100 Books Like World Brain

I never knew that the telegraph started as a series of physical towers conveying coded messages by line of sight from one hill to another. It took years for the word telegraph to refer to the system we know so well, relying on electrical lines, the telegraph key, and Morse code.

I love how Standage finds the through line from this 19th-century communications network to the Internet we all take for granted today.

This book starts in a similar historical location as Bod’s book but quickly moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—settling into the “information theory” era established by Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and others in the 1940s-1960s.

I love this book because it situates the intellectual climate leading to our current dystopia of information overload. Gleick’s teasing of chaos theory inevitably pushes the reader to explore his book on the subject from the 1980s: Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

Longtime technology journalist John Markoff explores the origins of the Silicon Valley mythos in this engaging and insightful history of the early personal computer industry.

The book explores how the modern personal computer took shape amid the counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s, where an eccentric cast of technology visionaries, hackers, and misfits began pushing the boundaries of human consciousness: embracing utopian ideals, experimenting with mind-expanding drugs, and exploring the still-uncharted possibilities of personal computing.

Markoff does a masterful job of connecting the dots between the Sixties counterculture and the revolutionary ethos that undergirded the early personal computing industry, making a convincing case that our present-day technology culture is deeply rooted in this transformative period in American culture. An entertaining and inspiring read.

The famously mercurial Nelson has been writing about the possibilities of networked information since the 1960s.

Indeed, he first coined the term “hypertext” in 1965. In Literary Machines (first published in 1981), he proposed a hypertext system dubbed Xanadu (after Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous “vision in a dream”), a new kind of networked system that would serve as a repository of all the world’s knowledge.

He proposed that users could connect related documents together via “jump links,” embed content from one document into another via what he called “transclusion,” and even explored the possibilities of micropayments.

Nelson’s pioneering work won him legions of acolytes in the early days of the personal computing and hypertext movements, directly influencing the development of later networked systems including the World Wide Web.

The thing I like most about this book is that it is one of the most outstanding works of imaginative fiction I have ever read. Written as a sequel to The Time Machine, it celebrates the centenary of that book’s first publication. 

This journey is more varied than the original. The hero journeys to different times and places and even gets marooned in one. I love the way the author uses the basic concept to explore various aspects of humanity’s future, such as the entire race living on the inner surface of a Dyson sphere around Sol.

I enjoyed journeying to different times and worlds, each vividly and realistically portrayed. I strongly recommend this work for lovers of time travel stories.

I could easily recommend any of Robert Harris’s “intelligent thrillers” however I’ve picked this one because I like the idea of an “ordinary” man who finds himself in the midst of a dangerous mystery. Briefly, The Second Sleep is set in the future after our civilisation has destroyed itself and where life is now functioning at the medieval level. The church, which controls everything, has banned investigation into the past. A humble priest is sent to visit a village in his parish and begins to suspect that things are not as they seem. Eventually, against the orders of the church, he decides to try to penetrate the past with alarming consequences. So, as for my character, David Hidalgo, we find that ordinary people can make a difference!

This is a great gateway collection. In fact, this was one of the first anthologies of plant-related speculative stories that I read after falling in love with science-fictional plants. I jumped at it when I saw that it includes authors such as H. G. Wells and Algernon Blackwood and am glad I did. I have written about a number of the stories I met in this collection. Awesome extra: there are two other volumes in this series. 

This book was first published in 1910. When I think of H.G. Wells, I think of his story about a time machine but this story, which I studied in school, was about changing your life, living your dream. Magic happens when Mr. Polly attempts suicide with the result that he becomes a hero and frees himself from the chains that bind him. I learned that all is possible. One does not need to be young, beautiful, and run a 4-minute mile to achieve one’s goals. With this thought in mind, I have run a marathon and entered two triathlons, finishing both and not coming last! I began my writing career at 70 years of age and am now the author of 5 books on mystery, history, and magic. 

A work of fiction rather than a travelogue, this is a gently told story of a young cockney draper’s assistant, Hoopdriver, who sets off on a two-week cycling holiday along the south coast of England in the summer of 1895 – when the great Victorian cycling boom was at its peak. Revelling in his independence and the sense of boundless possibility that comes over him as he pedals grandly through the countryside, Hoopdriver finds himself coming to the aid of the mysterious and beautiful Young Lady in Grey, an upper-class female cyclist who is seeking to avoid the attentions of another cyclist, a wealthy cad named Bechamel. A shrewd social observer and a keen cyclist himself, Wells saw the bicycle as a vehicle for change, equality, and the breaking down of class barriers. Wheels of Chance captures beautifully that all too brief fin de siècle period when the future really… show more.

During a lengthy hospital stay once, I needed to escape. Magazines were formulaic and newspapers dark. This book materialized on a library trolley. A plain dark blue hard cover looking dull and aged amongst the same-old paperbacks. After only the first story of this magical collection I was hooked away from all around me and into Wells’ tales of incredible imagination. Wells’ other shorts have become well known to the masses but here contained over forty lesser-known proto-sci-fi gems. In the way that Dickens did with characters that others could not, Wells was not constrained by conventions of science. The thought-provoking The Door in the Wall and The Red Room remain today are examples of skill for all contemporaries to aspire to.