WEBVTT - Summer Reading List 0:00:03.800 --> 0:00:06.680 Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff 0:00:06.680 --> 0:00:13.680 Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow 0:00:13.720 --> 0:00:16.400 your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. 0:00:16.800 --> 0:00:19.160 We're always talking about books on here. We read books 0:00:19.200 --> 0:00:22.639 when we're researching podcasts. We're fairly big readers, so we're 0:00:22.680 --> 0:00:25.520 reading books outside of the office as well. You'll hear 0:00:25.600 --> 0:00:28.240 us mentioned a title here title there. As the subjects 0:00:28.280 --> 0:00:31.200 between our work life and our entertainment and personal enrichment 0:00:31.240 --> 0:00:34.559 reading kind of overlap. So every now and then we 0:00:34.560 --> 0:00:37.160 throw up book recommendations. You guys write in and ask 0:00:37.240 --> 0:00:39.560 us about this book or another asked for us spelling 0:00:39.560 --> 0:00:41.600 on an author's name, and we chat back and forth. 0:00:41.640 --> 0:00:44.760 And we've been talking about doing a summer reading episode 0:00:44.800 --> 0:00:47.000 for a while now where we just go ahead and 0:00:47.120 --> 0:00:49.760 eliminate any other content from a short episode of Stuff 0:00:49.760 --> 0:00:51.720 to Blow Your Mind and just talk about a few 0:00:51.880 --> 0:00:55.480 books that are both near to our hearts but also 0:00:55.720 --> 0:00:58.400 near to the heart of the show and close to 0:00:58.440 --> 0:01:00.680 the themes that we often discuss and Stuff to Blow 0:01:00.720 --> 0:01:03.040 Your Mind. Yeah, and the presumption is that it's summer's 0:01:03.080 --> 0:01:05.880 coming up, and we're all gonna laze around for at 0:01:05.959 --> 0:01:09.240 least two weeks, uh, you guys over in Europe, I 0:01:09.280 --> 0:01:11.679 don't know, a month or two. We'll have some time 0:01:11.720 --> 0:01:14.399 here to tackle a reading list and hopefully you guys 0:01:14.440 --> 0:01:15.959 will be interested in some of the stuff that we 0:01:16.000 --> 0:01:18.839 have to recommend. Yeah, you know, so you can hunt 0:01:18.840 --> 0:01:21.479 these down, check them out from your library, load them 0:01:21.520 --> 0:01:23.360 up on your kindle. I can't speak for your list. 0:01:23.400 --> 0:01:24.880 I know on my list all these things are pretty 0:01:24.880 --> 0:01:27.479 readily available, so you shouldn't have to do any deep 0:01:27.520 --> 0:01:30.679 digging to find them. I like dusty books, like to 0:01:30.680 --> 0:01:33.440 crack them open, so but I'm assuming that most of 0:01:33.440 --> 0:01:35.759 the stuff is available. Yeah, I mean I do too, 0:01:35.760 --> 0:01:38.880 though I just switched. I finally jumped on the bandwagon 0:01:38.959 --> 0:01:40.920 and have a kindle. Now. Yeah, I'm going to get 0:01:40.959 --> 0:01:43.520 there soon, but it just hasn't happened yet. Put it 0:01:43.520 --> 0:01:45.640 that way, I mean, they don't smell near is nice. 0:01:46.120 --> 0:01:48.200 I'm just a cheap jerk and I'm not there yet. 0:01:48.360 --> 0:01:51.240 Like when it drops to fifty nine, probably without any 0:01:51.360 --> 0:01:53.680 further ado, let's roll this baby out. Well, I'll go 0:01:53.720 --> 0:01:56.960 first then, and I'm just gonna let you know most well, 0:01:57.000 --> 0:02:00.520 all my choices here are actually fiction sci fi kind 0:02:00.560 --> 0:02:02.200 of books, and you're gonna bring more of the non 0:02:02.240 --> 0:02:05.040 I'm gonna bring the nonfiction. There's definitely some nonfiction books 0:02:05.040 --> 0:02:06.960 that I've been reading or I've read recently, but they're 0:02:07.000 --> 0:02:09.480 not necessarily things that I would say, yes, you should 0:02:09.680 --> 0:02:13.400 plow through this as well, because there are books that 0:02:13.440 --> 0:02:17.519 are informative and enriching and well worth the time you 0:02:17.600 --> 0:02:19.880 spend with them, but it's not necessarily the kind of 0:02:19.880 --> 0:02:21.640 thing you might want to take on a vacation with 0:02:21.680 --> 0:02:25.239 you or you know, squirrel away for a little personal 0:02:25.320 --> 0:02:29.040 enjoyment reading. Although you might be a nonfiction reader like 0:02:29.120 --> 0:02:32.640 I am. Mostly I enjoy great fiction, but a lot 0:02:32.720 --> 0:02:34.600 of times I just like to cozy up to something 0:02:34.680 --> 0:02:36.399 that's really going to stirre my brain. Said, I don't 0:02:36.440 --> 0:02:39.320 feel like I'm trapped in a certain world for a 0:02:39.360 --> 0:02:41.959 certain amount of time, because I tend to when that happens, 0:02:42.240 --> 0:02:43.919 you know, I get a really good piece of fiction, 0:02:44.080 --> 0:02:46.800 I want to squirrel myself away for seventy two hours 0:02:46.840 --> 0:02:49.600 and not eat or drink or talk to anyone else. 0:02:50.120 --> 0:02:52.040 So that's a really big time commitment for me. So 0:02:52.160 --> 0:02:54.600 nonfiction I really love because it's a balanced way to 0:02:54.639 --> 0:02:58.240 consume some really cool bits of information. Okay, Well, my 0:02:58.280 --> 0:03:01.200 first pick is a non by an author by the 0:03:01.280 --> 0:03:03.720 name of our Scott Baker. Sometimes he's just so listed 0:03:03.720 --> 0:03:06.440 as Scott Baker, depending on if you're getting a like 0:03:06.480 --> 0:03:09.160 a Canadian, British, shore Us version of one of his books. 0:03:09.520 --> 0:03:13.040 He's the author of a really thought provoking epic fantasy 0:03:13.080 --> 0:03:16.080 series called well overall. It's called The Second Apocalypse, and 0:03:16.080 --> 0:03:18.800 that includes the novels The Prince of Nothing. The Darkness 0:03:18.800 --> 0:03:20.919 That Came Before is the first trilogy in that series, 0:03:21.040 --> 0:03:24.440 and it's all very thought provoking stuff. He's a philosophy guy. 0:03:24.600 --> 0:03:27.919 He invokes a lot of neuroscience in his worlds, even 0:03:27.919 --> 0:03:30.280 if he's writing about a world full of magic. But 0:03:30.440 --> 0:03:33.320 those fantasy books are not always as accessible, I think 0:03:33.360 --> 0:03:36.720 to some readers. Luckily, he has written a couple of 0:03:36.840 --> 0:03:39.760 non fantasy books, and one of these is a book 0:03:39.800 --> 0:03:41.680 called Disciple of the Dog, and that's the one that 0:03:41.680 --> 0:03:44.640 I'm gonna recommend here. It's a really fun read. It's short, 0:03:44.800 --> 0:03:50.120 and it is about a sleazy, pothead private investigator with 0:03:50.440 --> 0:03:54.160 an abnormal capacity for memory. He cannot forget anything that 0:03:54.280 --> 0:03:57.200 it's said to him. The capacity doesn't allow him to 0:03:57.360 --> 0:03:59.880 remember everything that he's read. But if somebody has said it, 0:04:00.040 --> 0:04:02.320 if he's seen it, then it's cemented in his mind. 0:04:02.440 --> 0:04:05.640 Is that similar to some people who have ability to 0:04:05.920 --> 0:04:09.200 recall dates like from twenty years ago or in in 0:04:09.240 --> 0:04:11.160 the events connected to them. Yeah, that kind of thing 0:04:11.280 --> 0:04:13.600 should be helpful if you're a private investigator and you know, 0:04:13.600 --> 0:04:16.400 we've seen this kind of investigator before. To a certain incidentally, 0:04:16.400 --> 0:04:20.240 give me Sherlock Holmes is the classic investigator character. And 0:04:20.320 --> 0:04:22.920 certainly with Sherlock, you have a character that has just 0:04:22.960 --> 0:04:27.240 a phenomenal brain and it distances himself from various human 0:04:27.279 --> 0:04:30.720 experiences and makes him kind of an enigma to normal people. Well, 0:04:31.000 --> 0:04:34.160 the character and disciple of the dog who's the character's name, 0:04:34.200 --> 0:04:36.680 is a disciple manning just kind of gimmicky but fun. 0:04:37.000 --> 0:04:39.680 He is kind of screw up because of his condition. 0:04:39.800 --> 0:04:42.599 Like his condition is he cannot forget anything, so anything 0:04:42.640 --> 0:04:45.680 that traumatizes him is there forever. So he's a character 0:04:45.720 --> 0:04:49.320 that has had some severe bouts with depression and self 0:04:49.440 --> 0:04:52.640 loathing based on this ability, but he's also managed to 0:04:52.760 --> 0:04:56.040 use it for financial gain as a private investigator. And 0:04:56.080 --> 0:04:59.080 so our Scott Baker injects a lot of philosophical pondering 0:04:59.080 --> 0:05:01.479 into this because we get into questions that we've raised 0:05:01.480 --> 0:05:04.320 in the podcast before, to what extent are we shaped 0:05:04.440 --> 0:05:06.320 by our memory? And what to what extent are we 0:05:06.360 --> 0:05:09.919 shaped by our memory errors. We discussed the seven Deadly 0:05:10.000 --> 0:05:13.279 sins of memory, the various ways that we misremember something 0:05:13.680 --> 0:05:16.000 or alter the memory of something in our head, and 0:05:16.040 --> 0:05:18.720 these are things that the character Disciple Man and cannot do. 0:05:18.920 --> 0:05:21.520 So it's interesting to see Baker play that out in 0:05:21.560 --> 0:05:24.400 the novel and Disciple the Dog. The character is looking 0:05:24.400 --> 0:05:27.280 into a missing person's case that concerns a new age 0:05:27.320 --> 0:05:30.159 cult where the believers are of the opinion that it 0:05:30.279 --> 0:05:34.000 is actually the year A D fifty million, and life 0:05:34.120 --> 0:05:36.600 as we know it is all just the dream of 0:05:36.640 --> 0:05:39.880 a quantum computer, and the sun is actually about to 0:05:40.000 --> 0:05:42.880 swallow the earth as it goes into a red dwarf stage. 0:05:43.400 --> 0:05:45.760 So you also end up with ponderings about what is 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:50.240 our future and the idea that you know, when yeah, yeah, 0:05:50.279 --> 0:05:52.799 what would it look like? And ideas that what is reality? 0:05:52.839 --> 0:05:55.280 You know, what is it possible that reality could be 0:05:55.360 --> 0:05:57.760 the dreams of a quantum computer? And then this is 0:05:57.800 --> 0:06:00.680 all just a backward fantasy. The world around this is 0:06:00.760 --> 0:06:03.880 just this backward fantasy that we project for ourselves. So 0:06:03.920 --> 0:06:06.480 there are various levels of, to my mind, mind blowing 0:06:06.600 --> 0:06:09.560 ideas that Baker has fun within this. And then on 0:06:09.640 --> 0:06:12.159 top of that, it's entertaining because you have a wonderfully 0:06:12.560 --> 0:06:17.200 sleazy but likable protagonist and you have this now air 0:06:17.360 --> 0:06:20.200 setting like industrial Jersey, so it's not really a new 0:06:20.200 --> 0:06:21.880 war setting, but it's got very much a new war 0:06:22.000 --> 0:06:25.520 kind of vibe to it. Classic detective case, what's gonna happen? 0:06:25.600 --> 0:06:28.000 He's gonna find the missing girl who's the heart of 0:06:28.040 --> 0:06:31.120 the conspiracy and all of this. So it's short, gets 0:06:31.200 --> 0:06:33.960 the point, have some fun with the character and brings 0:06:33.960 --> 0:06:35.279 with it a lot of floor ideas. I like the 0:06:35.320 --> 0:06:38.679 dichotomy of a pothead with a really long memory too. Yeah, 0:06:38.960 --> 0:06:40.960 a sharp memory. Well, pretty great because it's like the 0:06:41.000 --> 0:06:44.160 sharp memory is bringing him such trauma. It distanced him 0:06:44.160 --> 0:06:46.320 from so many people. He kind of has to self 0:06:46.400 --> 0:06:51.000 medicate through it. Yeah, what's on your list? Okay? Um, well, 0:06:51.040 --> 0:06:55.440 I have the best nature in science running. That of 0:06:55.480 --> 0:06:58.880 course is a series, and this particular one is the 0:06:59.000 --> 0:07:02.160 guest edited by Mary Roach. She's at the Helm there, yes, 0:07:02.240 --> 0:07:04.760 so she's made a lot of the selections here. You'll 0:07:04.800 --> 0:07:08.479 probably remember her from books like Stiff Pecking from Mars Bunk. 0:07:09.160 --> 0:07:12.760 She's just got a really great science journalism pedigree, and 0:07:12.880 --> 0:07:14.960 I think anybody familiar with her work knows that she 0:07:15.080 --> 0:07:17.440 has a great sense of humor and the ability to 0:07:17.480 --> 0:07:22.640 really deliver very accessible points of entry into some weighty subjects. 0:07:23.280 --> 0:07:25.280 If you go back through the catalog of our podcast 0:07:25.360 --> 0:07:27.840 far Enough, you're fun an interview with her from back 0:07:27.840 --> 0:07:30.280 when the podcast was stuffed in the Science Lab. So 0:07:30.360 --> 0:07:34.000 she's got the selection of different pieces of essays and articles, 0:07:34.000 --> 0:07:37.040 about twenty five of them. Actually. Some of them are 0:07:37.240 --> 0:07:41.240 from well known writers like Oliver Sacks and Leonard Lednov 0:07:41.400 --> 0:07:44.680 and Stephen Hawking, and others not as well known, although 0:07:44.800 --> 0:07:48.440 definitely up and coming, like Brook Hollard Builder, people making 0:07:48.440 --> 0:07:51.280 a name for themselves for their ability to reframe our 0:07:51.360 --> 0:07:54.080 understanding of the subject. In fact, Brook Hard Builder is 0:07:54.160 --> 0:07:57.040 the writer of the article that has to do with 0:07:57.120 --> 0:08:00.360 food safety, which right there sounds like incredibly wing. But 0:08:00.440 --> 0:08:05.280 this guy went into underground food movements like fermenting, which 0:08:05.320 --> 0:08:08.960 we talked about in a podcast, raw milk, the paleo diet, 0:08:09.600 --> 0:08:12.640 all these very different sort of movements going on right now, 0:08:12.840 --> 0:08:15.400 and what could have just been like a story about 0:08:15.640 --> 0:08:20.160 the safety of food became this incredible matrix of cultural 0:08:20.240 --> 0:08:25.480 ideas and scientific theories that are proven and disproven. So anyway, 0:08:25.560 --> 0:08:27.720 that that's why I really love this series is that 0:08:27.760 --> 0:08:30.560 it does take this sort of everyday stuff and reframe 0:08:30.600 --> 0:08:33.760 it for us. Another really good example is an essay 0:08:33.800 --> 0:08:36.880 by jarn Lanier. It's called the First Church of Robotics, 0:08:36.920 --> 0:08:39.880 and it explores our fascination with robotics. If certainly we 0:08:40.000 --> 0:08:41.840 have a fascination with it, We've talked about it quite 0:08:41.840 --> 0:08:44.960 a bit, and our need to project ourselves onto these 0:08:45.000 --> 0:08:48.040 machines and personify them. And he said that this is 0:08:48.080 --> 0:08:50.760 all going on at the same time we are increasingly 0:08:50.800 --> 0:08:54.400 treating our fellow humans like machines. So it's kind of 0:08:54.400 --> 0:08:56.679 interesting that you have this shift in the way that 0:08:56.720 --> 0:08:59.960 we are communicating with one another. We're communicating in way 0:09:00.040 --> 0:09:03.800 set rely on algorithms of technology instead of our own 0:09:03.840 --> 0:09:06.760 personal humanity. So if he's saying, hey, I mean it's 0:09:06.760 --> 0:09:09.560 more like a cautionary tale, like it's very compelling. He's saying, 0:09:09.640 --> 0:09:13.880 let's not deify a machine quite yet doing so just 0:09:13.960 --> 0:09:17.800 makes us sort of like these grotesque ventriloquists. So that's 0:09:17.840 --> 0:09:20.200 just another example of one of the more mind blowing 0:09:20.240 --> 0:09:23.559 aspects of these different essays. Kind of a buffet, right 0:09:23.720 --> 0:09:26.080 ideas with this you do you do? You could say 0:09:26.280 --> 0:09:28.800 it's sort of a snapshot of the year of eleven 0:09:28.840 --> 0:09:31.280 in journalism, and that would be absolutely true. But the 0:09:31.280 --> 0:09:32.760 fact of the matter is just that a lot of 0:09:32.760 --> 0:09:35.360 this has to do with topics that have been around. 0:09:35.480 --> 0:09:38.400 It's not just like, hey, this is the zeitgeist moment 0:09:38.640 --> 0:09:41.360 right here for this subject. I knew that there's a 0:09:41.440 --> 0:09:45.240 one essay or that talks about prohibition and about the 0:09:45.240 --> 0:09:48.959 government's role and actually poisoning ethanol and in doing so 0:09:49.120 --> 0:09:52.240 taking the lot of many Americans during prohibition, And this 0:09:52.280 --> 0:09:55.200 is something that's probably not widely known, but here's a 0:09:55.200 --> 0:09:57.560 piece of journalism sort of bringing up the past and saying, 0:09:57.600 --> 0:10:00.200 did you know that at one point probhibition and it 0:10:00.200 --> 0:10:02.959 had taken hold so much of the government that they 0:10:02.960 --> 0:10:05.880 were actually trying to discourage people by making them really sick, 0:10:06.080 --> 0:10:09.560 by mixing together ethanol and other chemicals and in doing 0:10:09.600 --> 0:10:12.600 so poisoning them, which resulted in thousands of deaths. So 0:10:12.640 --> 0:10:15.320 it does it takes everything from subjects like can animals 0:10:15.320 --> 0:10:19.079 be gay? To prohibition to even space junk, which we've 0:10:19.080 --> 0:10:23.240 talked about. And it's very entertaining because it does allow 0:10:23.320 --> 0:10:25.880 you to enter into these subjects in a way that 0:10:25.920 --> 0:10:29.400 are very accessible. And I was even thinking about Leonard 0:10:29.440 --> 0:10:33.960 miledna Of and Stephen Hawking and their essay about m theory, 0:10:34.200 --> 0:10:37.160 membrane theory or string theory, right, which is this idea 0:10:37.200 --> 0:10:40.640 that we can get this theory of everything together. They 0:10:40.679 --> 0:10:45.640 asked the reader to imagine themselves as goldfish looking through 0:10:45.679 --> 0:10:49.320 the distorted glass of their enclosures, and in order to 0:10:49.440 --> 0:10:53.880 understand the limitations of this theory of everything that we're after, 0:10:54.080 --> 0:10:57.000 and they say, imagine the goldfish as they formulate scientific 0:10:57.080 --> 0:11:00.760 laws from their distorted frames of reference that would always 0:11:00.760 --> 0:11:03.160 hold true and enable them to make predictions about the 0:11:03.200 --> 0:11:07.560 future emotions of objects outside the bowl. So they're taking 0:11:07.600 --> 0:11:11.400 this really cool analogy of us being fish in the 0:11:11.440 --> 0:11:15.600 bowl and having a distorted view of reality and then 0:11:15.600 --> 0:11:18.839 this theory of everything and again a really good entry 0:11:18.880 --> 0:11:21.760 point into this subject matter. So that is why I 0:11:21.760 --> 0:11:23.679 recommend that book. Well, that does sound like a good one. 0:11:23.880 --> 0:11:26.680 My next entry in this list is a book called 0:11:26.720 --> 0:11:30.520 The Wind Up Girl by a Paolo Bassa Gallupi, and 0:11:30.720 --> 0:11:33.360 this is a really fun sci fi novel and a 0:11:33.360 --> 0:11:35.880 really thought provoking sci fi novel, and that it takes 0:11:36.000 --> 0:11:40.439 a lot of our fears associated with our use of 0:11:40.480 --> 0:11:45.520 science today and extrapolates those into a very engaging, until 0:11:45.559 --> 0:11:48.440 our extent nightmaric vision of the future. It takes us 0:11:48.440 --> 0:11:52.120 to the futuristic time. It's a post oil world, so 0:11:52.160 --> 0:11:55.040 we've used up all of our natural resources as far 0:11:55.080 --> 0:11:59.640 as oil goes, So the petroleum based system crashes to 0:11:59.679 --> 0:12:03.320 the ground and suddenly traveling across the globe is severely limited. 0:12:03.520 --> 0:12:06.360 The world in a way becomes much larger because when 0:12:06.360 --> 0:12:08.960 we have less ability to travel it and to intraverse it, 0:12:09.240 --> 0:12:12.120 the distances become vast because we can't just fly around 0:12:12.160 --> 0:12:14.680 the world in a day anymore. There's no more oil. Also, 0:12:14.960 --> 0:12:19.480 you have genetically modified organisms, specifically genetically modified crops have 0:12:19.640 --> 0:12:22.440 backfired in this world to the point where you end 0:12:22.520 --> 0:12:26.800 up with massive starvations, massive famines, and it's really crippled 0:12:26.880 --> 0:12:29.160 the world. So in the Wine Up Girl, we find 0:12:29.160 --> 0:12:31.960 ourselves in Bangkok, Thailand, and this is one of the 0:12:32.000 --> 0:12:34.240 few places it's us shut itself off from the rest 0:12:34.240 --> 0:12:37.400 of the world. It's managed to maintain a certain degree 0:12:37.600 --> 0:12:41.640 of non genetically altered vegetation, that has a certain amount 0:12:41.640 --> 0:12:44.560 of genetic purity to most of its vegetables, and it's 0:12:44.600 --> 0:12:49.160 able to feed itself. And you have these outside corporations 0:12:49.200 --> 0:12:51.439 that are interested, these colary companies they are called, that 0:12:51.520 --> 0:12:55.760 are interested in infiltrating Thailand and Bangkok and actually finding 0:12:55.760 --> 0:12:57.520 some of these examples so they can take them out 0:12:57.640 --> 0:13:00.679 genetically tinker with them. Well, yeah, I mean really, I mean, 0:13:00.720 --> 0:13:03.400 the bad guys in this the villains are basically sci 0:13:03.440 --> 0:13:06.080 fi versions of some of the large companies like Monsanta 0:13:06.120 --> 0:13:08.160 that we have today. And then you also have a 0:13:08.240 --> 0:13:11.000 character in this book called Imaco, and Imaco is a 0:13:11.120 --> 0:13:12.960 wind up girl they call it. She's one of the 0:13:13.040 --> 0:13:16.679 new people. She's a genetically engineered human. She's a very 0:13:16.720 --> 0:13:20.240 interesting character too, because she's originally bred as basically a 0:13:20.240 --> 0:13:24.360 pleasure person, like a roxy robot, but flesh human flesh 0:13:24.360 --> 0:13:26.400 one yeahs trying to say it in an acceptable way, 0:13:26.600 --> 0:13:28.520 but she's bred for this kind of life, engines up 0:13:28.520 --> 0:13:31.560 abandoned in Bangkok by her former master, and she's not 0:13:31.679 --> 0:13:35.760 engineered to really survive all that well, she's been conditioned 0:13:35.800 --> 0:13:39.439 to be this submissive, servant to businessman thing of pleasure. 0:13:39.720 --> 0:13:42.960 Her horrors are extra small because it supposedly looks nicer 0:13:43.000 --> 0:13:45.360 for her to have very poor, less skin, but it 0:13:45.400 --> 0:13:47.680 also means that she has trouble managing her body heat. 0:13:48.000 --> 0:13:49.880 And so the author does a gred job of exploring 0:13:50.000 --> 0:13:52.920 what life might be like for this genetically modified person, 0:13:53.280 --> 0:13:55.480 what kind of flaws are engineered into her. They call 0:13:55.520 --> 0:13:57.920 her a wind up girl because she's engineered so that 0:13:57.960 --> 0:14:01.280 she walks funny, with the idea being that new people 0:14:01.280 --> 0:14:04.000 will stand out if they're just seen on the streets, 0:14:04.000 --> 0:14:05.880 so there will be this threat of the new people 0:14:06.000 --> 0:14:09.160 taking over. And it heart's also just a story about 0:14:09.160 --> 0:14:12.840 a spy trying to steal something about political corruption and 0:14:12.920 --> 0:14:15.560 about the crimes of humanity and how they may fall 0:14:15.600 --> 0:14:17.480 out over the decades to come, what it is to 0:14:17.480 --> 0:14:20.160 be human too, yea or even subjugated. It sounds like, 0:14:20.240 --> 0:14:22.200 are there any wind up men? I have to ask? 0:14:22.320 --> 0:14:24.200 I forget if there are. I feel like there's mention 0:14:24.240 --> 0:14:28.800 of mercenaries, none that are engineering. It's been a year 0:14:28.840 --> 0:14:30.080 or two since I read it, but I seem to 0:14:30.080 --> 0:14:32.520 remember there was a detail about that technically the book 0:14:32.600 --> 0:14:35.160 is I think they called biopunk, which I'm kind of 0:14:35.160 --> 0:14:39.000 a critic of overuse of the cyberpunk terminology where someone 0:14:39.080 --> 0:14:43.000 just puts in another steampunk Yeah, well yes, steampunk, diesel punk. 0:14:43.080 --> 0:14:46.360 The more something fits one of those classifications, the less interesting. 0:14:46.400 --> 0:14:49.080 I think the biopunk stuff is really cool though. Yeah yeah, 0:14:49.280 --> 0:14:51.120 I mean the potential, I mean people are doing some 0:14:51.160 --> 0:14:53.040 really cool things with that. But any but but at heart, 0:14:53.240 --> 0:14:55.400 this book is really interesting because it's entertaining, because it 0:14:55.480 --> 0:14:57.680 is action and intrigue characters should care about. But it 0:14:57.760 --> 0:15:01.000 also takes a look at modern day a logical concerns 0:15:01.120 --> 0:15:03.680 and uses them to create this sci fi future that 0:15:03.800 --> 0:15:06.240 really speaks to readers today. That sounds really cool. I 0:15:06.280 --> 0:15:07.920 like the premise of that a lot. I'm going to 0:15:08.000 --> 0:15:09.480 put that on my list. I gotta say, so, do 0:15:09.480 --> 0:15:11.520 you go? All right? Well, I think we let's take 0:15:11.520 --> 0:15:13.480 a quick break and when we get back we will 0:15:13.480 --> 0:15:21.120 talk about a book called Super Sad True Love Story. 0:15:22.000 --> 0:15:24.480 All right, we're back, So Super Sad True Love Story. 0:15:24.560 --> 0:15:27.680 You've mentioned this one before. I have. I've talked about it, 0:15:27.720 --> 0:15:29.880 like sort of sputtered about it. But I thought, well, 0:15:29.920 --> 0:15:31.760 this is a good opportunity to talk about why I'm 0:15:31.760 --> 0:15:35.160 always bringing it up. It's by Gary Steingart and just 0:15:35.280 --> 0:15:38.720 to fly our little futurists freak flag a little bit higher. 0:15:38.840 --> 0:15:43.080 It is again, a dystopian futuristic novel not too far 0:15:43.080 --> 0:15:44.680 in the future that I think they're talking about, maybe 0:15:44.680 --> 0:15:47.240 fifty years in the future. It is a fiction of 0:15:47.280 --> 0:15:49.880 work of fiction, of course, and it centers around a 0:15:49.920 --> 0:15:52.480 character not any enough, Lenny Abramof and he is a 0:15:52.520 --> 0:15:56.240 mid level drone for a massive multinational corporation in the future. 0:15:56.360 --> 0:15:58.680 By the way, the not too distant future, like everything 0:15:58.800 --> 0:16:03.680 is small talent national conglomerate, so it's like kmart g E, 0:16:04.520 --> 0:16:08.600 something ridiculous, something other, sort of like large company all 0:16:08.720 --> 0:16:12.040 melded together, which is just again it's extrapolating like what's 0:16:12.040 --> 0:16:13.960 happening in the present in the fifty years and sort 0:16:13.960 --> 0:16:16.200 of taking it to the nth degree, which is why 0:16:16.200 --> 0:16:19.680 it makes it such an interesting novel. Lenny is working 0:16:19.720 --> 0:16:23.840 in a division of this multinational corporation which promises to 0:16:23.840 --> 0:16:28.360 help the super rich live forever thanks to nanotechnology and 0:16:28.560 --> 0:16:32.160 super anti accidents and various other over hyped technologies. At 0:16:32.160 --> 0:16:34.080 this point, he falls in love with a beautiful young 0:16:34.160 --> 0:16:37.200 Korean woman named Unice. She lives with him, but and 0:16:37.360 --> 0:16:41.320 she really provides the perspective of the youth at that point. 0:16:41.920 --> 0:16:45.640 She's obsessed with consumerism. She's shallow, but she's not shallow me. 0:16:45.720 --> 0:16:49.040 She's drawn actually pretty well as a character. She's oversharing. 0:16:49.320 --> 0:16:53.760 She's obsessed with electronic media culture, in which everybody when 0:16:53.800 --> 0:16:56.440 you go out in public in this future world, everything 0:16:56.520 --> 0:16:59.040 is revealed about you via this sort of like iPhone 0:16:59.080 --> 0:17:02.560 looking device hanging around everybody's next and it projects to 0:17:02.760 --> 0:17:05.800 everybody else's iPhone device. I think it's called apparatus or 0:17:05.840 --> 0:17:10.560 something like that. Your credit score, your hotness score, every 0:17:10.640 --> 0:17:13.720 single thing about like, think about every piece of information 0:17:13.720 --> 0:17:16.960 about yourself that's out there that you could then just 0:17:17.119 --> 0:17:20.879 automatically transmit to someone. This is what's happening. So something 0:17:20.920 --> 0:17:23.960 you just posted on Facebook or Twitter. So you walk 0:17:24.000 --> 0:17:25.439 into a bar and all of a sudden, you can 0:17:25.480 --> 0:17:27.800 look down at your apparatus and you can see, like 0:17:27.880 --> 0:17:30.560 what your own hotness score is based on everybody at 0:17:30.600 --> 0:17:33.440 that very moment looking at you and entering it. So 0:17:33.520 --> 0:17:36.119 the premise of it is just really interesting. Everyone is 0:17:36.160 --> 0:17:41.159 divided into high network net work individuals and low net 0:17:41.400 --> 0:17:46.920 worth individuals um and basically you have a collapsing America 0:17:47.160 --> 0:17:51.080 which is hugely in debt to China, and it definitely 0:17:51.119 --> 0:17:54.080 has traces of Brave New World in four And it's 0:17:54.280 --> 0:17:55.960 the reason I really like it is it could have 0:17:56.000 --> 0:17:59.520 been watered down satire, but shine Gard is really a 0:17:59.600 --> 0:18:02.919 very spressive writer, and he builds a very convincing world. 0:18:03.000 --> 0:18:05.439 So you can easily imagine yourself walking through the streets 0:18:05.440 --> 0:18:09.280 of New York in this future America where the National 0:18:09.359 --> 0:18:13.760 Guard is ever present. You've got a collapsing banking system 0:18:13.800 --> 0:18:17.719 and yet this technology that really turns people inwards so 0:18:17.760 --> 0:18:20.359 that they're sort of ignoring all these different things happening 0:18:20.359 --> 0:18:24.960 around them, and really nice cohesive world building by shin Guard. 0:18:25.440 --> 0:18:28.159 There's also a running gag where the National Guard stops 0:18:28.160 --> 0:18:31.000 people at checkpoints and they're forced to deny and imply. 0:18:31.520 --> 0:18:34.159 They deny that a conversation ever took place, and they 0:18:34.200 --> 0:18:38.600 imply their consent for an invasive search. It is funny 0:18:38.600 --> 0:18:40.720 because so many times and when you're online you're just 0:18:40.760 --> 0:18:43.320 agreeing to something. It's very much in that same sort 0:18:43.359 --> 0:18:45.280 of like, hey, you're agreeing to this right, but you're 0:18:45.320 --> 0:18:47.520 not really reading it and all right, let's go on 0:18:47.720 --> 0:18:50.399 and so on and so forth. Document you need to 0:18:50.440 --> 0:18:53.280 read it before you visit a website, and you just yes, yeah. 0:18:53.480 --> 0:18:56.040 So again he's taken that idea to the degree and 0:18:56.080 --> 0:18:57.480 said that you know, you're now you are living in 0:18:57.520 --> 0:19:00.720 this this very public sphere where everything you do is 0:19:00.880 --> 0:19:05.240 being met with this idea of you deny and imply, 0:19:05.920 --> 0:19:08.240 and you're entering into these contracts that you don't even 0:19:08.240 --> 0:19:11.080 know about and the afterwards. Scheinert says that he read 0:19:11.440 --> 0:19:14.879 Ray Kurt's Wheels The Singularity Is Near while he was 0:19:14.880 --> 0:19:17.240 working in the book, as well as our friend Aubrey 0:19:17.280 --> 0:19:19.520 de Gray. I say our friend because I imagine this 0:19:19.640 --> 0:19:23.879 as friends, the bearded one, the biogenontologists. His book ending 0:19:23.920 --> 0:19:27.119 aging the rejuvenation breakthrough that could reverse human aging in 0:19:27.119 --> 0:19:30.040 our lifetime, and he definitely takes these ideas which are 0:19:30.119 --> 0:19:32.560 really cool and very cutting edge, but he does look 0:19:32.600 --> 0:19:34.800 at it through a lens of pessimism. He says, in 0:19:34.840 --> 0:19:37.199 this future, sure all of this would be accessible, but 0:19:37.320 --> 0:19:40.440 only to the super rich. Everyone else would be labeled 0:19:40.480 --> 0:19:44.240 impossible to preserve or I t P in this world. 0:19:44.840 --> 0:19:46.840 So that's why I think it's interesting. It touches on 0:19:46.960 --> 0:19:51.240 so many things that we've discussed, and it's done really well. Cool. Yeah, 0:19:51.280 --> 0:19:54.040 that's when I really need to add my reading list 0:19:54.080 --> 0:19:55.960 as well. You've mentioned it, i think in several times 0:19:56.000 --> 0:19:58.399 in relation to topics we've discussed, and it sounds like 0:19:58.400 --> 0:20:01.359 it's kind of funny too. Yeah. He's got a great 0:20:01.440 --> 0:20:03.959 sense of humor and it really is. Actually, I mean, 0:20:04.000 --> 0:20:06.320 the title is apt It is a love story, but 0:20:06.440 --> 0:20:10.199 it's it's heartbreaking and it's beautiful, important and terrifying at 0:20:10.240 --> 0:20:12.760 the same time. Well, my next pick isn't very funny 0:20:12.800 --> 0:20:14.320 in fact, even though this is an author that I 0:20:14.400 --> 0:20:16.280 understand has written some things that have a lot more 0:20:16.359 --> 0:20:18.240 humor and absurdity to them, this is not one of 0:20:18.280 --> 0:20:21.720 those books. The book is Embassy Town by China me Evil. 0:20:22.240 --> 0:20:24.840 As we're recording this podcast, it is on the list 0:20:24.840 --> 0:20:28.040 of nominees for two thousand and twelve Hugo Award. I 0:20:28.080 --> 0:20:30.240