“The Zoologist looked troubled. Eventually it said, ‘When you come back from the Sublime, it is as though you leave all but one of your senses behind, as though you have all the rest removed, torn away––and you have become use to having hundreds.’ It paused. ‘Imagine you,’ it said, nodding at the Caconym, ‘being […]
Throughout his distinguished career, Edward O. Wilson has brought a vast wealth of interdisciplinary knowledge to bear on some of humanity’s most complex and pressing questions. The Meaning of Human Existence is his most philosophical work, and contains many worthwhile insights about humanity’s origins and possible futures. Wilson’s method, best characterized as a kind of […]
“‘One should never mistake pattern…for meaning.’” ––The Hydrogen Sonata, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 127
“The internal conflict of conscience caused by competing levels of natural selection is more than just an arcane subject for theoretical biologists to ponder. It is not the presence of good and evil tearing at one another in our breasts. It is a biological trait fundamental to understanding the human condition, and necessary for survival […]
In the wake of our battle with the elements and the subsequent rush to finish the roof, things have slowed down here at the building site. There is still much to do, but the mood is more relaxed, the work less suffused with the tension of an imminently hostile sky. While the world dried itself […]
“Those on the Pressure Drop would be humans, mostly, it imagined. Mongrel-Culture; the result of a hundred centuries of species-mixing, serial amendment, augmentation, uploading, downloading, simple autonomous choice-directed breeding and––after all that time––perhaps even some genuine evolution. The usual bizarre bio-mix of who-knew-how-many planetary-original blood-lines, all tangled inextricably together with those from an equally unfathomable […]
This is definitely the best resource I’ve encountered for a crash course in the root causes of climate change and the potential negative outcomes if the global community continues to ignore the problem. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have condensed years of research into a tiny book––all the better to penetrate the noosphere of a […]
“The Mistake Not…, self-saddled with a full name so long and unmanageable that even other Culture ships rarely took the trouble to use all of it, was just vain enough to feel slightly flattered at all this attention, but still found the incessant chit-chat unbearably slow and fundamentally pointless. All these people seemed to do […]
“Alone again, in a pocket of silence as the wind dropped and all went still, Cossont paused for a moment. She looked up into the blue-black sky with its tinily pointed spray of stars and sat-light, and wondered what it would really be like to be Sublimed, to have gone through with it, to be […]
“‘History knocked on your door, did you answer?’” ––This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein, pg. 466