Summary: Anil Seth’s Being You is a new and groundbreaking examination of the nature, science, and ethics of consciousness. Seth presents three theories to contextualize current research and guide future efforts to explain what consciousness is and how it arises. The first theory is the “Real Problem of Consciousness,” an alternative to the traditional “Hard Problem” and […]
Summary: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain is an exceptionally lucid and commendable contribution to popular neuroscience. In this series of concise, highly-accessible essays, Barrett synthesizes a huge field of academic knowledge in a fashion that any literate person can enjoy and benefit from. Her central thesis is that the brain is […]
Summary: Richard Powers’s Bewilderment is a novel narrated by single father, Theo, who is trying to care for his young son, Robin. Theo is an academic astrobiologist who constructs computer models of how life could evolve on distant exoplanets; he is also a widower whose wife died in a tragic accident. Robin is a troubled child with […]
Summary: Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise is an exquisitely-crafted and emotionally-gripping novel that covers a huge swath of thematic, historical, and futuristic ground. The story is told in three Books, each of which is loosely connected through the recurrence of certain character names and relationship dynamics that inhabit a single home in Washington Square, New York City. Book […]
Summary: Gernot Wagner’s Geoengineering: The Gamble is a primer on the history of solar geoengineering, the state of current research, and possibilities for future experimentation and deployment. In a succinct and balanced fashion, Wagner discusses the various technical ways solar geoengineering might be implemented, as well as the morass of ethical and geopolitical problems that deployment may […]
Note: In July 2022, I published an extended review of this book. You can check that out here. Summary: Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock is a work of “cli-fi” (climate fiction) set in the near future, probably sometime in the 2040s. The book invites readers to imagine what might happen if someone unilaterally decided to initiate a solar geoengineering […]
Summary: Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under A White Sky is about the history and possible futures of geoengineering. Specifically, Kolbert examines how various geoengineering technologies are being used or may soon be used to combat the worst effects of climate change. Part One, “Down the River,” describes efforts to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, and […]
There are times when I feel utterly incapable of expressing my appreciation and admiration for a particular book. This is the case with Perhaps the Stars, Ada Palmer’s magnificent conclusion to her Terra Ignota Quartet. Please know, dear reader, that even if you read this entire review, and my reviews of the other three Terra Ignota books (Book 1, […]
Lots of writers use science fiction as an imaginary playground for suggesting ways that artificial intelligence might reshape human experience and civilization. Few, however, are ambitious enough to devote an entire novel to exploring the internal, conscious perspective of an AI living in a human-dominated world. For this alone, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun deserves our […]
I belong to the tiny fraction of science fiction enthusiasts who didn’t read Andy Weir’s phenomenally-successful breakout novel, The Martian. For whatever reason, it just didn’t appeal to me, although I enjoyed the film adaptation. But when my wife, friends, and favorite podcasters started gushing about Project Hail Mary, I decided it was time to send myself rocketing into Weir’s geeky […]