July 25, 2021
‘The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’ is a 1995 science fiction novel by American writer Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, focused on a young girl named Nell, set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of education, social class, ethnicity, and the nature of artificial intelligence.
The book contains descriptions of various exotic technologies, such as the chevaline (a mechanical horse that can fold up and is light enough to be carried one-handed), and forecasts the use of technologies that are in development today, such as smart paper that can show personalized news headlines. Major cities have immune systems made up of aerostatic defensive micromachines, and public matter compilers provide basic food, blankets, and water for free to anyone who requests them.
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January 7, 2021
‘The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia’ is a 1997 geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian political analyst and strategist known for his fascist views. His book has had influence within the Russian military, police, and foreign policy elites and has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military.
Its publication was well received in Russia. Powerful Russian political figures subsequently took an interest in Dugin, a Russian eurasianist, fascist, and nationalist who has developed a close relationship with Russia’s military academies.
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August 20, 2020
‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values’ (ZAMM) is a book by Robert M. Pirsig first published in 1974. It is a work of fictionalized autobiography, and is the first of Pirsig’s texts in which he explores his “Metaphysics of Quality”.
The title is an apparent play on the title of the 1948 book Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. In its introduction, Pirsig explains that, despite its title, “it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.”
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May 14, 2019
Stand on Zanzibar [zan-zuh-bahr] is a dystopian New Wave science fiction novel written by John Brunner and first published in 1968. The book won a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1969.
The story is set in 2010, mostly in the United States. A number of plots and many vignettes are played out in this future world, based on Brunner’s extrapolation of social, economic, and technological trends, such as an enormous population and its impact: social stresses, eugenic legislation, widening social divisions, future shock and extremism.
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December 30, 2018
The Negro Motorist Green Book was an annual guidebook for African-American roadtrippers. It was originated and published by New York City mailman Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1966, during the era of Jim Crow laws, when open and often legally prescribed discrimination against non-whites was widespread.
Although pervasive racial discrimination and poverty limited black car ownership, the emerging African-American middle class bought automobiles as soon as they could, but faced a variety of dangers and inconveniences along the road, from refusal of food and lodging to arbitrary arrest. In response, Green wrote his guide to services and places relatively friendly to African-Americans, eventually expanding its coverage from the New York area to much of North America, as well as founding a travel agency.
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May 4, 2016
‘The Demolished Man,’ by Alfred Bester, is an American science fiction novel and inverted detective story, that was the first Hugo Award winner in 1953. The story is a police procedural set in a future where telepathy is common, although much of its effectiveness is derived from one individual having greater telepathic skill than another. In the 24th century, telepaths—’Espers’ (short for Extrasensory perception), colloquially known as ‘peepers’—are completely integrated into all levels of a class-based society.
Class 3 Espers, the most common, can detect only conscious thoughts at the time they are formed and are often employed as secretaries or administrators; Class 2 Espers can dig more deeply, to the pre-conscious level, detecting subliminal patterns, epiphanies and tenuous associations, and they are employed in the professional middle class—lawyers, managers, psychologists, etc. Class 1 Espers can detect all of the foregoing plus sub-conscious primitive urges, and they occupy only the highest levels of power in fields such as the police, government and medicine (such as psychiatry).
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April 27, 2016
‘Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy’ (2008) is a bestselling book by Danish marketing expert Martin Lindstrom, in which he analyzes buying decisions. The author attempts to identify the factors that influence buyers’ decisions in a world cluttered with messages such as advertisements, slogans, jingles, and celebrity endorsements. Lindstrom, through a study of the human psyche, examines the subconscious mind and its role in deciding what the buyer will buy. He debunks some myths about advertising and promotion.
‘Buyology’ is claimed to be a result of the author’s three year neuromarketing study on 2,081 people to identify the effect of brands, logos, commercials, advertisements and products on them. Neuromarketing investigates the sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli. The study was funded by seven corporations, including GlaxoSmithKline, Hakuhodo, Fremantle – and Lindstrom himself. The study evaluates the effectiveness of logos, product placement and subliminal advertising, the influence of our senses and the correlation between religion and branding.
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March 13, 2016
How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb is a book written by Peter Kuran and published in 2006 by VCE. It documents the stories of the men who photographed US nuclear weapons tests between 1945–1963 and the techniques they used to capture nuclear blasts on film. The book contains 250 photos and 12 technical diagrams, some of which were previously classified.
Research on the book began while Kuran was working as an animator for ‘Star Wars.’ He was able to interview and collect material from photographers who witnessed the blasts, whom he calls unrecognized patriots. A traveling exhibit based on the book was purchased by the Atomic Testing Museum and put on display in 2007. In 2010, the ‘New York Times’ featured a 23-image slideshow on its website with photos taken from the book accompanied by an audio recording of George Yoshitake, then one of the few surviving cameramen.
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March 11, 2016
Liar’s Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author’s experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, the head of Salomon Brothers’ mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and the firm’s CEO John Gutfreund. The book’s name is taken from a high-stakes gambling game popular with bond traders.
First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street in that era, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s ‘Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco,’ and the fictional ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.’ The book captures an important period in the history of New York’s financial markets.
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February 28, 2016
‘The Design of Everyday Things‘ is a 1988 book by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Donald Norman on design’s role in enabling communication been objects and their users, and how to optimize that conduit to make the experience more effective. One of the main premises of the book is that although people are often keen to blame themselves when objects appear to malfunction, it is not the fault of the user but rather the lack of intuitive guidance that should be present in the design. In the book, Norman introduced the term ‘affordance’ as it applied to design, defining it as things that afford the opportunity for an organism to perform an action.
For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling. 20th century American psychologist James J. Gibson originally coined the term ‘affordance’ to describe changes made to one’s environment to make them more usable, such as carving stairs into a steep hill. Norman also popularized the term ‘user-centered design’ to describe design based on the needs of the user, leaving aside what he deemed secondary issues like aesthetics. User-centered design involves simplifying the structure of tasks, making things visible, getting the mapping right, exploiting the powers of constraint, designing for error, and explaining affordances.
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February 15, 2016
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. First published in 1968, the novel is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where Earth’s life has been greatly damaged by nuclear global war. Most animal species are endangered or extinct due to extreme radiation poisoning, so that owning an animal is now a sign of status and empathy, an attitude encouraged towards animals. The book served as the primary basis for the 1982 film ‘Blade Runner.’
The main plot follows a single day in the life of Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter hired by the San Francisco Police Department to ‘retire’ (kill) six escaped androids. A secondary plot follows John Isidore, a driver for an electric-animal repair company, who is a ‘special’ (a radioactively-damaged, intellectually slow human whose status prohibits him from emigrating). In connection with Deckard’s mission, the novel explores the issue of what it is to be human. Unlike humans, the androids are claimed to possess no sense of empathy.
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October 28, 2015
‘Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future’ is a 1990 book written by Scottish geologist Dougal Dixon exploring future evolutionary paths for humanity. Illustrator Philip Hood’s depictions of Dixon’s speculative organisms have been called fear-provoking and biologically horrific to the modern eye.
The book starts 200 years in the future where modern humans have genetically modified themselves into several subtypes including ‘aquamorphs’ (marine humans with gills instead of lungs) and ‘vacuumorphs’ (engineered for life in the vacuum of space, its skin and eyes carry shields of skin to keep its body stable even without pressure).
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