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 ]
Written By: Graeme Neill Publication Date: Mon, 18/04/2011 - 09:19 Authors including Iain M Banks and Michael Moorcock have written to the BBC's director general Mark Thompson, attacking the treatment of genre fiction in its recent World Book Night coverage. In total 85 authors, across the... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2011-04-18 00:00:00 UTC ]
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