A few of my favorite reads…
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All tagged science fiction
In Bewilderment, however, Richard Powers doesn’t limit the reader to life on planet earth; rather, through the first-person voice of his protagonist, astrobiologist Theo Byrne, Powers’ writing wanders the universe in search of life, but always returns home. Layering astronomy, biology, and neuroscience, this novel challenges its reader to think more broadly, to consider alternative truths, and to recognize how little we know about ourselves, our planet, and our universe.
If you enjoy books that tackle ambitious projects, play with historical trends and technologies, dig into themes of contemporary import, and end hopefully, I encourage you to pick up Cloud Cuckoo Land and then keep reading.
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 is at once startlingly gritty and wildly sci-fi. Somehow it is both a critical response to the wartime atrocity of Dresden’s bombing, and also a trippy, ironic, even disturbing thought-experiment about the nature of nonlinear time. Originally published in 1969, Slaughterhouse 5 looks back at the end of WWII’s European conflict from the perspective of a handful of American prisoners of war held in Dresden (in slaughterhouse building 5 or, in German, Sclachthof-funf).
