"The Math Book" by Cliff Pickover

Luminously illustrated, Cliff Pickover's "The Math Book" promises to be the tree-based equivalent to his exceedingly popular Reality Carnival. If you're not acquainted with Cliff's abiding fascination with fractals, robots and hypercubes (and everything in between), "The Math Book" is a veritable invitation to wade into the infinite. You've been warned.

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The art of Thomas Allen

Many more here!

(Hat tip: Boing Boing.)

Happy birthday, William Gibson!

March 17, 1948: William Gibson, Father of Cyberspace

Gibson has been my favorite writer -- and foremost influence -- since I belatedly discovered his work in high school. And he's never slowed down.

Mark Carlotto has a revised edition of "The Cydonia Controversy" on the way. Here's a teaser video.

Recent acquisitions:

Rudy Rucker on the creative process:

I enjoy my complex, layered, recursive, misleading ways of coping with reality and processing information. My mind is like an anthill, carting each twig of experience into this or that midden heap. If I can think of myself as a character in a transreal novel, then my life becomes more bearable, more mythic, less raw. Also it's a good way of amusing myself: a way to put reality in quotes, a way to handle life with pot-holders.

Franz Kafka's porn brought out of the closet

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a "quasi-saintly" image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

So Kafka had a thing for "shocking" sexual imagery. So what? Frankly, I find it more endearing than anything else.

I haven't read a Greg Bear novel in about ten years, but I'm putting his new one on my list.

I bought Ken Wilber's "A Brief History of Everything" yesterday. The woman at the counter thought I looked like Wilber. Today, at a coffeeshop, a customer seemed to think I might actually be Wilber . . . or at least a rather obsessive admirer.

I'm intrigued by Dr. Cliff Pickover's books. His books explore topics ranging from computers and creativity to art, mathematics, parallel universes, Einstein, time travel, alien life, religion, dimethyltryptamine elves, and the nature of human genius. His main web page is here.

(Call me a little crazy, but one reason I've placed this text on my web page is that I hope he will discover it and give me one of his books as a gift. In fact, like a mindless zombie, I copied these very words from Cliff.)

Not only am I intrigued by his books, I'm more than a little interested in finding out if his viral marketing effort works.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Why isn't it a classic of the field?

Why not indeed?

I have a whole page of Womack capsule reviews here. I can only stand in awe of his ability to create abhorrently plausible near-futures.

In other science fiction news:

Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction

I read the first half of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" this evening. I'd been hearing a lot of good things about it -- and hey, it takes place in a post-apocalyptic near-future and won the Pulitzer Prize, so how can I go wrong?





No one can plausibly dispute McCarthy's grasp of the English language. From the opening page, "The Road" glints with impressively understated feats of wordcraft and images of aching beauty: the omnipresent drizzle of ash that's turned the sky the color of gunmetal, the silent forests of blackened trees. McCarthy summons an image of a cataclysmic world so exquisitely realized it borders on the shamanic.

Nevertheless, I'm wary.

There don't seem to be any real ideas at work in "The Road." McCarthy's focus is the relationship between the unnamed father and son, whose trek across a gutted, toxic America forces them to perpetually confront their own mortality. But their strife is condemned to a vacuum; we view them in such extreme close-up that -- aside from a few obligatory shocks -- their devastated surroundings sometimes seem like an afterthought. (Compare McCarthy's approach to the vision of seasoned science fiction writers like Robert Charles Wilson, whose "Blind Lake" -- to use only only example -- utilizes the universe itself to underscore the inner lives of his characters. Forgive my impertinence, but I'll happily choose the latter anytime, Pulitzer Prize be damned.)

Just as ominously, McCarthy's novel is stained -- of only faintly -- with devices that serve little purpose other than to remind the reader that he's in the presence of True Literature. I'm unimpressed, for example, with the author's haughty disdain for punctuation. (In "The Road," abbreviation marks have been obliterated almost as thoroughly as the population.)

On my "to read" list:

"Spook Country" (William Gibson)

"The Road" (Cormac McCarthy)

"Saturn's Children" (Charles Stross)

"Mars Life" (Ben Bova)

"Mainspring" (Jay Lake)

Nick Redfern has a new book out -- and I still haven't finished "The Cryptoterrestrials."

Damn you, Nick!

I picked this up at the library:





I'll read just about anything with a paleo-futuristic cover illustration.

Just finished reading:





Now reading:

Blog of the day: Print is Dead

(It's not that I necessarily endorse the idea that print is dead. Because it isn't. But its role has shifted along fault lines we have yet to properly distinguish.)

Cliff Pickover strikes again!

Borders is on its way out? Leaving us with the Goliath of mediocrity that is Barnes & Noble? I don't like this one bit.