
sleazy but likable protagonist and you have this now air
setting like industrial Jersey, so it's not really a new
war setting, but it's got very much a new war
kind of vibe to it. Classic detective case, what's gonna happen?
He's gonna find the missing girl who's the heart of
the conspiracy and all of this. So it's short, gets
the point, have some fun with the character and brings
(06:33):
with it a lot of floor ideas. I like the
dichotomy of a pothead with a really long memory too. Yeah,
a sharp memory. Well, pretty great because it's like the
sharp memory is bringing him such trauma. It distanced him
from so many people. He kind of has to self
medicate through it. Yeah, what's on your list? Okay? Um, well,
I have the best nature in science running. That of
(06:55):
course is a series, and this particular one is the
guest edited by Mary Roach. She's at the Helm there, yes,
so she's made a lot of the selections here. You'll
probably remember her from books like Stiff Pecking from Mars Bunk.
She's just got a really great science journalism pedigree, and
I think anybody familiar with her work knows that she
has a great sense of humor and the ability to
(07:17):
really deliver very accessible points of entry into some weighty subjects.
If you go back through the catalog of our podcast
far Enough, you're fun an interview with her from back
when the podcast was stuffed in the Science Lab. So
she's got the selection of different pieces of essays and articles,
about twenty five of them. Actually. Some of them are
from well known writers like Oliver Sacks and Leonard Lednov
(07:41):
and Stephen Hawking, and others not as well known, although
definitely up and coming, like Brook Hollard Builder, people making
a name for themselves for their ability to reframe our
understanding of the subject. In fact, Brook Hard Builder is
the writer of the article that has to do with
food safety, which right there sounds like incredibly wing. But
this guy went into underground food movements like fermenting, which
(08:05):
we talked about in a podcast, raw milk, the paleo diet,
all these very different sort of movements going on right now,
and what could have just been like a story about
the safety of food became this incredible matrix of cultural
ideas and scientific theories that are proven and disproven. So anyway,
(08:25):
that that's why I really love this series is that
it does take this sort of everyday stuff and reframe
it for us. Another really good example is an essay
by jarn Lanier. It's called the First Church of Robotics,
and it explores our fascination with robotics. If certainly we
have a fascination with it, We've talked about it quite
a bit, and our need to project ourselves onto these
machines and personify them. And he said that this is
(08:48):
all going on at the same time we are increasingly
treating our fellow humans like machines. So it's kind of
interesting that you have this shift in the way that
we are communicating with one another. We're communicating in way
set rely on algorithms of technology instead of our own
personal humanity. So if he's saying, hey, I mean it's
more like a cautionary tale, like it's very compelling. He's saying,
(09:09):
let's not deify a machine quite yet doing so just
makes us sort of like these grotesque ventriloquists. So that's
just another example of one of the more mind blowing
aspects of these different essays. Kind of a buffet, right
ideas with this you do you do? You could say
it's sort of a snapshot of the year of eleven
in journalism, and that would be absolutely true. But the
(09:31):
fact of the matter is just that a lot of
this has to do with topics that have been around.
It's not just like, hey, this is the zeitgeist moment
right here for this subject. I knew that there's a
one essay or that talks about prohibition and about the
government's role and actually poisoning ethanol and in doing so
taking the lot of many Americans during prohibition, And this
(09:52):
is something that's probably not widely known, but here's a
piece of journalism sort of bringing up the past and saying,
did you know that at one point probhibition and it
had taken hold so much of the government that they
were actually trying to discourage people by making them really sick,
by mixing together ethanol and other chemicals and in doing
so poisoning them, which resulted in thousands of deaths. So
(10:12):
it does it takes everything from subjects like can animals
be gay? To prohibition to even space junk, which we've
talked about. And it's very entertaining because it does allow
you to enter into these subjects in a way that
are very accessible. And I was even thinking about Leonard
miledna Of and Stephen Hawking and their essay about m theory,
(10:34):
membrane theory or string theory, right, which is this idea
that we can get this theory of everything together. They
asked the reader to imagine themselves as goldfish looking through
the distorted glass of their enclosures, and in order to
understand the limitations of this theory of everything that we're after,
and they say, imagine the goldfish as they formulate scientific
(10:57):
laws from their distorted frames of reference that would always
hold true and enable them to make predictions about the
future emotions of objects outside the bowl. So they're taking
this really cool analogy of us being fish in the
bowl and having a distorted view of reality and then
this theory of everything and again a really good entry
(11:18):
point into this subject matter. So that is why I
recommend that book. Well, that does sound like a good one.
My next entry in this list is a book called
The Wind Up Girl by a Paolo Bassa Gallupi, and
this is a really fun sci fi novel and a
really thought provoking sci fi novel, and that it takes
a lot of our fears associated with our use of
(11:40):
science today and extrapolates those into a very engaging, until
our extent nightmaric vision of the future. It takes us
to the futuristic time. It's a post oil world, so
we've used up all of our natural resources as far
as oil goes, So the petroleum based system crashes to
the ground and suddenly traveling across the globe is severely limited.
(12:03):
The world in a way becomes much larger because when
we have less ability to travel it and to intraverse it,
the distances become vast because we can't just fly around
the world in a day anymore. There's no more oil. Also,
you have genetically modified organisms, specifically genetically modified crops have
backfired in this world to the point where you end
up with massive starvations, massive famines, and it's really crippled
(12:26):
the world. So in the Wine Up Girl, we find
ourselves in Bangkok, Thailand, and this is one of the
few places it's us shut itself off from the rest
of the world. It's managed to maintain a certain degree
of non genetically altered vegetation, that has a certain amount
of genetic purity to most of its vegetables, and it's
able to feed itself. And you have these outside corporations
(12:49):
that are interested, these colary companies they are called, that
are interested in infiltrating Thailand and Bangkok and actually finding
some of these examples so they can take them out
genetically tinker with them. Well, yeah, I mean really, I mean,
the bad guys in this the villains are basically sci
fi versions of some of the large companies like Monsanta
that we have today. And then you also have a
character in this book called Imaco, and Imaco is a
(13:11):
wind up girl they call it. She's one of the
new people. She's a genetically engineered human. She's a very
interesting character too, because she's originally bred as basically a
pleasure person, like a roxy robot, but flesh human flesh
one yeahs trying to say it in an acceptable way,
but she's bred for this kind of life, engines up
abandoned in Bangkok by her former master, and she's not
(13:31):
engineered to really survive all that well, she's been conditioned
to be this submissive, servant to businessman thing of pleasure.
Her horrors are extra small because it supposedly looks nicer
for her to have very poor, less skin, but it
also means that she has trouble managing her body heat.
And so the author does a gred job of exploring
what life might be like for this genetically modified person,
(13:53):
what kind of flaws are engineered into her. They call
her a wind up girl because she's engineered so that
she walks funny, with the idea being that new people
will stand out if they're just seen on the streets,
so there will be this threat of the new people
taking over. And it heart's also just a story about
a spy trying to steal something about political corruption and
about the crimes of humanity and how they may fall
(14:15):
out over the decades to come, what it is to
be human too, yea or even subjugated. It sounds like,
are there any wind up men? I have to ask?
I forget if there are. I feel like there's mention
of mercenaries, none that are engineering. It's been a year
or two since I read it, but I seem to
remember there was a detail about that technically the book
is I think they called biopunk, which I'm kind of
a critic of overuse of the cyberpunk terminology where someone
(14:39):
just puts in another steampunk Yeah, well yes, steampunk, diesel punk.
The more something fits one of those classifications, the less interesting.
I think the biopunk stuff is really cool though. Yeah yeah,
I mean the potential, I mean people are doing some
really cool things with that. But any but but at heart,
this book is really interesting because it's entertaining, because it
is action and intrigue characters should care about. But it
also takes a look at modern day a logical concerns
(15:01):
and uses them to create this sci fi future that
really speaks to readers today. That sounds really cool. I
like the premise of that a lot. I'm going to
put that on my list. I gotta say, so, do
you go? All right? Well, I think we let's take
a quick break and when we get back we will
talk about a book called Super Sad True Love Story.
(15:22):
All right, we're back, So Super Sad True Love Story.
You've mentioned this one before. I have. I've talked about it,
like sort of sputtered about it. But I thought, well,
this is a good opportunity to talk about why I'm
always bringing it up. It's by Gary Steingart and just
to fly our little futurists freak flag a little bit higher.
It is again, a dystopian futuristic novel not too far
(15:43):
in the future that I think they're talking about, maybe
fifty years in the future. It is a fiction of
work of fiction, of course, and it centers around a
character not any enough, Lenny Abramof and he is a
mid level drone for a massive multinational corporation in the future.
By the way, the not too distant future, like everything
is small talent national conglomerate, so it's like kmart g E,
(16:04):
something ridiculous, something other, sort of like large company all
melded together, which is just again it's extrapolating like what's
happening in the present in the fifty years and sort
of taking it to the nth degree, which is why
it makes it such an interesting novel. Lenny is working
in a division of this multinational corporation which promises to
help the super rich live forever thanks to nanotechnology and
(16:28):
super anti accidents and various other over hyped technologies. At
this point, he falls in love with a beautiful young
Korean woman named Unice. She lives with him, but and
she really provides the perspective of the youth at that point.
She's obsessed with consumerism. She's shallow, but she's not shallow me.
She's drawn actually pretty well as a character. She's oversharing.
(16:49):
She's obsessed with electronic media culture, in which everybody when
you go out in public in this future world, everything
is revealed about you via this sort of like iPhone
looking device hanging around everybody's next and it projects to
everybody else's iPhone device. I think it's called apparatus or
something like that. Your credit score, your hotness score, every
(17:10):
single thing about like, think about every piece of information
about yourself that's out there that you could then just
automatically transmit to someone. This is what's happening. So something
you just posted on Facebook or Twitter. So you walk
into a bar and all of a sudden, you can
look down at your apparatus and you can see, like
what your own hotness score is based on everybody at
that very moment looking at you and entering it. So
(17:33):
the premise of it is just really interesting. Everyone is
divided into high network net work individuals and low net
worth individuals um and basically you have a collapsing America
which is hugely in debt to China, and it definitely
has traces of Brave New World in four And it's
(17:54):
the reason I really like it is it could have
been watered down satire, but shine Gard is really a
very spressive writer, and he builds a very convincing world.
So you can easily imagine yourself walking through the streets
of New York in this future America where the National
Guard is ever present. You've got a collapsing banking system
and yet this technology that really turns people inwards so
(18:17):
that they're sort of ignoring all these different things happening
around them, and really nice cohesive world building by shin Guard.
There's also a running gag where the National Guard stops
people at checkpoints and they're forced to deny and imply.
They deny that a conversation ever took place, and they
imply their consent for an invasive search. It is funny
(18:38):
because so many times and when you're online you're just
agreeing to something. It's very much in that same sort
of like, hey, you're agreeing to this right, but you're
not really reading it and all right, let's go on
and so on and so forth. Document you need to
read it before you visit a website, and you just yes, yeah.
So again he's taken that idea to the degree and
said that you know, you're now you are living in
this this very public sphere where everything you do is
(19:00):
being met with this idea of you deny and imply,
and you're entering into these contracts that you don't even
know about and the afterwards. Scheinert says that he read
Ray Kurt's Wheels The Singularity Is Near while he was
working in the book, as well as our friend Aubrey
de Gray. I say our friend because I imagine this
as friends, the bearded one, the biogenontologists. His book ending
(19:23):
aging the rejuvenation breakthrough that could reverse human aging in
our lifetime, and he definitely takes these ideas which are
really cool and very cutting edge, but he does look
at it through a lens of pessimism. He says, in
this future, sure all of this would be accessible, but
only to the super rich. Everyone else would be labeled
impossible to preserve or I t P in this world.
(19:44):
So that's why I think it's interesting. It touches on
so many things that we've discussed, and it's done really well. Cool. Yeah,
that's when I really need to add my reading list
as well. You've mentioned it, i think in several times
in relation to topics we've discussed, and it sounds like
it's kind of funny too. Yeah. He's got a great
sense of humor and it really is. Actually, I mean,
the title is apt It is a love story, but
(20:06):
it's it's heartbreaking and it's beautiful, important and terrifying at
the same time. Well, my next pick isn't very funny
in fact, even though this is an author that I
understand has written some things that have a lot more
humor and absurdity to them, this is not one of
those books. The book is Embassy Town by China me Evil.
As we're recording this podcast, it is on the list
of nominees for two thousand and twelve Hugo Award. I
(20:28):
have a suspicion it might win it. We'll see how
that plays out. This is a science fiction novel takes
place in a far future. Humans of colonized distance space
and they travel through these kind of a warp situation
where they kind of they move through a an alternate
dimension to emerge into real space again, and one of
the stopovers, well not only stopped over, it t really
(20:48):
The Distant Frontier is a planet that has an alien
race on it called the Araiki. And in this story
we have a human colonist named Abbess returning to this
planet in the town their Inbassy Town after years of
deep space adventure, and she ends up getting sucked into
this adventure and they sell this intrigue between the human
(21:09):
colonists and the Iraqis that live there, and a lot
of it ends up having to do with language, in
the nature of language, and not just ideas of like
how might aliens communicate versus humans and how would humans
communicate with aliens, So there is a lot of discussion
of that. It also gets into just deeper ideas of
what language is. For instance, the Arakis in their language,
(21:29):
they do not have lies, like they cannot tell lies
because built into their linguistic machinery and not just lies,
but they cannot speak things that cannot be physically proven,
so they end up having to like just to form similars.
They end up having to an list actors and sort
of construct them out of minor dramas and uh and
(21:50):
so it's just thought provoking in terms of it's use
of language, and it really makes you think about what languages,
what lies are, and what the ramifications for these things
could be when it comes to in contact with a
potential alien species. So I recommend giving that one to read.
It also has a strong female protagonist, which is always
a nice change for sci fi, and like I said,
it might want a Hugo Award this year. So one
(22:11):
of the more remarkable science fiction books of the last
few years. I really like the idea that aliens couldn't
why because it's not part of the skill set that
they need. And I know we talked about this before
we did a podcast online and how with humans it's
like integral to the way that we enter into social contracts.
You cannot actually be a human really without lying at
some point however you define lying. Yeah, So that's that's
(22:35):
an interesting premise. Is this added level to where in
order to actually communicate with them, you can't just have
one person trying to speak the Araki tongue. You have
to have two individuals who essentially have the same mind
that are performing a duet. So, like I said the other,
but in an tremendous amount of thought and research into
language and what language is. So if you're at all
(22:55):
interested in alien linguistics, then definitely give this book a read.
Very cool. Okay, So I have a nonfiction book called
The Magic of Reality How We Know What's Really True?
By Richard Dawkins. We've talked about him before, and he's
offered many books. He's a big money time, selfish gene
is one that probably a lot of people know. I
(23:16):
love this book. I picked it up actually for my
daughter because I'm creating sort of a library for her
when when she gets older. And she's only three, so
it's just going to be the official library, or is
this the secret library that you're actually tricking her into reading.
It's just a bunch of books that she can pick up.
I mean, I'm not gonna say like today we're going
to pick up Richard Dawkins and you're going to go
to page twenty six. It's just a book that I
(23:39):
think would be really helpful for her as she develops
at different stages in her life. So this book is
actually built for all ages. But I kind of see
this more is like maybe a really precocious, tent and up.
But the reason why I selected this is because Dawkins
basically takes sort of like this whole, like, Hey, here's
the universe and we're gonna explain it to you now
(24:00):
in no, in certain terms, I mean, it's really cool.
Like he he starts out by talking about magic, because
magic and magical thinking is very much a human construct, right,
We've talked about this so many times. It can lead
to errors on our thinking, it can lead to beautiful
works of art. And he says that when it comes
to science, that reality is actually much more magical than
(24:23):
magic itself. I'm just going to read this little bit.
This is actually a description of the book. Says magic
takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used
in order to explain the world before they developed the
scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting
the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believe the
rainbow was the god's bridge to Earth. The Japanese used
(24:44):
to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried
the world on its back. That's not true, oh man,
I've been I think I wrote that into an article.
Bok you all right, I know what you're gonna be
reading right after this. Yeah, it's not true that earthquakes
occurred each time it flipped its tail. Oh man, yeah,
(25:06):
you're telling after revise your articles. My whole world view
is completely twitched around now that. Yeah. Yeah, these are magical,
extraordinary tales, and they're wonderful. But there's another kind of magic,
and it laws in the exhilaration of discovering the real
answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality science.
So there are twelve different questions or topics that he tackles,
and they're all introduced with the supernatural explanation that we
(25:29):
all know and love, and then Dawkins sprinkles his magic
science dust on top and makes you realize that the
rigors of scientific method uncover the old adage that the
truth really is stranger than fiction, and it makes that
even more glorious. Some of the areas that he covers
are what is reality? Who was the first person? Um?
(25:49):
He talks about DNA, and he talks about three million
years ago. You can point to this lizard and say, hey, man,
you and me we share a lot in common. What
is an earthquake? There really is stone left unturned in
the section, the last section he takes on miracles. Uh,
and he ends by saying, and I won't go into
all the different things that he talks about in terms
(26:11):
of what is a miracle that he ends the section
by saying. The eminent science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark
summed up the point as Clark's third law. Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If a time machine
were to carry us forward a century or so, we
would see wonders. Today we might think impossible miracles. The
(26:32):
truth is more magical in the best and most exciting
sense of the world than any myth or made up
mystery or miracles. Science has its own magic, magic of reality.
So again he's going back to sort of the basics
of very mind blowing stuff to us that we've talked
about before, in terms of how did our planet form?
Talking about stardust, talking about how how do we really
know that dinosaurs existed? Well, okay, you know, we've got
(26:55):
fossils into um and and it's amazing even talks about like, okay,
some of the things might have sounded like myth when
scientists wore proposing them, especially with sci fi writers he
talks about, he says, but they take these ideas and
they create theories out of them, and then they create
a model to test them. And DNA is the perfect
example of this. This was an idea that was then
(27:18):
modeled and then you know, through a series of different
things of research and data that came up, we came
to realize that this was a truth. That's why it's
so entertaining because he really he takes on these really
heavy concepts and he writes very eloquently and very humorously,
but very clearly. Because again, this is for all ages.
(27:39):
And I do recommend it to adults because I think
that you would get a lot out of it. But
I also think it's really worth its weight in gold
because it talks about the skeptics. I not as someone
who like, you know, let's pick apart everything and take
the magic out of things, but more like, let's not
be run by our superstitions or magical thinking. Let's you
(28:02):
the magic of reality just in day to day life
and be able to sort of to look at the
invisible world and see how incredible it is. And I
think that's a huge message to kids well into adults
as well well. The final book on my list of
four summer reading recommendations is a book called The Player
of Games by Ian M. Banks. And this is a
(28:24):
book from the Culture series, which I've mentioned before. I
generally bring it up because it takes place in a
distant future where humanity and machines live in a symbiotic relationship.
So it's a post technological singularity world where we see
the more positive ramifications. Not to say there's not some
darkness in this world, oh yeah, yeah, this is the
benign singularity. Definitely a benign singularity situation, though you do
(28:47):
have some dark things that end up happening in this universe.
And this book deals specifically with a clash between the
culture again, robots humans living in harmony. Basically humans doing
whatever they want while robots look after them and do
the hard work, and so humans end up living lives
of complete freedom. In this book, we have a human
(29:07):
by the name of Gurga, and he has used his
life to become a master of games. He's the Player
of Games that we referenced in the title, So he's
the master of all these different board games and travels
around just having a good time and playing them in competition,
very obsessive about winning, and he ends up being recruited
by the culture, by the robots that run the culture,
(29:27):
to serve as an emissary to this civilization that exists
outside of the culture in non culture space, called the
Empire of Azad, and they are at cruel, incredibly wealthy,
destructive alien race. But at the heart of their culture
they have this one super complex game and it serves
as the backbone not only their empire and its laws,
(29:49):
but also the very cognitive development of the race. So
imagine a civilization where there's one game, then, in all
its complexity and reasoning, is the backbone of everything they
hold deer and everything that they are. And so the
culture wants to send him in, and he's on this
long journey, so he has plenty of time to practice
and learn the game and play it against one of
(30:09):
the AI's on the ship, and then when he gets there,
he's expected to compete with members of this cruel alien race,
the idea being that by playing a human in the scenario, though,
somehow achieve a balance and they'll avoid war with the
Empire of his odd So it's a great introductory read
to the Culture series, because the Culture Series is not
(30:29):
one of these series where you need to like start
with the book one and then read through book eight.
Most of them, to my understanding, stand on their own.
I haven't read them all, I've only read a handful,
but everyone seems to exist well on its own, and
the player of games certainly does that. It's a fascinating
look at what a post singularity world might consist of,
when some of them were positive visions of that. It's
a great analysis of what games mean to a civilization.
(30:53):
And Ian and Banks is great about throwing in some
really cool science and stuff, like he's clearly clearly has
a very scientific mind, so he'll do things like for
instances of planet in this book, where the only land
on the planet everything is water except for the single
strip of land that goes all the way around the equator,
and you have a firestorm that moves along that strip
(31:15):
of land, so that the ecosystem on this planet is
a fire based ecosystem. And in the same way that
you have plants that depend on forest fires to reproduce,
all the life on this planet has evolved to deal
with this ce cyclical firestorm that goes all the way
around the world. So he'll throw in things like that
when he's thinking about life and other worlds or planetary
physics or whatever it happens to be. Andy'll incorporate that
(31:36):
even if it's just a fascinating nugget along the way.
And unlike some of the other authors that I mentioned,
Ian Ebanks tends to write with a certain degree of
humor that is not necessarily prevalent in the other three works.
So if you want something that is at times lighter
and might get a giggle out of you, I find
Ian in Banks tends to fit the bill on that. Yeah,
and I'd say too, that seems like, uh, you know,
(31:56):
one of the commonalities between all of these or most
of these, is that there is some sense of humor.
That author enters into the the information with a good
stance of humor. It sounds like, so, but you know
it's important to us, all right, very cool. I was
going to mention a book that I'm going to check out.
It's called Internal Time, The Science of Chronotypes, Social jet
(32:16):
lag and more. You're so tired, And I thought it
was really interesting because we are at a point in
our history where we are not I think because of
technology as tied to time as we used to be,
and so it does seem like there is a bit
of a shift in the way that people are approaching
their schedules. Not only that, you know, as everybody knows,
despite that and some sort of flexibility, we seem to
(32:38):
be cramming so much into our time and really suffering
for it. So I I really am interested in finding
out more about this, these chronotypes that supposedly all of
us possess a different chronotype and internal timing type. So
some people are early risers, some people are late risers,
and this seems to be Historically we thought, okay, well
(32:59):
that means that you're lay about if you get up late,
or you know your go get or if you get
up at six am or whatever. Those are just very
arbitrary terms that have been abscribed to people. That this
idea of chronotype is something that is more hardwired into us.
So I'm going to check that out. And then two
quick mentions. I won't go into them too much. Some
we love, some we hate, and some we eat. We've
(33:21):
talked about this book. It's great. I am A relationship
with animals. A relationship with the animals are ten years
relationship with animals, how confused we are kind of butt
over tea kettle when it comes to us, right, and
how we receive animals, and as the title says, some
we love, some we hate, and some wheat. So I'm
going to check that out a little bit more this
summer because there are some things I want to revisit.
Especially there's a chapter on animal cruelty and this myth
(33:46):
that serial killers start off as killers of animals, that
this is actually not true, that children do this as
sort of a mastery of their own places in the world,
and this idea of trying to figure out what power
is over another person or thing. So I want to
check that out. And the next book, last book, The
(34:08):
Family Fang. It is a fiction book. It's about Caleb
and Camille Fang, their performance artists, who use their two children,
Annie and Buster are otherwise known as Child and Child
be as parts of their performance pieces. And it seems
like it's going to be like a pretty smart debate
about the human cost of sacrificing everything for art and
(34:28):
this idea of family. Everybody always thinks that they have
the freakiest family, so it'll be interesting to see that
that idea played out with the family fang cool. Well,
for my part, I'm I think this may be the
summer I finally read Dan Simon's Hyperion. Oh yeah, classic
SciFi booked at our our our boss. Many people's always
(34:48):
read that, yet Yeah, I think I have a friend
who's gonna try reading it, So hopefully this will be
the summer. On that, I should also point out real
quick that the fiction books that I mentioned here, if
you're obviously, if you're a parent, you're involved then and
whatever your kid reads, that's your own deal. But I
would like to point out that the author Polo basaka Loopy,
the author of The Wind Up Girl, he also has
a couple of young adult novels. One in particular that's
(35:10):
out as we're recording. This is called The Shipbreaker, and
it deals in the same setting, a post oil, ecologically
ravaged world, but it's aimed to the younger audience, so
you don't have to worry about there being anything inappropriate
in there. I would list that as an alternative or
if you're just I mean end up playing of adults
who prefer young adult novels. I mean, there are a
lot of great young adult novels out there that can
be enjoyed by any age. So because I take those
(35:32):
as alternatives, so we present you this list of books.
You can use this if you're trying to think of
something you want to you want to read. So if
you do happen to pick one of these up, if
you read something that we have recommended, or if you're
reading something that we're planning to read this summer, or
if you've you've read it already and have some thoughts
on it, if you would like to encourage us in
these choices that we have made, or say, actually, you're
(35:52):
making a huge mistake by reading Hyperion or whatever, let
us know. We'd love to hear from you. You can
find us on Facebook and you can find us on Twitter.
On Facebook, we're stuff to Blow your Mind on Twitter.
Our handles Blow the Mind, and you can drop us
a line at blow the Mind discovery dot com. Okay,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas.
We're always talking about books on here. We read books
when we're researching podcasts. We're fairly big readers, so we're
reading books outside of the office as well. You'll hear
(00:25):
us mentioned a title here title there. As the subjects
between our work life and our entertainment and personal enrichment
reading kind of overlap. So every now and then we
throw up book recommendations. You guys write in and ask
us about this book or another asked for us spelling
on an author's name, and we chat back and forth.
And we've been talking about doing a summer reading episode
for a while now where we just go ahead and
(00:47):
eliminate any other content from a short episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind and just talk about a few
books that are both near to our hearts but also
near to the heart of the show and close to
the themes that we often discuss and Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. Yeah, and the presumption is that it's summer's
coming up, and we're all gonna laze around for at
least two weeks, uh, you guys over in Europe, I
(01:09):
don't know, a month or two. We'll have some time
here to tackle a reading list and hopefully you guys
will be interested in some of the stuff that we
have to recommend. Yeah, you know, so you can hunt
these down, check them out from your library, load them
up on your kindle. I can't speak for your list.
I know on my list all these things are pretty
readily available, so you shouldn't have to do any deep
digging to find them. I like dusty books, like to
(01:30):
crack them open, so but I'm assuming that most of
the stuff is available. Yeah, I mean I do too,
though I just switched. I finally jumped on the bandwagon
and have a kindle. Now. Yeah, I'm going to get
there soon, but it just hasn't happened yet. Put it
that way, I mean, they don't smell near is nice.
I'm just a cheap jerk and I'm not there yet.
Like when it drops to fifty nine, probably without any
(01:51):
further ado, let's roll this baby out. Well, I'll go
first then, and I'm just gonna let you know most well,
all my choices here are actually fiction sci fi kind
of books, and you're gonna bring more of the non
I'm gonna bring the nonfiction. There's definitely some nonfiction books
that I've been reading or I've read recently, but they're
not necessarily things that I would say, yes, you should
plow through this as well, because there are books that
(02:13):
are informative and enriching and well worth the time you
spend with them, but it's not necessarily the kind of
thing you might want to take on a vacation with
you or you know, squirrel away for a little personal
enjoyment reading. Although you might be a nonfiction reader like
I am. Mostly I enjoy great fiction, but a lot
of times I just like to cozy up to something
(02:34):
that's really going to stirre my brain. Said, I don't
feel like I'm trapped in a certain world for a
certain amount of time, because I tend to when that happens,
you know, I get a really good piece of fiction,
I want to squirrel myself away for seventy two hours
and not eat or drink or talk to anyone else.
So that's a really big time commitment for me. So
nonfiction I really love because it's a balanced way to
consume some really cool bits of information. Okay, Well, my
(02:58):
first pick is a non by an author by the
name of our Scott Baker. Sometimes he's just so listed
as Scott Baker, depending on if you're getting a like
a Canadian, British, shore Us version of one of his books.
He's the author of a really thought provoking epic fantasy
series called well overall. It's called The Second Apocalypse, and
that includes the novels The Prince of Nothing. The Darkness
(03:18):
That Came Before is the first trilogy in that series,
and it's all very thought provoking stuff. He's a philosophy guy.
He invokes a lot of neuroscience in his worlds, even
if he's writing about a world full of magic. But
those fantasy books are not always as accessible, I think
to some readers. Luckily, he has written a couple of
non fantasy books, and one of these is a book
(03:39):
called Disciple of the Dog, and that's the one that
I'm gonna recommend here. It's a really fun read. It's short,
and it is about a sleazy, pothead private investigator with
an abnormal capacity for memory. He cannot forget anything that
it's said to him. The capacity doesn't allow him to
remember everything that he's read. But if somebody has said it,
(04:00):
if he's seen it, then it's cemented in his mind.
Is that similar to some people who have ability to
recall dates like from twenty years ago or in in
the events connected to them. Yeah, that kind of thing
should be helpful if you're a private investigator and you know,
we've seen this kind of investigator before. To a certain incidentally,
give me Sherlock Holmes is the classic investigator character. And
(04:20):
certainly with Sherlock, you have a character that has just
a phenomenal brain and it distances himself from various human
experiences and makes him kind of an enigma to normal people. Well,
the character and disciple of the dog who's the character's name,
is a disciple manning just kind of gimmicky but fun.
He is kind of screw up because of his condition.
Like his condition is he cannot forget anything, so anything
(04:42):
that traumatizes him is there forever. So he's a character
that has had some severe bouts with depression and self
loathing based on this ability, but he's also managed to
use it for financial gain as a private investigator. And
so our Scott Baker injects a lot of philosophical pondering
into this because we get into questions that we've raised
in the podcast before, to what extent are we shaped
(05:04):
by our memory? And what to what extent are we
shaped by our memory errors. We discussed the seven Deadly
sins of memory, the various ways that we misremember something
or alter the memory of something in our head, and
these are things that the character Disciple Man and cannot do.
So it's interesting to see Baker play that out in
the novel and Disciple the Dog. The character is looking
into a missing person's case that concerns a new age
(05:27):
cult where the believers are of the opinion that it
is actually the year A D fifty million, and life
as we know it is all just the dream of
a quantum computer, and the sun is actually about to
swallow the earth as it goes into a red dwarf stage.
So you also end up with ponderings about what is
our future and the idea that you know, when yeah, yeah,
(05:50):
what would it look like? And ideas that what is reality?
You know, what is it possible that reality could be
the dreams of a quantum computer? And then this is
all just a backward fantasy. The world around this is
just this backward fantasy that we project for ourselves. So
there are various levels of, to my mind, mind blowing
ideas that Baker has fun within this. And then on
top of that, it's entertaining because you have a wonderfully
(06:12):
sleazy but likable protagonist and you have this now air
setting like industrial Jersey, so it's not really a new
war setting, but it's got very much a new war
kind of vibe to it. Classic detective case, what's gonna happen?
He's gonna find the missing girl who's the heart of
the conspiracy and all of this. So it's short, gets
the point, have some fun with the character and brings
(06:33):
with it a lot of floor ideas. I like the
dichotomy of a pothead with a really long memory too. Yeah,
a sharp memory. Well, pretty great because it's like the
sharp memory is bringing him such trauma. It distanced him
from so many people. He kind of has to self
medicate through it. Yeah, what's on your list? Okay? Um, well,
I have the best nature in science running. That of
(06:55):
course is a series, and this particular one is the
guest edited by Mary Roach. She's at the Helm there, yes,
so she's made a lot of the selections here. You'll
probably remember her from books like Stiff Pecking from Mars Bunk.
She's just got a really great science journalism pedigree, and
I think anybody familiar with her work knows that she
has a great sense of humor and the ability to
(07:17):
really deliver very accessible points of entry into some weighty subjects.
If you go back through the catalog of our podcast
far Enough, you're fun an interview with her from back
when the podcast was stuffed in the Science Lab. So
she's got the selection of different pieces of essays and articles,
about twenty five of them. Actually. Some of them are
from well known writers like Oliver Sacks and Leonard Lednov
(07:41):
and Stephen Hawking, and others not as well known, although
definitely up and coming, like Brook Hollard Builder, people making
a name for themselves for their ability to reframe our
understanding of the subject. In fact, Brook Hard Builder is
the writer of the article that has to do with
food safety, which right there sounds like incredibly wing. But
this guy went into underground food movements like fermenting, which
(08:05):
we talked about in a podcast, raw milk, the paleo diet,
all these very different sort of movements going on right now,
and what could have just been like a story about
the safety of food became this incredible matrix of cultural
ideas and scientific theories that are proven and disproven. So anyway,
(08:25):
that that's why I really love this series is that
it does take this sort of everyday stuff and reframe
it for us. Another really good example is an essay
by jarn Lanier. It's called the First Church of Robotics,
and it explores our fascination with robotics. If certainly we
have a fascination with it, We've talked about it quite
a bit, and our need to project ourselves onto these
machines and personify them. And he said that this is
(08:48):
all going on at the same time we are increasingly
treating our fellow humans like machines. So it's kind of
interesting that you have this shift in the way that
we are communicating with one another. We're communicating in way
set rely on algorithms of technology instead of our own
personal humanity. So if he's saying, hey, I mean it's
more like a cautionary tale, like it's very compelling. He's saying,
(09:09):
let's not deify a machine quite yet doing so just
makes us sort of like these grotesque ventriloquists. So that's
just another example of one of the more mind blowing
aspects of these different essays. Kind of a buffet, right
ideas with this you do you do? You could say
it's sort of a snapshot of the year of eleven
in journalism, and that would be absolutely true. But the
(09:31):
fact of the matter is just that a lot of
this has to do with topics that have been around.
It's not just like, hey, this is the zeitgeist moment
right here for this subject. I knew that there's a
one essay or that talks about prohibition and about the
government's role and actually poisoning ethanol and in doing so
taking the lot of many Americans during prohibition, And this
(09:52):
is something that's probably not widely known, but here's a
piece of journalism sort of bringing up the past and saying,
did you know that at one point probhibition and it
had taken hold so much of the government that they
were actually trying to discourage people by making them really sick,
by mixing together ethanol and other chemicals and in doing
so poisoning them, which resulted in thousands of deaths. So
(10:12):
it does it takes everything from subjects like can animals
be gay? To prohibition to even space junk, which we've
talked about. And it's very entertaining because it does allow
you to enter into these subjects in a way that
are very accessible. And I was even thinking about Leonard
miledna Of and Stephen Hawking and their essay about m theory,
(10:34):
membrane theory or string theory, right, which is this idea
that we can get this theory of everything together. They
asked the reader to imagine themselves as goldfish looking through
the distorted glass of their enclosures, and in order to
understand the limitations of this theory of everything that we're after,
and they say, imagine the goldfish as they formulate scientific
(10:57):
laws from their distorted frames of reference that would always
hold true and enable them to make predictions about the
future emotions of objects outside the bowl. So they're taking
this really cool analogy of us being fish in the
bowl and having a distorted view of reality and then
this theory of everything and again a really good entry
(11:18):
point into this subject matter. So that is why I
recommend that book. Well, that does sound like a good one.
My next entry in this list is a book called
The Wind Up Girl by a Paolo Bassa Gallupi, and
this is a really fun sci fi novel and a
really thought provoking sci fi novel, and that it takes
a lot of our fears associated with our use of
(11:40):
science today and extrapolates those into a very engaging, until
our extent nightmaric vision of the future. It takes us
to the futuristic time. It's a post oil world, so
we've used up all of our natural resources as far
as oil goes, So the petroleum based system crashes to
the ground and suddenly traveling across the globe is severely limited.
(12:03):
The world in a way becomes much larger because when
we have less ability to travel it and to intraverse it,
the distances become vast because we can't just fly around
the world in a day anymore. There's no more oil. Also,
you have genetically modified organisms, specifically genetically modified crops have
backfired in this world to the point where you end
up with massive starvations, massive famines, and it's really crippled
(12:26):
the world. So in the Wine Up Girl, we find
ourselves in Bangkok, Thailand, and this is one of the
few places it's us shut itself off from the rest
of the world. It's managed to maintain a certain degree
of non genetically altered vegetation, that has a certain amount
of genetic purity to most of its vegetables, and it's
able to feed itself. And you have these outside corporations
(12:49):
that are interested, these colary companies they are called, that
are interested in infiltrating Thailand and Bangkok and actually finding
some of these examples so they can take them out
genetically tinker with them. Well, yeah, I mean really, I mean,
the bad guys in this the villains are basically sci
fi versions of some of the large companies like Monsanta
that we have today. And then you also have a
character in this book called Imaco, and Imaco is a
(13:11):
wind up girl they call it. She's one of the
new people. She's a genetically engineered human. She's a very
interesting character too, because she's originally bred as basically a
pleasure person, like a roxy robot, but flesh human flesh
one yeahs trying to say it in an acceptable way,
but she's bred for this kind of life, engines up
abandoned in Bangkok by her former master, and she's not
(13:31):
engineered to really survive all that well, she's been conditioned
to be this submissive, servant to businessman thing of pleasure.
Her horrors are extra small because it supposedly looks nicer
for her to have very poor, less skin, but it
also means that she has trouble managing her body heat.
And so the author does a gred job of exploring
what life might be like for this genetically modified person,
(13:53):
what kind of flaws are engineered into her. They call
her a wind up girl because she's engineered so that
she walks funny, with the idea being that new people
will stand out if they're just seen on the streets,
so there will be this threat of the new people
taking over. And it heart's also just a story about
a spy trying to steal something about political corruption and
about the crimes of humanity and how they may fall
(14:15):
out over the decades to come, what it is to
be human too, yea or even subjugated. It sounds like,
are there any wind up men? I have to ask?
I forget if there are. I feel like there's mention
of mercenaries, none that are engineering. It's been a year
or two since I read it, but I seem to
remember there was a detail about that technically the book
is I think they called biopunk, which I'm kind of
a critic of overuse of the cyberpunk terminology where someone
(14:39):
just puts in another steampunk Yeah, well yes, steampunk, diesel punk.
The more something fits one of those classifications, the less interesting.
I think the biopunk stuff is really cool though. Yeah yeah,
I mean the potential, I mean people are doing some
really cool things with that. But any but but at heart,
this book is really interesting because it's entertaining, because it
is action and intrigue characters should care about. But it
also takes a look at modern day a logical concerns
(15:01):
and uses them to create this sci fi future that
really speaks to readers today. That sounds really cool. I
like the premise of that a lot. I'm going to
put that on my list. I gotta say, so, do
you go? All right? Well, I think we let's take
a quick break and when we get back we will
talk about a book called Super Sad True Love Story.
(15:22):
All right, we're back, So Super Sad True Love Story.
You've mentioned this one before. I have. I've talked about it,
like sort of sputtered about it. But I thought, well,
this is a good opportunity to talk about why I'm
always bringing it up. It's by Gary Steingart and just
to fly our little futurists freak flag a little bit higher.
It is again, a dystopian futuristic novel not too far
(15:43):
in the future that I think they're talking about, maybe
fifty years in the future. It is a fiction of
work of fiction, of course, and it centers around a
character not any enough, Lenny Abramof and he is a
mid level drone for a massive multinational corporation in the future.
By the way, the not too distant future, like everything
is small talent national conglomerate, so it's like kmart g E,
(16:04):
something ridiculous, something other, sort of like large company all
melded together, which is just again it's extrapolating like what's
happening in the present in the fifty years and sort
of taking it to the nth degree, which is why
it makes it such an interesting novel. Lenny is working
in a division of this multinational corporation which promises to
help the super rich live forever thanks to nanotechnology and
(16:28):
super anti accidents and various other over hyped technologies. At
this point, he falls in love with a beautiful young
Korean woman named Unice. She lives with him, but and
she really provides the perspective of the youth at that point.
She's obsessed with consumerism. She's shallow, but she's not shallow me.
She's drawn actually pretty well as a character. She's oversharing.
(16:49):
She's obsessed with electronic media culture, in which everybody when
you go out in public in this future world, everything
is revealed about you via this sort of like iPhone
looking device hanging around everybody's next and it projects to
everybody else's iPhone device. I think it's called apparatus or
something like that. Your credit score, your hotness score, every
(17:10):
single thing about like, think about every piece of information
about yourself that's out there that you could then just
automatically transmit to someone. This is what's happening. So something
you just posted on Facebook or Twitter. So you walk
into a bar and all of a sudden, you can
look down at your apparatus and you can see, like
what your own hotness score is based on everybody at
that very moment looking at you and entering it. So
(17:33):
the premise of it is just really interesting. Everyone is
divided into high network net work individuals and low net
worth individuals um and basically you have a collapsing America
which is hugely in debt to China, and it definitely
has traces of Brave New World in four And it's
(17:54):
the reason I really like it is it could have
been watered down satire, but shine Gard is really a
very spressive writer, and he builds a very convincing world.
So you can easily imagine yourself walking through the streets
of New York in this future America where the National
Guard is ever present. You've got a collapsing banking system
and yet this technology that really turns people inwards so
(18:17):
that they're sort of ignoring all these different things happening
around them, and really nice cohesive world building by shin Guard.
There's also a running gag where the National Guard stops
people at checkpoints and they're forced to deny and imply.
They deny that a conversation ever took place, and they
imply their consent for an invasive search. It is funny
(18:38):
because so many times and when you're online you're just
agreeing to something. It's very much in that same sort
of like, hey, you're agreeing to this right, but you're
not really reading it and all right, let's go on
and so on and so forth. Document you need to
read it before you visit a website, and you just yes, yeah.
So again he's taken that idea to the degree and
said that you know, you're now you are living in
this this very public sphere where everything you do is
(19:00):
being met with this idea of you deny and imply,
and you're entering into these contracts that you don't even
know about and the afterwards. Scheinert says that he read
Ray Kurt's Wheels The Singularity Is Near while he was
working in the book, as well as our friend Aubrey
de Gray. I say our friend because I imagine this
as friends, the bearded one, the biogenontologists. His book ending
(19:23):
aging the rejuvenation breakthrough that could reverse human aging in
our lifetime, and he definitely takes these ideas which are
really cool and very cutting edge, but he does look
at it through a lens of pessimism. He says, in
this future, sure all of this would be accessible, but
only to the super rich. Everyone else would be labeled
impossible to preserve or I t P in this world.
(19:44):
So that's why I think it's interesting. It touches on
so many things that we've discussed, and it's done really well. Cool. Yeah,
that's when I really need to add my reading list
as well. You've mentioned it, i think in several times
in relation to topics we've discussed, and it sounds like
it's kind of funny too. Yeah. He's got a great
sense of humor and it really is. Actually, I mean,
the title is apt It is a love story, but
(20:06):
it's it's heartbreaking and it's beautiful, important and terrifying at
the same time. Well, my next pick isn't very funny
in fact, even though this is an author that I
understand has written some things that have a lot more
humor and absurdity to them, this is not one of
those books. The book is Embassy Town by China me Evil.
As we're recording this podcast, it is on the list
of nominees for two thousand and twelve Hugo Award. I
(20:28):
have a suspicion it might win it. We'll see how
that plays out. This is a science fiction novel takes
place in a far future. Humans of colonized distance space
and they travel through these kind of a warp situation
where they kind of they move through a an alternate
dimension to emerge into real space again, and one of
the stopovers, well not only stopped over, it t really
(20:48):
The Distant Frontier is a planet that has an alien
race on it called the Araiki. And in this story
we have a human colonist named Abbess returning to this
planet in the town their Inbassy Town after years of
deep space adventure, and she ends up getting sucked into
this adventure and they sell this intrigue between the human
(21:09):
colonists and the Iraqis that live there, and a lot
of it ends up having to do with language, in
the nature of language, and not just ideas of like
how might aliens communicate versus humans and how would humans
communicate with aliens, So there is a lot of discussion
of that. It also gets into just deeper ideas of
what language is. For instance, the Arakis in their language,
(21:29):
they do not have lies, like they cannot tell lies
because built into their linguistic machinery and not just lies,
but they cannot speak things that cannot be physically proven,
so they end up having to like just to form similars.
They end up having to an list actors and sort
of construct them out of minor dramas and uh and
(21:50):
so it's just thought provoking in terms of it's use
of language, and it really makes you think about what languages,
what lies are, and what the ramifications for these things
could be when it comes to in contact with a
potential alien species. So I recommend giving that one to read.
It also has a strong female protagonist, which is always
a nice change for sci fi, and like I said,
it might want a Hugo Award this year. So one
(22:11):
of the more remarkable science fiction books of the last
few years. I really like the idea that aliens couldn't
why because it's not part of the skill set that
they need. And I know we talked about this before
we did a podcast online and how with humans it's
like integral to the way that we enter into social contracts.
You cannot actually be a human really without lying at
some point however you define lying. Yeah, So that's that's
(22:35):
an interesting premise. Is this added level to where in
order to actually communicate with them, you can't just have
one person trying to speak the Araki tongue. You have
to have two individuals who essentially have the same mind
that are performing a duet. So, like I said the other,
but in an tremendous amount of thought and research into
language and what language is. So if you're at all
(22:55):
interested in alien linguistics, then definitely give this book a read.
Very cool. Okay, So I have a nonfiction book called
The Magic of Reality How We Know What's Really True?
By Richard Dawkins. We've talked about him before, and he's
offered many books. He's a big money time, selfish gene
is one that probably a lot of people know. I
(23:16):
love this book. I picked it up actually for my
daughter because I'm creating sort of a library for her
when when she gets older. And she's only three, so
it's just going to be the official library, or is
this the secret library that you're actually tricking her into reading.
It's just a bunch of books that she can pick up.
I mean, I'm not gonna say like today we're going
to pick up Richard Dawkins and you're going to go
to page twenty six. It's just a book that I
(23:39):
think would be really helpful for her as she develops
at different stages in her life. So this book is
actually built for all ages. But I kind of see
this more is like maybe a really precocious, tent and up.
But the reason why I selected this is because Dawkins
basically takes sort of like this whole, like, Hey, here's
the universe and we're gonna explain it to you now
(24:00):
in no, in certain terms, I mean, it's really cool.
Like he he starts out by talking about magic, because
magic and magical thinking is very much a human construct, right,
We've talked about this so many times. It can lead
to errors on our thinking, it can lead to beautiful
works of art. And he says that when it comes
to science, that reality is actually much more magical than
(24:23):
magic itself. I'm just going to read this little bit.
This is actually a description of the book. Says magic
takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used
in order to explain the world before they developed the
scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting
the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believe the
rainbow was the god's bridge to Earth. The Japanese used
(24:44):
to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried
the world on its back. That's not true, oh man,
I've been I think I wrote that into an article.
Bok you all right, I know what you're gonna be
reading right after this. Yeah, it's not true that earthquakes
occurred each time it flipped its tail. Oh man, yeah,
(25:06):
you're telling after revise your articles. My whole world view
is completely twitched around now that. Yeah. Yeah, these are magical,
extraordinary tales, and they're wonderful. But there's another kind of magic,
and it laws in the exhilaration of discovering the real
answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality science.
So there are twelve different questions or topics that he tackles,
and they're all introduced with the supernatural explanation that we
(25:29):
all know and love, and then Dawkins sprinkles his magic
science dust on top and makes you realize that the
rigors of scientific method uncover the old adage that the
truth really is stranger than fiction, and it makes that
even more glorious. Some of the areas that he covers
are what is reality? Who was the first person? Um?
(25:49):
He talks about DNA, and he talks about three million
years ago. You can point to this lizard and say, hey, man,
you and me we share a lot in common. What
is an earthquake? There really is stone left unturned in
the section, the last section he takes on miracles. Uh,
and he ends by saying, and I won't go into
all the different things that he talks about in terms
(26:11):
of what is a miracle that he ends the section
by saying. The eminent science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark
summed up the point as Clark's third law. Any sufficiently
advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If a time machine
were to carry us forward a century or so, we
would see wonders. Today we might think impossible miracles. The
(26:32):
truth is more magical in the best and most exciting
sense of the world than any myth or made up
mystery or miracles. Science has its own magic, magic of reality.
So again he's going back to sort of the basics
of very mind blowing stuff to us that we've talked
about before, in terms of how did our planet form?
Talking about stardust, talking about how how do we really
know that dinosaurs existed? Well, okay, you know, we've got
(26:55):
fossils into um and and it's amazing even talks about like, okay,
some of the things might have sounded like myth when
scientists wore proposing them, especially with sci fi writers he
talks about, he says, but they take these ideas and
they create theories out of them, and then they create
a model to test them. And DNA is the perfect
example of this. This was an idea that was then
(27:18):
modeled and then you know, through a series of different
things of research and data that came up, we came
to realize that this was a truth. That's why it's
so entertaining because he really he takes on these really
heavy concepts and he writes very eloquently and very humorously,
but very clearly. Because again, this is for all ages.
(27:39):
And I do recommend it to adults because I think
that you would get a lot out of it. But
I also think it's really worth its weight in gold
because it talks about the skeptics. I not as someone
who like, you know, let's pick apart everything and take
the magic out of things, but more like, let's not
be run by our superstitions or magical thinking. Let's you
(28:02):
the magic of reality just in day to day life
and be able to sort of to look at the
invisible world and see how incredible it is. And I
think that's a huge message to kids well into adults
as well well. The final book on my list of
four summer reading recommendations is a book called The Player
of Games by Ian M. Banks. And this is a
(28:24):
book from the Culture series, which I've mentioned before. I
generally bring it up because it takes place in a
distant future where humanity and machines live in a symbiotic relationship.
So it's a post technological singularity world where we see
the more positive ramifications. Not to say there's not some
darkness in this world, oh yeah, yeah, this is the
benign singularity. Definitely a benign singularity situation, though you do
(28:47):
have some dark things that end up happening in this universe.
And this book deals specifically with a clash between the
culture again, robots humans living in harmony. Basically humans doing
whatever they want while robots look after them and do
the hard work, and so humans end up living lives
of complete freedom. In this book, we have a human
(29:07):
by the name of Gurga, and he has used his
life to become a master of games. He's the Player
of Games that we referenced in the title, So he's
the master of all these different board games and travels
around just having a good time and playing them in competition,
very obsessive about winning, and he ends up being recruited
by the culture, by the robots that run the culture,
(29:27):
to serve as an emissary to this civilization that exists
outside of the culture in non culture space, called the
Empire of Azad, and they are at cruel, incredibly wealthy,
destructive alien race. But at the heart of their culture
they have this one super complex game and it serves
as the backbone not only their empire and its laws,
(29:49):
but also the very cognitive development of the race. So
imagine a civilization where there's one game, then, in all
its complexity and reasoning, is the backbone of everything they
hold deer and everything that they are. And so the
culture wants to send him in, and he's on this
long journey, so he has plenty of time to practice
and learn the game and play it against one of
(30:09):
the AI's on the ship, and then when he gets there,
he's expected to compete with members of this cruel alien race,
the idea being that by playing a human in the scenario, though,
somehow achieve a balance and they'll avoid war with the
Empire of his odd So it's a great introductory read
to the Culture series, because the Culture Series is not
(30:29):
one of these series where you need to like start
with the book one and then read through book eight.
Most of them, to my understanding, stand on their own.
I haven't read them all, I've only read a handful,
but everyone seems to exist well on its own, and
the player of games certainly does that. It's a fascinating
look at what a post singularity world might consist of,
when some of them were positive visions of that. It's
a great analysis of what games mean to a civilization.
(30:53):
And Ian and Banks is great about throwing in some
really cool science and stuff, like he's clearly clearly has
a very scientific mind, so he'll do things like for
instances of planet in this book, where the only land
on the planet everything is water except for the single
strip of land that goes all the way around the equator,
and you have a firestorm that moves along that strip
(31:15):
of land, so that the ecosystem on this planet is
a fire based ecosystem. And in the same way that
you have plants that depend on forest fires to reproduce,
all the life on this planet has evolved to deal
with this ce cyclical firestorm that goes all the way
around the world. So he'll throw in things like that
when he's thinking about life and other worlds or planetary
physics or whatever it happens to be. Andy'll incorporate that
(31:36):
even if it's just a fascinating nugget along the way.
And unlike some of the other authors that I mentioned,
Ian Ebanks tends to write with a certain degree of
humor that is not necessarily prevalent in the other three works.
So if you want something that is at times lighter
and might get a giggle out of you, I find
Ian in Banks tends to fit the bill on that. Yeah,
and I'd say too, that seems like, uh, you know,
(31:56):
one of the commonalities between all of these or most
of these, is that there is some sense of humor.
That author enters into the the information with a good
stance of humor. It sounds like, so, but you know
it's important to us, all right, very cool. I was
going to mention a book that I'm going to check out.
It's called Internal Time, The Science of Chronotypes, Social jet
(32:16):
lag and more. You're so tired, And I thought it
was really interesting because we are at a point in
our history where we are not I think because of
technology as tied to time as we used to be,
and so it does seem like there is a bit
of a shift in the way that people are approaching
their schedules. Not only that, you know, as everybody knows,
despite that and some sort of flexibility, we seem to
(32:38):
be cramming so much into our time and really suffering
for it. So I I really am interested in finding
out more about this, these chronotypes that supposedly all of
us possess a different chronotype and internal timing type. So
some people are early risers, some people are late risers,
and this seems to be Historically we thought, okay, well
(32:59):
that means that you're lay about if you get up late,
or you know your go get or if you get
up at six am or whatever. Those are just very
arbitrary terms that have been abscribed to people. That this
idea of chronotype is something that is more hardwired into us.
So I'm going to check that out. And then two
quick mentions. I won't go into them too much. Some
we love, some we hate, and some we eat. We've
(33:21):
talked about this book. It's great. I am A relationship
with animals. A relationship with the animals are ten years
relationship with animals, how confused we are kind of butt
over tea kettle when it comes to us, right, and
how we receive animals, and as the title says, some
we love, some we hate, and some wheat. So I'm
going to check that out a little bit more this
summer because there are some things I want to revisit.
Especially there's a chapter on animal cruelty and this myth
(33:46):
that serial killers start off as killers of animals, that
this is actually not true, that children do this as
sort of a mastery of their own places in the world,
and this idea of trying to figure out what power
is over another person or thing. So I want to
check that out. And the next book, last book, The
(34:08):
Family Fang. It is a fiction book. It's about Caleb
and Camille Fang, their performance artists, who use their two children,
Annie and Buster are otherwise known as Child and Child
be as parts of their performance pieces. And it seems
like it's going to be like a pretty smart debate
about the human cost of sacrificing everything for art and
(34:28):
this idea of family. Everybody always thinks that they have
the freakiest family, so it'll be interesting to see that
that idea played out with the family fang cool. Well,
for my part, I'm I think this may be the
summer I finally read Dan Simon's Hyperion. Oh yeah, classic
SciFi booked at our our our boss. Many people's always
(34:48):
read that, yet Yeah, I think I have a friend
who's gonna try reading it, So hopefully this will be
the summer. On that, I should also point out real
quick that the fiction books that I mentioned here, if
you're obviously, if you're a parent, you're involved then and
whatever your kid reads, that's your own deal. But I
would like to point out that the author Polo basaka Loopy,
the author of The Wind Up Girl, he also has
a couple of young adult novels. One in particular that's
(35:10):
out as we're recording. This is called The Shipbreaker, and
it deals in the same setting, a post oil, ecologically
ravaged world, but it's aimed to the younger audience, so
you don't have to worry about there being anything inappropriate
in there. I would list that as an alternative or
if you're just I mean end up playing of adults
who prefer young adult novels. I mean, there are a
lot of great young adult novels out there that can
be enjoyed by any age. So because I take those
(35:32):
as alternatives, so we present you this list of books.
You can use this if you're trying to think of
something you want to you want to read. So if
you do happen to pick one of these up, if
you read something that we have recommended, or if you're
reading something that we're planning to read this summer, or
if you've you've read it already and have some thoughts
on it, if you would like to encourage us in
these choices that we have made, or say, actually, you're
(35:52):
making a huge mistake by reading Hyperion or whatever, let
us know. We'd love to hear from you. You can
find us on Facebook and you can find us on Twitter.
On Facebook, we're stuff to Blow your Mind on Twitter.
Our handles Blow the Mind, and you can drop us
a line at blow the Mind discovery dot com. Okay,
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