What to read this weekend: Near-future dystopian fiction and a new approach to explaining life's origin

New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention. Hum by Helen Phillips Robots have become a regular fixture of the workforce, and humans are losing their jobs to AI. Climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet. It’s getting harder and harder for the average person to make ends meet. Facial recognition technology is being used for surveillance. Sound familiar? In her new novel, Hum, author Helen Phillips paints a picture of what our near-future could look like. Its main character, May, has lost her job after technology made her role obsolete, and, desperate for money to support her family, she agrees to participate in an experiment that alters her face to make her undetectable to facial recognition. With the extra cushion from the payment, she takes her husband and children on a short, technology-free vacation to the Botanical Garden — but things go dangerously awry. Hum is a captivating, unsettling work of dystopian fiction that makes it impossible not to draw parallels with our current reality. Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence by Sara Imari Walker There’s so much we don’t know about the origins of life on Earth, and how it could appear on other worlds. Arizona State University theoretical physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker tackles the enduring question, “What is life?” and so much more in her book, Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. It explores assembly theory, which, as Walker... Continue reading at 'Engadget'

[ Engadget | 2024-08-10 19:43:55 UTC ]

Other news stories related to: "What to read this weekend: Near-future dystopian fiction and a new approach to explaining life's origin"


Announcing a New Publishing Project and a Call for Co-Editors: Best Translations: An Annual Anthology, by The Editors of WLT

News and Events Photo by Wendy Call / www.wendycall.com Deadline for Applications: Thursday, January 7, 2021 Call for Applications: Two series co-editors, one with expertise in Asian literatures and one with expertise in Middle Eastern and/or... Continue reading at World Literature Today

[ World Literature Today | 2020-12-09 14:16:34 UTC ]
More news stories like this


A gift guide for the fans of science fiction, fantasy and horror books in your life

Anthologies like “The Big Book of Modern Fantasy” cover a lot of ground. Illustrated books like “Flyway” offer something special. Continue reading at The Washington Post

[ The Washington Post | 2020-12-07 14:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Announcing WLT’s 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominees, by The Editors of WLT

News and Events Photo: Quarantine portrait. Tulsa, Oklahoma. March 22, 2020, by Joseph Rushmore. This photograph accompanied the publication of Rilla Askew's "Cataclysm" in the Summer 2020 issue of World Literature Today. The editors of World... Continue reading at World Literature Today

[ World Literature Today | 2020-11-30 21:07:51 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Small Axe: what Steve McQueen got right and wrong about lovers rock

Centred around a Blues Party in London, the second film from the Small Axe anthology captured the excitement of setting up a party but missed things about sound system culture in the UK. Continue reading at The Conversation

[ The Conversation | 2020-11-30 15:04:41 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Inkandescent makes its mark with crowdsourced anthology

An Unbound link-up for a new anthology of writers from the margins could put indie Inkandescent on the map Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2020-11-27 17:33:34 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Life Isn’t a Narrative: A Conversation with JoAnn Wypijewski

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer, editor, and journalist based in New York. From 1982 to 2000, she was an editor at The Nation magazine and co-editor, with Kevin Alexander Gray and Jeffrey St. Clair, of Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence (2014). She has written for CounterPunch,... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-11-26 18:00:16 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Bradbury Noir: The Crimes of a Science Fiction Master

THE SKELETONS IN Ray Bradbury’s closet are out in Killer, Come Back to Me, a career-spanning collection of the science fictioneer’s crime stories. These 300 pages present a new side to readers who only know Bradbury from such classics as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953).... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-11-24 13:30:59 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Jeff Bezos’s thoughts on Big Business, outer space and The Washington Post

An anthology of writings provides a glimpse into the mind of the Amazon founder. Continue reading at The Washington Post

[ The Washington Post | 2020-11-20 13:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s “Dune”

FASCISTS LOVE Dune: Denis Villeneuve’s film adaptation was highly anticipated on white nationalist sites such as Counter-Currents and the Daily Stormer. As soon as the trailer dropped, they began poring over it for signs of deviation from their pet interpretations of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-11-19 18:00:46 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Best science fiction, fantasy and horror books of 2020

Dystopias, adventures and new worlds in books by Stephen Graham Jones, Zen Cho and more. Continue reading at The Washington Post

[ The Washington Post | 2020-11-19 13:30:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


The Classic Novel That Robert Macfarlane Just Couldn’t Finish

“Wild landscapes, weird nature, science fiction — this really should be my jam. But no.” Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2020-11-19 10:00:06 UTC ]
More news stories like this


What Makes a Great American Essay?

Phillip Lopate spoke to Literary Hub about the new anthology he has edited, The Glorious American Essay. He recounts his own development from an “unpatriotic” young man to someone, later in life, who would embrace such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who personified the simultaneous darkness and... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-11-17 09:49:35 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions may finally be published, after five-decade wait

Sci-fi anthology stalled since 1974 will be produced by executor, screenwriter J Michael Straczynski, adding stories by today’s big-name SF writersIt is the great white whale of science fiction: an anthology of stories by some of the genre’s greatest names, collected in the early 1970s by Harlan... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2020-11-16 14:38:59 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Doctor Who's sonic pioneers to turn internet into giant musical instrument

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop made the famous science fiction theme tune and worked with the Beatles. Now it is preparing to make historyThe Radiophonic Workshop has always broken new sonic ground, from the Doctor Who theme to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Now they’re at it again – this... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2020-11-15 10:00:31 UTC ]
More news stories like this


A new Jane Austen anthology series is coming to the CW.

It is a truth universally acknowledged . . . that the CW is developing an anthology series inspired by Jane Austen’s works! The series, titled Modern Austen, will tackle a different Jane Austen novel each season and reimagine it as six modern stories. Modern Austen’s first season will set Pride... Continue reading at Literrary Hub

[ Literrary Hub | 2020-11-13 16:26:19 UTC ]
More news stories like this


'A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky' reveals Octavia E. Butler's early life in Pasadena

Drawing on Octavia E. Butler's journals and notes, "A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky" offers a glimpse inside her journey to becoming a science fiction writer. Continue reading at Los Angeles Times

[ Los Angeles Times | 2020-11-11 15:30:06 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Can Science Fiction Help Us Govern for the Future?

Authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Malka Older discuss how storytelling can help us govern for the future. Continue reading at Slate

[ Slate | 2020-11-11 14:15:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


A Monumental and Rapturous New Anthology of Black American Poetry

“African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song,” edited by Kevin Young, contains an overwhelming amount of variety and history. Continue reading at The New York Times

[ The New York Times | 2020-11-10 20:51:39 UTC ]
More news stories like this


America Starts Here: On “When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry”

2020 WORKED HARD to be one of the worst years in recent memory, but for readers of Native American literature, this era is proving to be among the most exciting in the history of Indigenous writing, especially for poetry. To wit: Joy Harjo has just begun her second term as poet laureate of the... Continue reading at Los Angeles Review of Books

[ Los Angeles Review of Books | 2020-11-09 18:00:17 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Higher education technology company Anthology acquires xRM software

Anthology, based in Boca Raton, partners with over 2,000 colleges across 30 countries. Continue reading at Silicon Valley Business Journal

[ Silicon Valley Business Journal | 2020-11-09 17:38:19 UTC ]
More news stories like this