I was a teacher and a professor who showed generations of students how to find x, how to prove figure 1 was similar to figure 2, how to make a machine search through millions of bits of data for an answer. An inspiration for a story struck me one day early in retirement as I was daydreaming. I began to write and have never stopped. It turns out that âif-thenâ is not so different from âwhat if.â The first is more like destiny, the second like free will. One is science, the other is fiction. âWhat ifâ has led me into strange lands.
Iâll admit that the opening sex scene with the naked woman in the moonlight caught my attention fifty years ago, but Iâve visited the city of Bellona several times since then. It means something different to me each time. Now I notice its poetic and mythological symbolism as part of Delaneyâs construction of the city and reconstruction of the main characterâs lost memory. Bellona is a post-apocalyptic place, like a confused mind. The poetic drifter starts like a character scribbled in the margin of a writerâs notebook. Iâm sure that if you dare enter Bellona with him, your experiences will be memorable.
Nebula Award Finalist: Reality unravels in a Midwestern town in this sci-fi epic by the acclaimed author of Babel-17. Includes a foreword by William Gibson.
A young halfâNative American known as the Kid has hitchhiked from Mexico to the midwestern city Bellonaâonly something is wrong there . . . In Bellona, the shattered city, a nameless cataclysm has left reality unhinged. Into this desperate metropolis steps the Kid, his fist wrapped in razor-sharp knives, to write, to love, to wound.
So begins Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delanyâs masterwork, which in 1975 opened a new door for what science fiction could mean.âŚ
Like many of you I have enjoyed the movie and tv versions of some of Dickâs stories such as Blade Runner, The Man in the High Castle, and Total Recall. I have also read his thousand-page plus Exegesis, a rambling and chaotic attempt to make sense of his life. He was a deeply disturbed and troubled genius. This book is one of the best examples of that genius. The writing is clear, the ideas are deep. The religious symbolism and concepts are everywhere as Dick takes the reader from competing drug dealers through layer upon layer of hallucinations or alternate realities to direct interaction with God or a god or a devil or...?
In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late twenty-first century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world.
But when industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D. But could the permanent state of drugged illusion it induces be part of something much more sinister?
Conditions are Different After Dark
by
Owen W. Knight,
In 1662, a man is wrongly executed for signing the death warrant of Charles I. Awaiting execution, he asks to speak with a priest, to whom he declares a curse on the village that betrayed him. The priest responds with a counter-curse, leaving just one option to nullify it.
Here is an alternate reality novel before the term even existed. It is a prison break tale, of a strange sort, and as you would expect of London it has lots of action. But it is philosophical as well. âThe spirit is the reality that endures.â Scientific also, with explanations that were state of the art at the time. If you are into social justice, read his case against society and the brutality of the prisons of the day.
The Jacket (1915) is a novel by American writer Jack London. A groundbreaking work of science fiction that blends elements of mysticism, The Jacket critiques the harsh reality of the American criminal justice system. The novel was inspired by the experiences of Ed Morrell, a man who spent time at San Quentin State Prison for robbing trains. Horrified by his description of "the jacket," a constricting device used to punish inmates, London wrote the novel to explore the psychological effects of torture. Darrell Standing was a Professor of Agronomics at the University of California, Berkeley when, in a fit ofâŚ
What is it? A first contact story. Sort of. They were aliens? Yeah, Russians. What are they like? Donât know. Theyâre gone now. Did you find anything good? Lots and lots. Whatâs that? The God hypothesis. It allows you to have an unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing. Can you show me something else? No. You gotta go yourself. Can I really go into the Zone? If youâre old enough. And brave enough. Is it dangerous? People donât come back. Is it legal? No, but you can sneak in.
Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a âfull empty,â something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that heâll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until heâŚ
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year searchâŚ
I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like âeasy to use partial differential equationsâ that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as âequations that had sadness as a constant,â are in a âtechno-poeticâ style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this âmeta-science fictionâ novel is also filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. The âreality portionsâ in which the main character pursues his quest to âfind his fatherâ are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.
With only TAMMY - a slightly tearful computer with self-esteem issues - a software boss called Phil - Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0 - and an imaginary dog called Ed for company, fixing time machines is a lonely business and Charles Yu is stuck in a rut.
He's spent the better part of a decade navel-gazing, spying on 39 different versions of himself in alternate universes (and discovered that 35 of them are total jerks).âŚ
Schroedingerâs Cheshire Cats is a journey through Thoughtland, where the Summoner is searching and testing the creations of other Gods for the formula of a soul to use for its own creation. Six characters are kidnaped from reality, their souls are placed like cats in a Schroedinger box filled with a maze of poisons. Their paths through the maze are studied closely by the Summoner. Like a symbol for science itself, the Summoner is the âphysicallyâ omniscient creator of Thoughtland, but its search for a formula is destined to fail. Humans can conceive of anything and can live with paradox, and like the Cheshire Cat, they can choose to disappear.
Ilsa Krause and her siblings are stunned to discover their father left massive debt behind upon his death. To help pay off their creditors, she takes a job at Beckâs Chocolates, the company her father despised. To make matters worse, her boss is Ernst Webber, her high school love whoâŚ
A fast-paced literary thriller with a strong sci-fi element and loaded with existential questions. Beyond the entertainment value, this book takes a hard look at the perilous world of publishing, which is on a crash course to meet the nascent, no-holds-barred world of AI. Could these worlds co-exist, or willâŚ