For Dr Stephen Pearce, it’s a boyhood dream come true: he’s joining an expedition attempting to scale one of the world’s unconquered peaks. But Kanchenjunga has the reputation of a killer, and Stephen will face its deadly secrets alone…
this is going to end badly isn’t it
By the end of the twenty-first century, we’ll know we are not alone. We will have pushed forward with our own evolution. We will have brought our worst nightmares back to haunt us from the past. And Dan Brüks, stubbornly baseline, reliant on pills to keep up with his tweaked peers, will head into space with a crew that has transcended humanity in search of God.
Blindsight: the ability of the cortically blind to respond to stimuli they cannot (consciously) ‘see’.
Also: a Hugo-nominated hard SF novel by Peter Watts, which asks us what makes us human and whether – in the face of demonstrably more viable alternatives – it’s all it’s cracked up to be.
This sat on my wishlist for a long time before I picked it up, having caught my eye […]
The ill-fated Ishiguro mission set space exploration back decades. Years later, the Hyvonen twins (students of Guy Singer, the only ‘real’ scientist aboard Ishiguro) achieve the funding and the mandate to retrace the failed mission’s footsteps in order to discover the nature of the Anomaly that Singer wanted to study – and which appears to be moving closer to Earth.
The first manned expedition in years will go deeper into space than anyone has gone before. It’s a thinly-veiled PR stunt, an attempt to reinvigorate interest in manned space exploration, and of course it all goes wrong. Cormac Easton is the journalist on board and the last survivor, chronicling the disasters and his own mental and emotional deterioration as he faces up to the inevitability of his own death.
Yes, I’m procrastinating. Two posts in one day? What else could possibly be going on? I’ve got a document to draft by Tuesday, and I meant to have it finished by Thursday evening. It’s far from done, so I’m crossing off other bits of mental laundry so that tomorrow can be as productive as physically/mentally possible. Terrifyingly, it’s nearly 6 months since I last jotted notes here on my recent reading. In the meantime, I’ve finished 32 books (what can I say, the longer commute and the part-time work suit me down to the ground). As last time, links go to my commentary elsewhere online.
When Sweden decides to declare certain people ‘dispensable’ – for aging when single, childless, or otherwise not deemed essential to society – they are moved to Units to support medical research. Expect this hard-hitting political dystopia be every bit as difficult to read as it sounds.
