Naam offers a mind-bending story about a reality right around the corner. As modern medicine has breakthroughs in mind-altering drugs, telepathy, and mind control, is mankind civilized enough to use them wisely? Kade Lane holds the secret to a drug called nexus, which allows people to share their consciousness but could also be used to turn people into robotic killers. Now, two very similar organizations are fighting over the formula and trying to get Kade to work for them, but which is the less evil? Narrator Luke Daniels's performance allows listeners to follow the complicated story, even with all its pseudoscientific terminology. He keeps the listener riveted as the powerful plot unfolds, forcing listeners to consider what they would do if faced with Kade's choices. M.S. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
With the announcement of the new those-bad-sequels-never-happened Alien movie, it’s been forgivably easy to forget that Neill Blomkamp has a totally different sci-fi film coming out this week. Chappie is the story of the creation of a new form of thinking machine, and looks to be cresting a wave of new cinematic depictions of artificial intelligence. A.I. also plays a role in […]
When I was an unfortunate looking teenager, I took a very powerful acne drug with some very scary side effects, side effects serious enough that the manufacturer included drawings of the horrible things it would do to a baby if a pregnant woman took it. But, as real life and fiction have proven time and […]
Science Fiction often deals with the connections between science/technology and society. These books can influence our assumptions and paradigms about the world we live in today. Q: What book have you loved that explore the connection between society and technology, and how did it influence how your worldview?
I recently read and enjoyed Ramez Naam’s Nexus, a book with a central premise that has preoccupied science fiction since H.G. Wells first spun up The Time Machine: the next stage in human evolution. Naam imagined a sort of unified hive mind in our future, and the idea that the next evolutionary step is a telepathic link between […]
“I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change…” – Margaret Atwood, Slate.com Since long before “climate change” was a phrase on every politician’s lips (and before it, global warming, greenhouse gasses, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, and on and on), science fiction has considered […]