Henri Lef

FICTION

Ian Banks: The “Culture” Series, Consider Phlebas, The Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, The State of the Art, Inversions, Excession, Look to Windward, Matter
Greg Bear: Moving Mars, Queen of Angels, Slant
David Brin: Earth, The “Earthclan” series, Startide Rising, The Uplift War, Sundiver
Paul Di Filippo: Ribofunk
Cory Doctorow: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe
Greg Egan: Axiomatic, Diaspora, Distress, Permutation City, Quarantine
Warren Ellis: Crooked Little Vein
Kathleen Ann Goonan: The “Nanotech Cycle”, Queen City Jazz, Mississippi Blues, Crescent City Rhapsody, Light Music
Peter Hamilton: The “Commonwealth Saga”, Pandora’s Star, Judas Unleashed, The “Greg Mandel Trilogy”, Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, The Nano Flower
James Hogan: Voyage from Yesteryear
Ken Macleod: The “Fall Revolution” series, The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, The Sky Road, Newton’s Wake
Richard Morgan: The “Takeshi Kovacs” series, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies, Thirteen
Linda Nagata: The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, Limit of Vision, Tech Heaven, Vast
Frederick Pohl: Gateway
Alastair Reynolds: Absolution Gap, Chasm City, The Prefect, Pushing Ice, Redemption Ark, Revelation Space
Kim Stanley Robinson: The “Mars Trilogy”, Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, The Martians, Karl Schroeder, Ventus
Dan Simmons: Endymion, Fall of Endymion, Llium, “Hyperion Cantos”, Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Olympos
Neal Stephenson: Diamond Age
Bruce Sterling: Caryatids, Crystal Express, Holy Fire, Schismatrix Plus
Charles Stross: Accelerando, Glasshouse, Halting State, Iron Sunrise, Singularity Sky, Toast
Karen Traviss: City of Pearl
Vernor Vinge: Across Realtime, A Deepness in The Sky, A Fire Upon The Deep, Rainbow’s End, True Names and Other Dangers
Elisabeth Vonarburg: Slow Engines of Time
Peter Watts: Blindsight, “Rifters’ Trilogy”, Star sh, Maelstrom, Behemoth (ß-Max Seppuku)
Scott Westerfeld: The Risen Empire, The Killing of Worlds
Walter Jon Williams: Aristoi, Angel Station, Voice of the Whirlwind
David Zindell: The Broken God, Neverness, War in Heaven, The Wild

COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

Jamie Delano: Narcopolis
Warren Ellis: Doktor Sleepless, Doom 2099, Global Frequency, Ministry of Space, Ocean, Transmetropolitan
Jonathan Hickman: Transhuman
Grant Morrison: The Filth, The Invisibles
Masamune Shirow: Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor, Ghost in the Shell 2: Man/Machine Interface
Adam Warren: Iron Man: Hypervelocity
Makoto Yukimura: Planetes

NON-FICTION

Ronald Bailey: Liberation Biology
Susan Blackmore: The Meme Machine
Cynthia Brezeal: Designing Sociable Robots
David Brin: The Transparent Society
Richard Brodie: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme
James Brook and Ian Boal (eds): Resisting the Virtual Life
Rodney Brooks: Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI, Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance, Electronic Civil Disobedience, The Electronic Disturbance, Flesh Machine, The Molecular Invasion, The Marching Plague
Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene
K. Eric Drexler: Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
Freeman Dyson: Disturbing the Universe, Imagined Worlds
Ann Finkbeiner: The Jasons, Imaginary Weapons
Joel Garreau: Radical Evolution
Adam Greenfield: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
James Hughes: Citizen Cyborg
Ray Kurzweil: The Singularity is Near
Howard Rheingold: Smart Mobs: The Next Social, Revolution
John Robb: Brave New War
Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody
Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the, Next Fifty Years
Gregory Stock: Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable, Genetic Future
Simon Young: Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist, Manifesto

ROLEPLAYING GAMES

Blue Planet, Burning Empires, Call of Cthulhu, CthulhuTech, Cybergeneration, Dawning Star, Delta Green, FreeMarket, Gamma World, GURPS: Transhuman Space, Morrow Project, Paranoia, Shadowrun, Shock: Social Science Fiction, Traveller

MOVIES AND TELEVISION

Aeon Flux, AI, Alien series, Andromeda, Babylon 5, Big O, Blade Runner, Cowboy Bebop, Crusade, District 9, Dollhouse, Dreamcatcher, Event Horizon, Ergo Proxy, Fire y, Gattica, Ghost in the Shell, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Solid State Society, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, 2nd Gig, The Island, Jekyll, Moon, Pandorum, Planetes, Serenity, Sleep Dealer, Solaris, Stargate and Stargate: Atlantis, Sunshine, Uzumaki, Zardoz

In its most primitive form, life is, therefore, no longer bound to the cell, the cell which possesses structure and which can be compared to a complex wheel-work, such as a watch which ceases to exist if it is stamped down in a mortar. No, in its primitive form life is like fire, like a flame borne by the living substance;—like a flame which appears in endless diversity and yet has specificity within it;—which can adopt the form of the organic world, of the lank grass-leaf and of the stem of the tree.

The virtue of thinking about life elsewhere is that it forces us to stretch our imaginations. Can we think of alternative solutions to biological problems already solved in one particular way on Earth? For example, the wheel is a comparatively recent invention on the planet Earth. It seems to have been invented in the ancient Near East less than ten thousand years ago. In fact, the high civilizations of Meso- America, the Aztecs and the Mayas, never employed the wheel, except for children's toys. Biology – the evolutionary process – has never invented the wheel, in spite of the fact that its selective advantages are manifest. Why are there no wheeled spiders or goats or elephants rolling along the highways? The answer is clearly that, until recently, there were no highways. Wheels are of use only when there are surfaces to roll on. Since the planet Earth is a heterogeneous, bumpy place with few long, smooth areas, there was no advantage to evolving the wheel. We can very well imagine another planet with enormous long stretches of smooth lava fields in which wheeled organisms are abundant. The late Dutch artist M. C. Escher designed a salamander-like organism that would do very well in such an environment.

The blood, the fountain whence the spirits flow,
The generous stream that waters every part,
And motion, vigour, and warm life conveys
To every Particle that moves or lives;
This vital fluid, thro' unnumber'd tubes
Pour'd by the heart, and to the heart again
Refunded; scourg'd forever round and round;
Enrag'd with heat and toil, at last forgets
Its balmy nature; virulent and thin
It grows; and now, but that a thousand gates
Are open to its flight, it would destroy
The parts it cherish' d and repair'd before.
Besides, the flexible and tender tubes
Melt in the mildest, most nectareous tide
That ripening Nature rolls; as in the stream
Its crumbling banks; but what the vital force
Of plastic fluids hourly batters down,
That very force, those plastic particles
Rebuild: so mutable the state of man.
For this the watchful appetite was given,
Daily with fresh materials to repair
This unavoidable expense of life,
This necessary waste of flesh and blood.
Hence the concoctive powers, with various art,
Subdue the cruder aliments to chyle;
The chyle to blood; the foamy purple tide
To liquors, which through finer arteries
To different parts their winding course pursue;
To try new changes, and new forms put on,
Or for the public, or some private use.

After all, we scientific workers ... like women, are the victims of fashion: at one time we wear dissociated ions, at another electrons; and we are always loth to don rational clothing; some fixed belief we must have manufactured for us: we are high or low church, of this or that degree of nonconformity, according to the school in which we are brought up—but the agnostic is always rare of us and of late years the critic has been taboo.

Try to imagine what the electric and magnetic fields look like at present in the space of this lecture room. First of all, there is a steady magnetic field; it comes from the currents in the interior of the earth - that is, the earth's steady magnetic field. Then there are some irregular, nearly static electric fields produced perhaps by electric charges generated by friction as various people move about in their chairs and rub their coat sleeves against the chair arms. Then there are other magnetic fields produced by oscillating currents in the electrical wiring - fields which vary at a frequency of 60 cycles per second, in synchronism with the generator at Boulder Dam. But more interesting are the electric and magnetic fields varying at much higher frequencies. For instance, as light travels from window to floor and wall to wall, there are little wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields moving along at 186,000 miles per second. Then there are also infrared waves travelling from the warm foreheads to the cold blackboard. And we have forgotten the ultraviolet light, the X-rays, and the radiowaves travelling through the room.

Flying across the room are electromagnetic waves which carry music of a jazz band. There are waves modulated by a series of impulses representing pictures of events going on in other parts of the world, or of imaginary aspirins dissolving in imaginary stomachs. To demonstrate the reality of these waves it is only necessary to turn on electronic equipment that converts these waves into pictures and sounds.

If we go into further detail to analyze even the smallest wiggles, there are tiny electromagnetic waves that have come into the room from enormous distances. There are now tiny oscillations of the electric field, whose crests are separated by a distance of one foot, that have come from millions of miles away, transmitted to the earth from the Mariner [2] space craft which has just passed Venus. Its signals carry summaries of information it has picked up about the planets (information obtained from electromagnetic waves that travelled from the planet to the space craft).

There are very tiny wiggles of the electric and magnetic fields that are waves which originated billions of light years away - from galaxies in the remotest corners of the universe. That this is true has been found by 'filling the room with wires' - by building antennas as large as this room. Such radiowaves have been detected from places in space beyond the range of the greatest optical telescopes. Even they, the optical telescopes, are simply gatherers of electromagnetic waves. What we call the stars are only inferences, inferences drawn from the only physical reality we have yet gotten from them - from a careful study of the unendingly complex undulations of the electric and magnetic fields reaching us on earth.

There is, of course, more: the fields produced by lightning miles away, the fields of the charged cosmic ray particles as they zip through the room, and more, and more. What a complicated thing is the electric field in the space around you!

No direct quote found yet.

I was walking across a bridge one sunny day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: 'Stop. Don't do it.'

'Why shouldn't I?' he asked.

'Well, there's so much to live for!'

'Like what?'

'Are you religious?'

He said: 'Yes.'

I said. 'Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?'

'Christian.'

'Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?''

'Protestant.'

'Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?'

'Baptist.'

'Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?'

'Baptist Church of God.'

'Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you reformed Baptist Church of God?'

'Reformed Baptist Church of God.'

'Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?'

He said: 'Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915.'

I said: "Die, heretic scum," and pushed him off.