“Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAR 20, 2014)

The protagonist of Orfeo, Peter Els, listens at age thirteen to a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and is transported. This novel continues the author’s literary exploration of cutting edge science and its impact on its practitioners. Peter Els becomes a composer of serious music, very much of the current moment in the arts. He is a musical idealist, with a belief in the power of music to truly move the listener. As he matures, his work becomes ever more difficult and timely. As a young man he was a prodigy in music with talent in science as well. The creative juices of both flow in his veins. In college he starts out in chemistry, but becomes enmeshed in music through the musical connection with his first love, Clara. In graduate school at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, his work becomes ever more difficult and “modern,” in part through his collaborations with Maddy, who becomes his lover and later his wife for a while, and with Richard Bonner, an experimental theater director who he meets while in graduate school. Richard pushes him to become ever more radical.

Peter teaches music at a small university for some years, but retires fairly young and returns to chemistry, taking up biohacking as a hobby, encoding music into the DNA of the serrata marcescens bacterium. Peter chooses it because of its ubiquity in scientific research and ready availability despite the fact that it can cause illness. On the surface, this might seem like an implausible fantasy to write art onto DNA, but Joe Davis, an artist, in Cambridge, MA, hijacked the expertise of molecular biologists at Harvard and MIT more than 30 years ago to modify the DNA of e-coli to encode a bitmapped image as well as the decoding scheme onto areas of that organism’s “junk” DNA. Through a Kafkaesque series of happenstance Peter becomes pursued by the authorities who are concerned that Peter might be a bio-terrorist.

Orfeo is literary science fiction of the highest order. It is not about the future, but rather takes the cutting edge of contemporary science and makes it part and parcel of the novel. Among other things it is also a learned and passionate discourse on western music as it has developed over time to the present with an emphasis on more recent work. Powers’ description of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony is remarkable. My composer father wanted to name me Jupiter because the Jupiter Symphony was, in his opinion, the greatest symphony of all time. I’ve listened to it many times and find it quite wonderful, but I do not have the musical vocabulary to really appreciate its depth. Powers’ description of Peter Els listening to it for the first time showed me why my father felt so strongly. The poignant and elegiac description of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is wonderful poetic history. It is a piece that I’ve enjoyed many times and one whose history was familiar to me as well. Powers’ sympathetic appreciation of music is admirable.

I’m familiar with much of the contemporary music he describes and as far as I can see, the details, historical and artistic, are correct. The composers, old and new are as described. Powers gets his science right as well. The writing is brilliant, not dumbed down in any way, and evocative as all get out. I recommend this novel and author without reservation.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 34 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; First Edition edition (January 20, 2014)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Generosity: An Enhancement The Echo Maker

Bibliography:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
• Prisoner’s Dilemma
• The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
• Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• Gain (1998)
• Plowing the Dark (2000)
• The Time of Our Singing (2003)
• The Echo Maker (2006)
• Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
• Orfeo (January 2014)

“Why are we interested?” Taggart said. He smiled at his old teacher. “We’re both just curious about them— there’s a lot of discussion about how they evolved. Why do you think a cave-dwelling species might lose its eyes?”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (MAR 2, 2014)

Phoebe Cornelius, the protagonist of “The Ether of Space,” the second of the five long stories in this collection, makes a living explaining scientific concepts to laymen. This is Andrea Barrett’s forte also. Three of these stories are set in the wings of some great scientific discovery: Phoebe is trying to comprehend Einstein’s Relativity; her son Sam becomes a pioneer in the relatively new science of genetics; and an earlier story explores the impact of Darwinism on the younger generation of scientists in America. In all these cases, Barrett explains the underlying concepts with great clarity. Sometimes, though, the stories seem to be running on two tracks simultaneously, one scientific and the other personal; I don’t know that readers with little interest in science would get much out of the book on the personal level alone.

For some reason, Barrett seems to be drawn to scientists who are deluded or blind, rather than the great innovators. “The Island” is about the summer school set up on Penikese Island (the predecessor of the Woods Hole Institute) by the eminent American scientist Louis Agassiz, a celebrated critic of Darwinism. The grand old man in the background of Phoebe’s story is Sir Oliver Lodge, the great English physicist and radio pioneer who, late in life, made the double error of rejecting Einstein and embracing spiritualism. And Phoebe’s son Sam, although on to something important, invites ridicule by suggesting that some discredited Lamarckian notions might nonetheless coexist with Mendelism.

Barrett’s bookend stories are less tied to scientific theory. In the first, “The Investigators,” a Detroit teenager named Constantine Boyd, spends a summer at a research farm in upstate New York run by his uncle, and watches the early experiments with flying machines taking place in the adjoining valley. In the last, “Archangel,” Boyd reappears as one of the Polar Bear Expedition, that small contingent of American troops sent to Northwest Russia to fight against the Bolsheviks; the true protagonist of that story, however, is a young American woman working with early X-Ray equipment in a military hospital. I liked these two stories especially for their greater emphasis on historical action and human qualities. But despite their concern with scientific theory, the other stories share these qualities too. “The Particles,” the story about Sam Cornelius, begins in high drama with the sinking of the ATHENIA, the first British ship to be torpedoed in WW2. And Phoebe Cornelius, after all her tussles with the mathematics of Relativity, ends with an understanding of relativity in quite a different sense, in the embrace of her extended family, both living and dead.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition, edition (August 19, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Andrea Barrett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Air We Breathe

Bibliography:

• Lucid Stars (1988)
• Sweet Harmonies (1989)
• The Middle Kingdom (1991)
• The Forms of Water (1993)
• Ship Fever and Other Stories (1996) 
• The Voyage of Narwhal (1998)
• Servants of the Maps: Stories (2002)
• The Air We Breathe (2007)
• Archangel (August 2013)

With Peter Turchi:

• The Story Behind the Story (January 2004)
• A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on their Craft (March 2011)

“This is not a book about the great Austrian physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, nor, despite its importance in my life, is it about Antarctica. It is more about time and chance and the images and dreams we bring with us from childhood which shape who we are and what we become. It is about science and atoms and starry nights and what we think we remember, though we have made it up.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (DEC 18, 2011)

Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science by Bill Green is at once a travelogue and joyous celebration of science. The author is a chemist who has done significant research in the dry lakes of Antarctica. Boltzmann was a brilliant physicist and teacher, a pioneer in the study of entropy. He was an early champion for the atomic model of matter in the 19th century, to the derision of many of his peers. Ironically, he committed suicide at almost the same time as Einstein was doing his pioneering work on brownian motion. This work, unknown to Bolztmann, provided persuasive evidence for the atomic model by demonstrating the existence of tiny units of matter, so small they are invisible and yet energetic enough that they cause macroscopic dust particles to move randomly in water. The author notes that Boltzmann died in Duino, the same city where Rilke wrote his Duino Elegies, brilliant poetry of profound melancholy. Boltzmann and Rilke were kindred spirits in the sense that both suffered profound depression, and were tortured by self-doubt. More importantly, the two shared the supreme gift of being able to take experience and use their respective media of mathematics and written language creatively to express unique truths.

This short work is not intended to do justice to the arduous task of skeptical inquiry and the continuing cycle of intellectual labor turning observation into theory, theory into prediction, prediction into experiment that supports or falsifies the theory. What this book does is illuminate the spark that drives scientists, and it makes clear that science comes from the work of real people who are so moved by the mystery and magic of their experience that they will walk through the fire of scorn, self-doubt and in the case of Galileo, the very real fear of torture, to seek and speak truth.

Boltzmann’s entropy formula S= k*log(W) is carved onto his tomb. His work on entropy describes the relationship between what one can observe such as the temperature of a volume of gas and a statistical description of the more or less random states of tiny units such as the motion of the constituent molecules. His work on entropy metaphorically focuses our attention on the role of chance in our every endeavor. Chance encounters with scientists during the author’s travels as a younger man lead to opportunities such as the chance to work in Antarctica. The capacity for poetic wonder at the splendors of nature fueled his scientific career. The message is that what comes to everyone does so more or less by happenstance, but some find mystery and beauty in these chance encounters. Creative souls, the scientists and poets, are then inspired for a lifetime of expression.

Boltzmann’s Tomb is a scientific travelogue celebrating a number of pilgrimages to the places where great science was made. As we follow the author on his travels, we visit the Vienna of Boltzmann and so many others in science and the arts. We spend time in Galileo’s Florence, hometown of the Renaissance. Cambridge was home to Isaac Newton and Watson and Crick of DNA fame. We visit Prague where Copernicus and Kepler created the basis for modern astronomy and laid the groundwork for Newton’s description of gravity. Along the way we see the scientists as human beings, creatures of their place and time and inspired to transcend their beginnings by creating glorious structures of thought to explain the mysteries of the universe. We come to appreciate the passionate and poetic wonder that informs much of great science. Do yourself a favor and put this book on your shelf of inspirational literature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 1 readers
PUBLISHER:	Bellevue Literary Press (June 14, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Bill Green
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene

Bibliography:

• Improbable Eden (2003)
• Water, Ice & Stone: Science and Memory on the Antarctic Lakes (2008)
• Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science (June 2011)

“Henri Poincaré was a man who longed to believe, a man who was moved by mystery and beauty but a man for whom belief was impossible. He was too much a scientist, ever the investigator in a world bound up in webs of cause and effect that had served him well in every regard save one: that at the hour between dusk and darkness, when the sky slid from deepest cobalt into night, he suspected something large, momentous even, was out there just beyond his reach….”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (NOV 3, 2011)

In Leonard Rosen’s superb mystery, All Cry Chaos, Henri Poincaré, fifty-seven, is a veteran Interpol agent who believes that it is “better to let one criminal go free than to abuse the law and jeopardize the rights of many.” One of the malefactors that Henri tenaciously and successfully tracked down is Stipo Banovic, a Serb accused of ordering and participating in the mass murder of seventy Muslims in Bosnia. A furious Banovic vows to make Poincaré suffer. In a stunning exchange, during which Henri trades invective with the imprisoned criminal, Banovic screams, “Did you once stop to think why a man becomes a killing machine?” He goes on to say, “I will put you in my shoes before I die.”

Such confrontations do Henri no good, especially since he suffers from heart arrhythmia. His wife, Claire, has repeatedly urged her husband to retire to their farm in the Dordogne; she would like him to spend stress-free hours with her, their son, and their beloved grandchildren. Instead, Inspector Poincaré persists in using his experience and uncanny intuition to “anticipate a criminal’s moves as if he were the pursued.”

Poincaré’s next case involves an explosion in an Amsterdam hotel where a thirty-year old mathematician, James Fenster, had been staying prior to delivering a speech to the World Trade Organization. All that is left are the corpse’s charred remains. Who would want to destroy this man of ideas, a gentle and brilliant scholar with no obvious enemies? The search for Fenster’s murderer will lead Henri down many byways, during which he will encounter, among others, a Peruvian activist, a fabulously wealthy mutual fund manager, Fenster’s former fiancée, and a graduate student in mathematics. Most fascinating of all is the possibility that the crime occurred as a result of Fenster’s prodigious mathematical knowledge and wide-ranging imagination.

Nothing is obvious or can be taken for granted in this beautifully constructed and intricate novel. Rosen’s vividly depicted characters have lively discussions that touch on philosophy, economics, psychology, theology, mathematics, and jurisprudence. Passages of deliciously dark humor and vivid descriptive writing enhance All Cry Chaos, a challenging brain-teaser as well as a powerful, literate, and entertaining police procedural. Rosen expresses ideas about family, human rights, morality, and justice that take on added significance in a unsettled world marred by war, financial collapse, political infighting, and lawlessness.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 33 readers
PUBLISHER:	Permanent Press (September 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Leonard Rosen
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Bibliography:

Interpol Agent Henri Poincaré series:

• All Cry Chaos (September 2011)

“You never get used to the feeling of hot metal, entering your skull and exiting through the back of your head. It’s simulated in glorious detail. A burning train through your forehead, a warm spray of blood and brain on your shoulders and back, the sudden chill – and finally, the black, when things stop. The Archons of the Dilemma Prison want you to feel it. It’s educational.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JUL 16, 2011)

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi is a tremendous first novel, first published in Great Britain last year and now in the US. It is a wild adventure story taking place centuries from now on Mars. The solar system has been colonized by our descendents, not all of whom get along. Technologies based on quantum weirdness are everywhere. Robotics has progressed well beyond true artificial intelligence. Jean le Flambeur, master thief, is broken free from prison to steal some time. This is what might be called hard science fiction in that the science is an intelligent and informed extrapolation of what we now know or speculate.

The protagonist is an imprisoned master thief, who has been duplicated and resurrected over and over to engage in lethal confrontations where he must cooperate with another prisoner, kill, or be killed only to be resurrected immediately, in endless rounds of the prisoner’s dilemma. His rescuer is a warrior descendent of role-playing gamers, in symbiotic relationship with her intelligent, flirtatious, and extremely capable spacecraft. She needs this particular thief to steal some of the currency of the day, time. He had hidden the majority of his self from himself in a subtly constructed memory palace protected by ingenious encryption so he cannot be compromised by the hell of his dilemma prison.

The story takes place on and near Mars, where the city walks, memories are both external and internal, and the citizens live a prescribed amount of time and then die to be reborn in the Quiet as servants to the common good. The weirdest aspects of quantum theory have been incorporated into everyday technology, including quantum teleportation and other consequences of entanglement of which Einstein once complained of as being “spooky action at a distance.” Robot technology; both macro and nano; is ubiquitous. It is possible to share or withhold all or any part of memories. We are most certainly not in Kansas anymore.

There is an informative wiki devoted to The Quantum Thief with a section devoted to the unusual vocabulary, unexplained in the novel except by context. Some of this vocabulary is Russian in origin, perhaps in homage to the slang devised by Anthony Burgess for his novel, A Clockwork Orange. Guberniya and oblast are used in the novel to refer to administrative units, just as in their Slavic roots. Gevulot, Hebrew for borders, is used to describe the constraints placed on shared memory. Some of the vocabulary is clearly related to quantum theory. There are also literary references, notably the use of the word gogol to mean an artificial servant, no doubt in reference to Nikolai Gogol’s novel, Dead Souls, a story about the traffic in lists of dead serfs or souls as they were also called.

Most hard science fiction is about the relatively near future so the technologies and their social consequences can be examined without much stress to our suspension of disbelief. When dealing with the more distant future, authors generally posit some apocalyptical event that destroys much of civilization leaving technology, people and their institutions recognizable. The Quantum Thief takes neither easy way out. The time is distant and almost everything except human emotion is very different from today. Human emotion is the glue that keeps this novel from being a chain of dei ex machina. In short, the real technology here is one of the oldest; that of language telling a coherent and compelling story. This is an auspicious and important first novel. I can’t wait for the next chapter in the live(s) of master thief, Jean le Flambeur.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 184 readers
PUBLISHER:	Tor Books; First Edition edition (May 10, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Hannu Rajaniemi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt Glossary of Terms
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Robopocalypse by Daniel H. Wilson

Bibliography:

• The Quantum Thief (2011)
• The Fractal Prince (October 2012)

“Resist the easy grooves [digital creative materials] guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (APR 18, 2011)

You Are Not A Gadget is a passionate and thought-provoking critique of Silicon Valley from behind its ramparts, and a must-read for anyone interested in the ways technology is affecting our culture. In his first book, Jaron Lanier, a visionary leader in the development of virtual reality technology (and the man who popularized the term), sounds the alarm: our humanity is under digital attack as the software that increasingly governs our lives impoverishes what it is to be a person.

Not only does software express ideas, making it “impossible to work with information technology without engaging in social engineering,” technology extends “your being, like remote eyes and ears (web cams and mobile phones ) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people. These structures in turn can change how you conceive of yourself and the world.” This need not be a bad thing, however, if these structures expand what it is to be a person. However, Lanier argues, the ideas and philosophies implied by the code, by the software – anonymity, the wisdom of crowds, the emergent intelligence of networks, be they the neural networks of the brain or the networks of cyberspace and the noosphere- undermine the “quest,” the “mystery,” the “leap of faith” that it is to be a person.

The Web 2.0, with the rigidity of Facebook profiles, Blogger templates, and Twitter’s 140-characters, effectively restricts our range of expression. As our online presence becomes our social, economic and professional avatars, as we carry out more and more of our lives online, there is a danger of defining ourselves “downward.” Just as the entrenchment of the MIDI format, originally developed to “express the tile mosaic world of the keyboardist, not the watercolor world of the violin,” reduced the richness of musical expression, and just as UNIX’s command-line interface (and the influence this structure had on all subsequent operating systems) artificially divides and parcels time, our Web 2.0 identities are impoverished versions of ourselves, a reduction with increasingly dire consequences as our world becomes increasingly digital and our online personas increasingly us.

Moreover, the economics of software development means that design decisions are often subject to “lock-in.” As a piece of software grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to make changes, especially if other programs are relying on it to run.

So software presents what often feels like an unfair level of responsibility for technologists. Because computers are growing more powerful at an exponential rate, the designers and programmers of technology must be extremely careful when they make design choices. The consequences of tiny, initially inconsequential decisions are often amplified to become defining unchangeable rules of our lives.

However, Lanier suspects, some of these same computer scientists might actually want to degrade our personhood in order to reduce the distance between human consciousness and computers. On considering Alan Turing’s famous test for machine consciousness – if a computer could fool a human to believing they were conversing with an actual person, that computer should be considered conscious – Lanier brilliantly writes:

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you let your personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?”

Considering that many technologists eagerly await the Singularity, a time when computers begin to design themselves, producing machines with capabilities far exceeding our own, a time which “would involve dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious,” they might “cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.” Whether they realize it or not, many technologists have transferred their faith and fear of death to the machines they work with, hoping “to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion where you hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer.”

As humans just become another element in the all-important network, troubling cultural and economic effects emerge. Online anonymity has bred cyber bullying and trolls. The reduction in individual responsibility allowed by the digital world likely contributed to the nesting of abstract financial products implicated in the financial meltdown. Authorship is devalued with the ascendance of the open-source movement and the popularity of crowd-sourcing. The result is that it becomes increasingly difficult to convince consumers that producers of culture should be paid for their work. Some of Lanier’s ideas on how to reintroduce compensation for digital expression – 3-D video-conferencing gigs – are more interesting, and likely more obtainable than, others –music embedded objects, such as jewelry, called songles.

Lanier excels in the depths of philosophy, rather than in shallows of practicalities. His “realistic” approach to computationalism, that the “cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, very deep encounter with reality” so that the information processes that create consciousness are a part of reality, their “pattern hewn out of so many encounters with reality that they aren’t really abstractable bits anymore, but are instead a nonabstract continuation of reality,” are fascinating and feel to me to be right on the mark, and his hopes for post-symbolic communication in a virtual-reality world, where one might morph to express an idea, exciting to think about, although one has to wonder how hoping for a virtual-reality world doesn’t show as least some of the contempt for human reality as the futurist, who hopes of having his consciousness uploaded into a computer.

Jaron Lanier is a deep and original thinker, and no doubt, you won’t agree with everything he says here, but if you’ve ever thought (or worried) about the cultural effects of our rapidly progressing technology, you won’t be disappointed by this book.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage; Reprint edition (February 8, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Jaron Lanier
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	A look at some of these ideas through fiction: The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sims by Jonathan Coe And the classic novel in which most of us encountered an uploaded personality: Neuromancer by William Gibson

Bibliography:

• You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (January 2010)

“They arrived at the bridge. He didn’t follow his own advice: there were things in the dark water,l ittle bloated islands that not even the seagulls dared touch. The wind had accumulated a small drift of them on the far bank, beached and slick where the rain beat down on them and cleaned the filth of the lake away.

When the Neva thawed in spring, there were always bodies washing under the Saint Petersburg bridges along the grey lumps of ice. But there was an effort to collect them, identify them, cut holes in the frozen ground and bury them.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  MAR 29, 2011)

Equations of Life by Simon Morden is a profoundly dystopian romp that takes place approximately twenty years in the future and it is great fun to read. Unlike much of contemporary science fiction, the science is pretty much correct as befits an author with a Ph.D. in planetary geophysics. It is the first in a trilogy, to be followed by Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom, all featuring Samuil Petrovitch, scientific genius, physical wreck, reluctant hero, and academic fraud.

Nuclear armageddon occurred twenty-some years ago. Japan sank beneath the ocean; much of the world has been ravaged. Greater London, the Metrozone, is impossibly crowded and horribly crammed with refugees. Hyde Park is a cesspool of diseased, dying and dead derelicts. There is barely room to breathe.

Petrovitch doesn’t want to be involved with anything beyond his work in physics. He is an academic fraud with no formal education. He stole from Russian criminals and is on the run from them. He most certainly does not want to attract attention.

A botched kidnapping of Sonja, a beautiful girl on the subway, triggers a spark of reluctant heroism. Petrovitch grabs Sonja and runs from the kidnappers. While fleeing the kidnappers his life is saved by Madeleine, a giantess of a nun with awesome fighting prowess. Sonja is the beautiful and much-loved daughter of London’s Japanese crime-lord, Oshicora. His passion is to create a virtual Japan, perfect to the last blade of grass, to replace what sunk beneath the ocean as part of the global disaster. Madeleine is described as ”…a nun, fully robed, white veil framing her broad, serious face. A silver crucifix dangled around her neck, and a rosary and a holster hung at her waist. She had the biggest automatic pistol Petrovitch had ever seen clasped in her righteous right hand.”

Petrovitch is a physical wreck. He is dying. His heart has failed and his pacemaker is failing. The Metrozone has been under attack by the New Machine Jihad. This has completely disrupted the Metrozone’s infrastructure. Hearts for transplantation, for example, have rotted since the refrigeration units are all stopped. Bad heart and all, Petrovitch is running around frantically, being shot, beaten and harassed on all sides as he tries to stop the Jihad and save Sonja from her kidnappers.

Between having his heart flat-line periodically and being chased by some of the nastier heavies in the city, he, along with his colleague, Pif, solve the grand unification problem that has eluded theoretical physicists since Einstein, who spent the last twenty years of his life on one futile attempt at a solution after another. We don’t find out much about this theoretical solution beyond the idea that it connects gravity with electromagnetism. We don’t even know if our hero will get a new heart before he dies for good. Madeleine is looking for a replacement heart for Petrovitch while Sonja is on guard in his hospital room, sword across her knees. The novel ends. We catch our breath.

This is a plot seemingly propelled by paranoia and amphetamines. Will artificial intelligence be Frankenstein the monster or will it be benign? Will Petrovitch and Pif’s grand unification theory really solve the fundamental questions of the universe? Will Petrovitch live? Will Petrovitch find true love with Madeleine, the nun? Will Sonja be a complication? Who is Petrovitch, anyway? Will his past catch up with him? I am really looking forward to the rest of the trilogy.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Orbit (March 29, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Simon Morden
EXTRAS:	Excerpt  The book covers for this series
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another dim view of the future:  The Passage by Just in Cronin

Bibliography:

• The Lost Art (2008)

Samuil Petrovitch series:

• Equations of Life (March 2011)
• Theories of Flight (April 2011)
• Degrees of Freedom (May 2011)

“Some people recoil at the notion of parallel worlds; as they see it, if we are some part of a multiverse, our place and importance in the cosmos are marginalized. My take is different. I don’t find merit in measuring significance by our relative abundance. Rather, what’s gratifying about being human, what’s exciting about being part of the scientific enterprise , is our ability to use analytical thought to bridge vast distances, journeying to outer and inner space and, if some of the ideas we’ll encounter in this book prove correct, perhaps even beyond our universe.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  (MAR 13, 2011)

Imagine: a spiral galaxy exactly like our own Milky Way, home to a 4.5 billion year-old yellow dwarf 26,400 light years away from the supermassive black hole powering the galactic center, orbited by an iron-aqueous planet, populated with intelligent, bi-pedal, opposable-thumb mammals identical to humans from their DNA on up; and imagine that on this Earth-like planet, there exists a person exactly similar in every respect – physical, mental, historical – to you, sitting as you are right now, hunched over a keyboard at work or curled up, at home, with your laptop on the couch, but instead of scrolling down through the rest of this review, your counterpart leaves MostlyFiction.com to check her status on Facebook, muttering: What a load of rubbish.

Would you believe it if I told you that even according to some of the most conservative theories in physics, parallel worlds like these actually exist? In fact, there might be infinitely many such worlds, in all of which you (or if you prefer, your otherworldly counterpart) exist; of course –and I’m not sure whether this is more comforting or not – there are also infinitely many more worlds where you don’t exist at all.

This –the physics of parallel universes, or to put it another way, the theoretical backing for the existence of a multiverse – is the subject of Brian Greene’s latest book, The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University and author of The Fabric of the Cosmos and the children’s book, Icarus at the Edge of Time, is probably best known for his 1999 bestseller The Elegant Universe and the three part PBS series it spawned. Here, in his latest book, Greene walks the reader through theoretical frameworks as varied as cosmology, quantum mechanics, string theory and information theory, all of which suggest that we should prepare ourselves for perhaps the greatest of all Copernican revolutions, for just as our ancient ancestors wrestled with the realization that our planet isn’t at the center of the universe, or even the orbital axis for our neighboring planets and closest star, and just as our great-grandparents struggled to accept that our galaxy is but one of billions, science seems to be setting us up for an existential crisis of our own: parallel universes abound.

Or at least a number of a scientific theories imply they do, and while some of the science Greene discusses is cutting edge and speculative, other science suggestive of multiple universes, or the multiverse as physicists call it, is among the most established, or at the very least, among the most uncontroversial, of our knowledge.

For example, consider two commonly held assumptions in contemporary cosmology, assumptions backed by a large and varied collection of data: that universe is infinite and that matter/energy is finite. The idea here is: if light travels at a finite speed, regions of space more than 14 billion light years apart (the time estimated to have elapsed since the big bang) will be effectively isolated from each other because they haven’t yet had the chance to exchange information (since nothing travels faster than the speed of light). In this scheme, space can be conceptualized as a quilt, each patch 14 billion light years squared, and if our cosmic quilt is indeed infinite, there would be an infinite number of patches. And, if matter is finite, a specific organization of matter will repeat itself. Infinitely. To paraphrase Greene’s analogy: imagine your wardrobe consists of 3 shirts, 2 skirts and 4 pairs of jeans. If you live forever, the set of all the outfits you’ve worn – let’s say, one for every day of your infinite life – will itself be infinite. However, you only have 6 bottoms and 3 tops, so you will necessarily repeat outfits. In fact, you will repeat outfits infinitely many times, and if all you are is the organization of your matter (I’ve bracketed another key, perhaps more controversial, assumption: that everything from the behavior of stars to the emotions of a child can ultimately be reduced to the organization of particles), the particular organization that is you –like say, a specific outfit such as a red top paired with a pink skirt – will repeat itself. Infinitely.

Crazy, right? And that’s not the only theory to imply that you might have parallel existences. The need to solve something known as the horizon problem in cosmology – a problem I’ll ignore, but that Greene does an excellent job of explaining in the chapter on the Inflationary Multiverse – lead researchers to postulate the existence of a particle called the inflaton. A capricious little particle, the inflaton can exist in states of high or low energy, as well as a number of states in between, and while it’s most stable, and thus more abundant, at low-energy, it’s in its higher energy state that the inflaton has the potential to create universes. Much like a ball at the top of a slide has the potential to roll down if released, the inflaton has the potential to expand space if pushed from its high-energy perch. Such expansions would be enormous and rapid, and would in effect create isolated universes in an explosive conversion of energy to matter. Rather than a quilt, here the multiverse looks more like a block of Swiss cheese, each universe a bubble.

But does inflaton expansion lead to universes parallel to ours? Again it depends on the extent of space. The total composition of matter in a new-born bubble universe is directly related to the end state of the fallen inflaton, or to put it another way, the specific makeup of primordial matter depends on how far the ball has rolled down the slide. If the inflaton can only exist in a finite number of states, then there can only be finite collections of matter (say, 3 shirts, 3 skirts, 4 pants; 6 shirts, 4 skirts, 2 pants; and 4 shirts, 1 skirt, 9 pants). If space, and the number of bubble universes, is infinite, these collections, and consequently, specific organizations of matter, would bound to repeat themselves; in a vein similar to the Quilted Multiverse, there would be infinitely many universes exactly similar to ours, and infinitely many counterparts of you.

Not to worry, though. Not all of the possible approaches to multiverse entail parallel worlds and your concurrent existence. String theory, and its expanded counterpart, M-theory, see universes as infinitely large energy membranes, membranes that form the very substrate of space and matter. Although membranes can orbit and collide with one another, producing eternally cyclic patterns of creation and destruction, the specific frequency of vibration of the strings bound to any membrane, and hence, the specific composition of matter, need not be similar to ours. And while the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that all possible states of a particle are equally real (presumably all possible states of collections of particles such as yourself– reading this review, turning on the television, toggling over to Facebook – actually occur as well), this is just math, its physical representation far from clear.

But worrying about our multiple existences might be misguided if the physicists studying entropy and black holes are correct, and the visible world is nothing more than a projection of the information encoded on the boundaries of our universe, much like a hologram is a 3-D projection of information etched onto a plate. And if all that’s not enough to keep you up at night, Greene explores a futurist’s multiverse – the possibility of uploading human consciousness to a computer, of simulated universes, of universe/consciousness creation – that will be familiar, and fascinating, to fans of The Matrix.

Greene, gifted in the art of analogy and metaphor, manages to explain some very complicated science without resorting to jargon or math, all without sacrificing content. However, even in his conversational style, this book is extraordinarily dense, and since, with a few edits, each chapter could stand alone, I couldn’t help but feel that the book’s form didn’t best serve its content. It would have been better conceived as a collection of essays, inviting pauses and pondering between each essay, allowing the mind-boggling implications to sink in and further pique curiosity, whetting the appetite for more.

But, don’t let that turn you off this book. If you’re even moderately interested in the possibility of parallel universes, buy this book, but savor it, slowly.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 69 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (January 25, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipdedia page on Brian Greene
EXTRAS:	Nova interview with Brian GreeneExcerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	The multiverse in fiction: The Skrayling Tree by Michael Moorcock City at the End of Time by Greg Bear Nation by Terry Pratchett The Room by Ray Melnick Not yet reviewed by MostlyFiction: Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World by Lisa Randall

Bibliography:

• The Elegant Universe (1999)
• The Fabric of the Cosmos (2005)
• Icarus at the Edge of Time (2008)
• The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (January 2011)

“There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons — an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing.  Another scientist calcuated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet.  In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy  (DEC 21, 2010)

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is an enthralling look at the origin of HeLa cells that grew “with [such] mythological intensity,” that they “seemed unstoppable.” They were a “continuously dividing line of cells all descended from one original sample” acquired from Henrietta Lacks, a black woman who suffered from a particularly virulent form of cervical cancer complicated by syphilis. During the Jim Crow era, many hospitals refused to treat black patients. Therefore, Lacks traveled twenty miles to Johns Hopkins, where black people were segregated in “colored wards.” After enduring heavy doses of radiation that charred her skin, Henrietta, who was thirty-one and the mother of five, died in agony. Neither she nor her family had any idea that the cells obtained from her cervix in 1951 would eventually number in the trillions and become a vital part of medical research all over the world.

Henrietta, who was one of ten children, was born in Virginia in 1920. She grew up in a “home-house,” a four-room log cabin that formerly served as slave quarters. She later married her cousin, David (known as Day). Neither Henrietta nor Day had much education. They spent their childhood planting and harvesting tobacco, milking cows, and feeding farm animals. One of their children, Elsie, had an undiagnosed mental condition that left her unable to speak. She was eventually sent to an overcrowded, poorly staffed, and unsanitary institution named Crownsville, where patients lived under horrific conditions and were subject to dangerous experiments. Henrietta and Day had few resources to cope with life’s tragedies and were at the mercy of an exploitative society.

The author expertly depicts Henrietta, her extended family and acquaintances, as well as various scientists and physicians who either knew Henrietta or worked with her cells after her death. In addition, Skloot traces the incredible odyssey of HeLa cells that “went up in the first space missions” and contributed to “the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, [and] in vitro fertilization.” HeLa cells also were instrumental in the development of drugs to treat such conditions as hemophilia and Parkinson’s. Rebecca decided to track down the family and find out how they felt about what had happened to Henrietta. At first, the Lackses wanted no part of her. They were bitter and angry over the racism and condescension that they had endured over the years and had no reason to trust anyone outside of their immediate circle. In addition, they suffered from a variety of serious ailments such as diabetes and prostate cancer, but had spotty health insurance coverage and little money to pay doctor bills. They received no profit from their mother’s unwitting donation to medical science.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks touches on the history, sociology, science, and ethics of an era when the chasm between black and white, rich and poor, educated and unschooled, was very deep. Henrietta’s descendants express themselves eloquently. They are confused and incensed over what was taken from their mother without her knowledge or permission. Nor does Skloot skimp on the science; she explains how and why certain cells are more valuable than others. In addition, she discusses the legal and moral issues raised when someone takes tissue from a patient and then gives or sells it to researchers. Rebecca admits that “the Lackses challenged everything I thought I knew about faith, science, journalism, and race.”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 413 readers
PUBLISHER:	Crown; First Edition edition (February 2, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Skloot
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another interesting book: Don’t Sleep There are Snakes by Daniel Everett

Bibliography:

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (February 2010)

“Indeed, I was quite the romantic. A man would have to be heartless not to be, and a fool not to outgrow it. Of course, every Jew wishes to summon the Messiah, to draw him down, through the force of his own goodness, from the throne upon which he sits chained in the Heavens. But one might profitably ask: Who has chained him there, if not the Lord Himself, the devil being a theological convenience we Jews…forbid ourselves?”

Book Review:

Review by Betsey Van Horn (SEP 8, 2010)

Science, religion, and language intersect in this edgy, Judeo-mystic satire about love, brotherhood, and neuroses in fin-de-siècle Vienna. In 1895, oculist Jakob Sammelsohn meets Sigmund Freud on the same night that he eyes and falls in love with Freud’s primary patient, Emma Eckstein. As Jakob is guided into Freud’s world of psychoanalysis, he reluctantly becomes a guide himself. He plunges into the mythological realm of a dybbuk, the dislocated spirit of his dead wife, Ita, who possesses and inhabits Emma. Or so Ita-as-Emma claims. As the relationship intensifies between Jakob, Freud, and Emma, Ita’s haunting voice lures Jakob into a psychosexual seduction.

But here in Vienna, the cultural center of the world, supernatural notions and Jewish folklore is rejected in favor of more intrepid theories of science and psychology. Freud believes Emma is in the throes of hysteria, while his friend, Dr. Fliess, advances the theory of “nasal reflex neurosis” as the source of all unhappiness. In the meantime, Jakob just wants to lose his virginity. His tyrannical father, who spoke to him only in Hebrew scripture, forced him to marry Ita, the village “idiot,” after the first forced marriage to Hindele ended in chaste disaster. Just after the wedding, Ita fled and drowned herself. But she is back and commanding Jakob with menace and affection.

Jakob later meets Dr. Ludvik Zamenhof, a half-blind, retired oculist and language enthusiast. Zamenhof’s aim is to join all of humanity in a utopian, universal language called Esperanto. When Jakob meets the radiant Esperanto patron, Loe Bernfeld, he is smitten. Subsequently, Jakob is thrust into an idealistic world of love and linguistics–the neutral tongue to unite the world and a passionate one to join him with Loe. But the ether world has a different design on this incurable romantic.

Jakob’s Hebraic-Homeric journey is full of colorful and magical characters, such as bickering, burly angels; a bedeviling dybbuk; a wicked demon child; and zealous polyglots, to name just a few. A clash of the titans of intellect and faith crosscut through the leviathans of lexicon and argot. The story follows Jakob from the countryside of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the cultural hub of Vienna, from the terrifying streets and ghetto of Warsaw, and to celestial, rarefied dimensions.

Skibell’s tale is wholly imaginative and inventive, with ripe and rollicking prose and outrageous, unforgettable characters. In addition, it is peppered with an array of languages and dialog, most notably Hebrew and the enigmatic Esperanto, which endow symbolic and metaphoric texture to the narrative. At times, he is overwrought and long-winded, dawdling down his shadowy side streets and rambling for too long in his self-indulgent thoughts. But his ardent, spunky voice keeps the reader engaged and hooked in this fantastical and sometimes unearthly odyssey.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 9 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books (September 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Betsey Van Horn
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Joseph Skibell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another imagined Freud meeting: Lions at the Lamb House by Edwin M. Yoder Another imaginative historical novel: The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds

Bibliography:

• A Blessing On The Moon (1997)
• The English Disease (2003)
• A Curable Romantic (2010)