How do you describe this book? Prescient? A foretelling? Crystal ball gazing? Or simply something that was written by a talented author that from a particular perspective now might be close to a possible future? I finished reading The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I’ve deliberately read it slowly to take it all in. I’ve also taken a couple of weeks to absorb it before I wrote this review. 30 years ago, it was certainly dystopian fiction several steps […]
Fascinating insight into our inevitable (giant) step next door
Over the Christmas break, I watched the National Geographic Channel’s excellent drama-cum-documentary series Mars. A couple of episodes in, as one of the documentary sequences interviewed Stephen L. Petranek, I had a moment of realisation: hang on, I have this book and it’s one I haven’t read yet! To the Bookcave, Batman! Petranek’s How We’ll Live On Mars, like all the TED Books series, is short and sharp. It’s fewer than 100 pages, designed to be read in a single sitting (or maybe two, if […]
Can you think more expansively and connect the dots? Dave Gray says you can.
This is one of those books where you sit there nodding and thinking, “he’s got it!”. Or you’re going to be utterly puzzled by it. It’s going to depend on how your brain works. Others have tried in the past to explain this kind of mindset, but Dave’s effort does a good job of aggregating some of the thinking out there on working this way, bringing it together and making sense of something that’s been inadequately described previously. If you’re one of those people for […]
One for the fans (but probably not the rest of us)
/me sighs… wonders how to do this without sounding grumpy… I’ve always been a Star Wars fan: I remember my parents taking us to the drive-in to see the original on a double feature with Damnation Alley and have seen all of the films multiple times; I remember that the first Star Wars figure I got was R2-D2, and that I collected every Kenner figure and all the mail-in redemptions all the way through the end of Return of the Jedi; I own several of […]