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Autobiography of A Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda...it's amazing,but sometimes I start to nod off a little.Old English!

A Scanner Darkly is one of my favorite stories and I also enjoyed the movie adaption.


Right now I'm into Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers by Michael Baden M.D.. Just some stories and anecdotes of a forensic scientist.

A lot of this sounds like grim smelly work and just respect these guys who catalog and analyze and perform autopsies. Then serving as an expert witness to the court to help bring justice to killers.

Nothing at the moment. I recently read The Giver as a school requirement.

The last book I read on my spare time was Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by James Bradley (Flags of our Fathers). I finished it a few months ago.

If only all PKD fans were so accurate...

Finished Broken Angels - quite good, but left some puzzling loose ends and the gratuitous sex is annoying. Unsurprisingly enough, now on with Woken Furies, which is more of the same. Quell's philosophy is class, best thing about the books.

More Stross and Brosnan (Carnosaur! ) next up, then off for the last four of Glen Cook's Black Company books.

I'm confused. Accurate at what? If you mean that PKD isn't much of a science fiction author, I agree. He basically wrote SF because it was the only way to get his philosophical ideas across. His stories have flying cars and laster pistols, but he never spends much time describing how they work or even what they look like.

Yes. I know the futility of trying to define science fiction, but that it should contain science is kinda axiomatic.

Ray Bradbury, PKD, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card -- I suppose -- are considered "soft science fiction" which is basically fantasy, with tropes rooted in science, futurism, extraterrestrial, ect.

As opposed to "hard science fiction" with examples from writers like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Gibson.

A Scanner Darkly is closer to "Transgressive" than Sci-Fi. My OCD would feel more relieved putting it in a stack with books like, "A Clockwork Orange" "Crash" and "Naked Lunch"

I'm giving Kafka another go. The Metamorphosis

Short stories are easier to commit to.

Interesting discussion on SF.

After reading Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, I'm not in a hurry to read more hard SF. Several times throughout the novel, I thought, "Will you stop trying to impress me with realism and get on with the story?"

There's plenty of technology in PKD but he isn't interested in realism. He's interested in philosophical issues that are most easily expressed in SF. If you're going to write a story about what it means when you can't trust your memories, how do you express that idea? With a story about a man who seeks out memory implants and finds out more than he wanted to know. This is much more interesting to me than long descriptions of how the flying car works.

PKD had a strong fondness for SF (he correctly called it the "literature of ideas") but he also felt pigeonholed by it. It's not surprising that he felt this way, since he was never interested in the science part of science fiction. A Scanner Darkly was originally not SF at all, and he only added the minor SF elements to please his publisher. But yes, despite the futility in trying to define SF, I would call him an SF writer. (Mostly, anyway. Most of his non-SF novels like Confessions of a Crap Artist have been published.)

At the moment, several books on local history and one by Karl Kautsky on socialism and christianity.

The Story of Beautiful Girl

I'm reading more books than that at the same time. Like 30. I kid you not. I can't just go through one book. I get bored too easily.

That's more a function of Clarke than of hard SF. I do find some hard SF writers actively annoying (as opposed to simply boring like Clarke - especially if Gentry Lee is around ) when they start pushing abstruse mathematics; a bit like reading xkcd only without the jokes.

The issue with PKD and his like is that through their ignorance of hard science, they often end up writing hard science stupidities at the same time as their soft science. Like treating Mars as if it was almost identical to Earth in Martian Time-Slip. Abstracting things (laser guns, flying cars...) to make for a good story isn't a problem in and of itself, but the writer has to know how reality works before they can dismiss it convincingly. They also have to be consistent in their dismissal of reality - if you can have a flying car or a laser pistol, you must at least consider all the other cool things you could do with the power to keep a ton of metal hanging in the air or carry an uber-battery around on your belt. That sort of hard science directly implies a massive change in the soft science environment - flying cars and laser guns might not directly change the way people behave all that much, but indirectly a world with the technology that would allow a flying car or a laser pistol would be very different and so would its people. Sorta like (it's a poor example) the mobile phone - in and of itself a mobile phone isn't so different from a landline (and God knows I wouldn't want to listen to much detail about how they work!), but the social changes that have occurred now most people carry the damn things around and txt each other 24/7 are major. If a soft science fiction novel includes abstracted ("black-boxed" or "it works because it does" things) their implications need to be followed through or it fails even as soft SF. Which is particularly annoying when they arise unnecessarily through a conceit of the author ("I'll set my story on Mars, because Mars is Science! for 'other planet.'")

Fair enough. PKD can certainly get silly with his utter disregard for realism and I can see how it could bother people, but it doesn't bother me at all.

Another book added to my pile: The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula. I'm always quick to point out that I'm not into vampires despite my obsession with Stoker's Dracula (seriously, I despise most vampire stories), but I couldn't resist a book in which the author begins his study of the public's fascination with vampires by drinking his own blood from a shot glass and vomiting it all over his bathroom.

Clarke isn't boring. He is if you really only like character-driven storylines. Rendezvous With Rama is a masterpiece. Now, Gentry Lee on the other hand. Gack.

American Nerd