Thank you everyone who showed up for the discord chat and contributed to the Neuromancer thread. This thread is for the March/April BOM. We'll do our discussion Friday April 14.
For this round we're taking 2 suggestions for the pole. Since "Foundation" tied with Neuromancer last time, it already has a place in the voting.
As last time, please only suggest 1 book per post. Like 2 others you'd enjoy reading (your initial posts count as 1 vote for your books). Try to post a small summary of the book rather than a link, it's easier for people to make a decision without having to toggle back and forth.
The Traveler, John Twelvehawks, Book 1 of the forth realm trilogy.
Breaking my own suggestion a bit by recommending a book I've already read, but it is foundational to my becoming passionate about privacy protection and is just an all around fun book to read. Lots of action, not bogged down with back stories, and the scenes and characters are described in an economy of words that gives you exactly what you need to know without a bunch of fluff. Published in 2005. Here's a description from Goodreads:
In London, Maya, a young woman trained to fight by her powerful father, uses the latest technology to elude detection when walking past the thousands of surveillance cameras that watch the city. In New York, a secret shadow organization uses a victim's own GPS to hunt him down and kill him. In Los Angeles, Gabriel, a motorcycle messenger with a haunted past, takes pains to live "off the grid" - free of credit cards and government IDs. Welcome to the world of The Traveler - a world frighteningly like our own.In this compelling novel, Maya fights to save Gabriel, the only man who can stand against the forces that attempt to monitor and control society. From the back streets of Prague to the skyscrapers of Manhattan, The Traveler portrays an epic struggle between tyranny and freedom. Not since 1984 have readers witnessed a Big Brother so terrifying in its implications and in a story that so closely reflects our lives.
The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan, 1996.
I am about 3 chapters into this one right now, and I feel like I want to order 50 copies and pass them out to everyone I know or meet. It's an important book.
Excerpt from chapter 1 that I read to the early arrivals on the Discord chat for Neuromancer: “I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..."
Summary of the book: "How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don't understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science? Pulitzer Prize-winning author and distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan argues that scientific thinking is critical not only to the pursuit of truth but to the very well-being of our democratic institutions.
Casting a wide net through history and culture, Sagan examines and authoritatively debunks such celebrated fallacies of the past as witchcraft, faith healing, demons, and UFOs. And yet, disturbingly, in today's so-called information age, pseudoscience is burgeoning with stories of alien abduction, channeling past lives, and communal hallucinations commanding growing attention and respect. As Sagan demonstrates with lucid eloquence, the siren song of unreason is not just a cultural wrong turn but a dangerous plunge into darkness that threatens our most basic freedoms."
Anathem is a speculative fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 2008. Major themes include the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the philosophical debate between Platonic realism and nominalism
When Jack Burroughs, a brilliant young computer programmer, is given his pink slip, he is offered the opportunity to use his skills for a little industrial espionage. Donning the guise of his online alter ego, Max Kool, Burroughs transforms himself into one of the hippest cybernetic surfers on the InfoBahn.
My non-fiction book suggestion will have to be "The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" by Ray Kurzweil.
Book Summary
The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of the best-known and most controversial advocates for the role of machines in the future of humanity. In his latest book, he envisions an event—the "singularity"—in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that our bodies and brains will merge with our machines.
The Singularity Is Near portrays what life will be like after this event— a human- machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful. In practical terms, this means that human aging and pollution will be reversed; world hunger will be solved; our bodies and environment transformed by nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of biology, including death; and virtually any physical product can be created from information alone. The Singularity Is Near also considers the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes, and is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and provocative books of 2005.
My fiction book suggestion will be a fantasy book called "Eon" by Allison Goodman.
Book Summary Sixteen-year-old Eon has a dream, and a mission. For years, he's been studying sword-work and magic, toward one end. He and his master hope that he will be chosen as a Dragoneye-an apprentice to one of the twelve energy dragons of good fortune.
But Eon has a dangerous secret. He is actually Eona, a sixteen-year-old girl who has been masquerading as a twelve-year-old boy. Females are forbidden to use Dragon Magic; if anyone discovers she has been hiding in plain sight, her death is assured.
When Eon's secret threatens to come to light, she and her allies are plunged into grave danger and a deadly struggle for the Imperial throne. Eon must find the strength and inner power to battle those who want to take her magic...and her life.
Hi everyone this is actually my first post in these forums and I think this book of the month is an excellent idea. I look forward to picking up a few recommendations from you all!
My suggestion is a book that I'm currently reading but has me looking forward to every bit of quiet time I get to pick it up and read on.
The book looks at some of the pivotal developments in our history that set us on our path from a multi genus species to just one. It analyses and asks critical questions about some of the major events in our history like the agricultural revolution and the rise of empires. What I most enjoy about the book so far is how the author can completely turn assumptions on something I had a very loose understanding of completely upside down! This one really makes you think.
As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most immediate and incontrovertible phenomena are left unexplained by the natural sciences because they lack the physical properties—such as mass, momentum, charge, and location—that are assumed to be necessary for something to have physical consequences in the world. This is an unacceptable omission. We need a "theory of everything" that does not leave it absurd that we exist.
Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.
Foundation is default in the running because it tied for Neuromancer last month. The final poll will be Foundation, Book Choice A, Book Choice B as decided by likes on this thread
