Books like Coyote

I liked this book (and also the others of the trilogy) for the realistic and well-thought-out description of the terraforming of Mars.

The ethical and political aspects of this endeavor are so well described that the reader immediately gets involved in the political struggle (I personally joined the ‘green’ party advocating for immediate terraforming).

But politics on Mars is as harsh as on Earth and even more deadly since the place is a very dangerous one. The United Nations plays the part of the felon, trying to prevent Martians from becoming independent, and the war they wage causes the reader to lose several friends.

Dayworld is an elegant but dystopic solution to a possible future population crisis and one that keeps me thinking about how we should restrain ourselves. Humanity can only endure overpopulation by placing people into suspended animation six days a week. Jeff Carid is a rebel and a daybreaker, living a different life each day as he illegally moves through the week. But, when Jeff’s ability to segregate his seven lives deteriorates, the rebels realise they can’t trust him.

I love how Jeff slips from Tuesday-World to Wednesday-World, etc., easing into distinct personalities. This story made me realise different cultures exist in the same place, often never noticing each other, which we see when Jeff looks back with distaste at a previous day’s persona.

Set in Earth's future, humanity has been reduced to an ideal population. Living in domed cities humans live and die by the hand of the city's central computer. In this world, humanity has staved off the perils of overpopulation by surrendering human existence to the central computer's machine mind. 

With an enforced life span of only 21 years and every possible need and desire supplied and maintained by a central artificial intelligence, humanity has stagnated. Are we, today, in the real world, exploring the same path Nolan and Johnson presented in this book? We seem incapable of the political and social will to curb population or to limit our decadence. If we remain unable and unwilling to decide what a stable human world culture would look like, I foresee a time when we will delegate our future to machines. And, like Logan's world, we will stagnate. 

This world is maintained… show more.

I have given copies of the Galactic Milieu Trilogy as gifts more than any other book. This is the bravest near-future sci-fi series I have ever read. Intervention, published in 1987, follows events from 1945 through to 2013 when the five races of the Galactic Milieu embrace humanity. I love the merger of historical events with future possibilities in a story centred around a dynasty of ‘operant’ human beings.

As a teenager, I was fascinated by stories of telepathy, etc., but I found most books that dealt with ‘higher mind powers’ were in the fantasy or horror market. But this series is perfect sci-fi, technically plausible while politically powerful—and again, with a large, diverse cast.

One of those rare pieces of political writing that outlive their moment of birth to become classics, Havel’s grippingly written essay invites us to rethink the meaning of power. The radical idea is that the powerful are never as powerful as they, or we, might imagine.

Since within any institution or political order, the lines of organized power pass like low-current electricity through all its subjects, the downtrodden always have within themselves the power to short-circuit the system and to remedy their own powerlessness by refusing the power of rulers bent on running and ruining their everyday lives. 

There are two kinds of patriots: those who insist that allegiance to flag and country means keeping things the way they are, and those who want their country to live up to its ideals and do better by all its citizens. (Which side are you on?) In Dissent (2015), history professor Ralph Young shows how the foundational protest of the American Revolution lives on in the Occupy demonstrators and Women’s Marchers, Black Lives Matter groups, and climate change activists.

It was a toss-up here between this book and The Scar, set in a different part of the same world. One of Miéville’s acknowledged influences is the wonderful Mervyn Peake, and like Peake, he’s never in a hurry to get a story underway.

I’d have probably tossed Perdido Street Station aside after 100-200 pages except for a friend’s fervent recommendation—and I’d have missed out big time if I had! Because the story as it develops is truly grand, truly epic. Like Peake, Miéville has a gift for raising action to a mythical status. I love, love, love a novel that builds up to a long, rolling, thunderous climax!

The emergence of a dissident movement and the KGB’s efforts to control it were one of the dramas of the Brezhnev era. What better way to read the history than through the agency’s reports on the period’s premier dissident? Andrei Sakharov, nuclear physicist and “Domestic Enemy Number One,” survived the mind games and isolation, emerging to lead the campaign for memory in the late 1980s as Gorbachev loosened up. The book is fascinating on the fumbling efforts of Politburo gerontocrats, who often seem confused and outplayed, as well as on the circumlocutions and ideological distortions of a security agency determined to blur the true character of its operations.  

This book hit me like a thunderclap as an early-career faculty member studying Plato. Ober trained a sociological lens on Greek philosophers, showing how the democratic constitution of ancient Athens was the backdrop against which many of them were reacting and responding in very different ways.

The book charts the difference between criticism that is constructively offered by those who identify with a given constitutional type and criticism that is far-reaching in rejecting the existing terms of constitutional debate.

I love how this contrast illuminates political debate today. 

The United States was born out of a revolution, but the civil rights of its citizens were created by evolution over the country’s nearly 250-year history. In this book, author Kyle G. Volk traces how various minorities elbowed their way to the American rights table and changed our democratic political system. 

What made the book resonate with me was the well-researched examples of how minorities got their voices heard by the majority. He sticks to the meat and potatoes issues that matter to regular people, such as transportation, education, and booze–wet regulations, as it were.