Science Fiction and Science Links Abound!

I have just started to read Chang-rae Lee's newest book--On Such a Full Sea--and, surprise surprise it is fantastic. I don't want to make a full post about his departure from his earlier stories, which tend to center on family legacies, ethnicity, and mixed-race relationships/identity, but suffice it to say that it is Dystopic, futuristic, and therefore science fiction, in many respects.

So here is another link to current science fiction books that captured my interest mostly because of the review's focus on cognitive and neurological issues (the first and third review, respectively).

And here is a nifty diagram to the best science fiction

Here is another review of a science fiction book that was originally published in the 1970s but has just been re-published (uncensored and un-edited ) under a different title. Interesting because it is set in Soviet-era Russia, and deals with a scientists on the verge of a great discovery but also on the verge of a breakdown, the scientist seems to be interrupted on a cosmic scale. Interrupted, and eventually imprisoned, the Universe seems to be stymieing the protagonist in his research at every turn.

And for some creepy science that is indeed no longer fiction, here is the latest from our friends at MIT--books that allow readers to share the sensory experiences of its settings and characters! I wonder though how much the physical stimulus will allow readers to engage with other, more complicated, aspects of the psychology and emotional states of the characters in a book? Will there soon be a way to feel the higher-level cognitive states of characters? If so will that make fiction (the one thing it seems to still help us do... though I am being melodramatic and reductive in this statement) obsolete? And, as the review notes, is the issue with the inability of a book to capture a reader's attention a problem with the reader's imagination or a problem with the author's writing/plot/characterization?

Still, I would love to take the class on science fiction that the creators of the vest were enrolled in when they invented a feasible tool to experience sensory fiction...