Massive congratulations to my extremely talented sister-in-law Dana, whose debut novel ‘The Steam Magnate’ is published any day now by Aio Publishing. Hurrah! You can read an excerpt (PDF) here, and once that has whet your appetite, you can buy a copy (or two! or twelve!) from AIO (preferable - support the independents, eh?) and from most online bookstores, including amazon, Chapters in Canada and Waterstone’s in the UK. The Steam Magnate is ’speculative fiction’ which is sorta like Science Fiction, only more literary. I’m so proud of you, Dana, and I’m quite sure a glittering literary career is assured.
Archive for the 'Books' Category
Awesome! You can now read online of my favourite books EVAR - Out of Control by Kevin Kelly. I read the book when it came out and was lucky enough to get Kevin Kelly to do a reading at the Waterstone’s in Cambridge where I worked at the time (my second best geek moment while there after going to the pub with Neal Stephenson, but that’s another story…). What’s it about? Well, emergence, complexity, biomimicry, network effects, collective intelligence and many other things which are currently extremely fashionable, at least among web geeks. If you haven’t already read it, I HIGHLY recommend it. For a taster, why not try Hive Mind - The Collective Intelligence Of The Mob.
In a friends-and-relative are star authors (or going to be) type double whammy, massive (and somewhat belated) congratulations to my dear sister-in-law Dana whose Science Fantasy novel The Steam Magnate, which will be published in September by Aio Publishing. Being ridiculously talented, Dana is also doing the cover art and illustrations. You also go, girl!
Huge congratulations to our friend Ali Smith, who has won the Whitbread Novel Of The Year award, beating out such nonentities as Salman Rushdie and Nick Hornby, with her novel ‘The Accidental‘. I suppose you’ll be wanting that website now, eh? That’ll be £5k. Joke!
I’m really enjoying Accelerando by Charles Stross, which he recently released under a creative commons licence, which means you can download it all, for free. It is ‘post-singularity‘ SF and imagines how the future might look if things (computing power, media saturation, general weirdness) just keep on speeding up the way they are now. Lots of fun, and deeply odd. It is the sort of book I would write, if I could actually write, and was extremely smart and somewhat geeky. And you can read it all, for free. w00t.
Malcolm “Tipping Point” Gladwell has a new book out in January, entitled Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking, which looks fascinating. In it, he investigates the power of the adaptive unconscious, the cognitive facility behind our ability to make snap decisions or quick judgments. As a huge fan of The Tipping Point I’m highly keen to check it out.
The book is based on his 2002 New Yorker article The Naked Face in which he asks “can you read people’s thoughts just by looking at them?” and refers extensively to the work of psychologist Paul Ekman, whose book Emotions Revealed I really should get around to finishing.
Also, Gladwell has written a great article on Ketchup. Yes, ketchup.
I’ve just finished reading Platform by Michel Houllebecq, which was excellent. Maybe not quite as good as Atomised (which I haven’t actually finished yet) but still very thought provoking, provocative and full of sex scenes which are actually well-written and ‘erotic’. I was reading it on the tube the other day and saw that a girl in the same carriage was also reading it - we gave one another a kind of sly, knowing look. It’s that kind of book. Destined to become a cult classic, I think.
I’m reading a very interesting book by Virginia Postrel called The Substance of Style. Her central thesis is that we have entered the “Age of Aesthetics” and “look and feel” (along with design) is assuming ever-greater importance. Ms. Postrel managed to neatly deflect criticisms that aesthetic pleasure is ’superficial’ or argues that it is rather the case that it taps deep into human instincts. This certainly seems a persuasive argument to me. I’m about a third of the way through and enjoying it enormously, very thought provoking. I might try to write a proper review when I finish it.
Hurrah! David Foster Wallace has a new book out, entitled Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. In honour of this momentous - for us DFW geeks, at least - occassion, I’ve decided to rename my blog ‘howling fantods!’ (a key phrase from DFW’s magnum opus Infinite Jest). I would have named it that in the first place, if I’d have thought of it. Anyway, I need to get me that book. I serendipitously noticed that another favourite of mine, Jonathan Lethem, has a new book out entitled The Fortress of Solitude. And no, it isn’t about Superman. It’s about Brooklyn. Where all the cool kids live, these days, it seems.
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