Axiomatic

By Greg Egan,

Book cover of Axiomatic: Short Stories of Science Fiction

Book description

"Wonderful, mind-expanding stuff, and well written too."-The Guardian

Axiomatic is a wonderful collection of eighteen short stories by Hugo Award-winning author Greg Egan. The stories in this collection have appeared in such science fiction magazines as Interzone and Asimov's between 1989 and 1992.

From junkies who drink at the time-stream…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Axiomatic as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Your older self writes a diary and sends it back in time to you. It reveals that between two pathways, you will take a right. You arrive at that crossroads, and no matter how willing you are to defy your unveiled fate, you can’t avoid choosing right again. I often find this type of super-deterministic scenario in science fiction, invariably raising philosophical questions about free will. Nevertheless, Egan is the only author to offer a satisfactory psychological solution to why the protagonist can’t change their fate. And this is just the first of the short stories in this collection. Axiomatic…

Philip K. Dick was not so lucky as to be able to read and absorb the entire library of Philip K. Dick’s writings before beginning his own writing. But Greg Egan was. As a result, Greg Egan’s short stories in his collection, Axiomatic, show the directions that Philip K. Dick may have gone in if he had been able to live two lifetimes. (It is noteworthy that, on this website, John L. Casti recommends Greg Egan’s novel Permutation City, also one of my favorites.)

In his short story, The Hundred Light-Year Diary, Egan imagines a world where you…

From Michael's list on the mind as more than a brain.

The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion

By Jonathan Mugan,

Book cover of The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author

Jonathan's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

The Curiosity Cycle is a book for parents and educators who want to teach their children to be active explorers of the world. Learning through curiosity leads to adaptive thinking because your child is continually trying to improve his or her understanding of the world, and new facts and ideas become embedded in the knowledge that your child already has. Curiosity will also enrich your child's life because curiosity-based learning is internally directed and intrinsically motivated.

Our world is rapidly changing, and our children must be able to filter the cacophony of voices in cyberspace to stay true to their…

The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion

By Jonathan Mugan,

What is this book about?

Through curiosity, children carve out concepts from the environment that they assemble into models to describe the world. Children then test those models to see how well they predict what they observe, and they use the results from those experiments to form new concepts and models---leading to the next round of the curiosity cycle. However, our children are more than passive observers. They are an embodied part of the world and have brains that are predisposed to see the environment in particular ways. To get the most from their curiosity, children must build models about the intentions of those around…


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