Here's where I post my recommendations for favorite:
Believe it or not, this civilization is just full of bright and exciting thinkers, pushing the envelope in all directions. These are just a few I've come across lately. Send your recommendations to my email address.
Here are some of my favorite nonfiction books, which I highly recommend you read for a grounding in the science behind my science fiction and nonfiction.
I highly recommend the latest book to ponder the topic of "where is everybody out there?" Contact with Alien Civilizations was written by former senior U.S. diplomat Michael A.G. Michaud, who chaired the committees that developed the well-regarded "SETI Protocols." I served with Micahael on those committees...
... until they unraveled, just this last year, under the strain of the increasingly tense METI imbroglio, or the debate over whether humanity (or rather, a few peremptory individuals) should start shouting into a strange and dauntingly silent universe. An excellent book, covering these issues from many angles!
Will the first decade of the 21st Century be known as the time when our Scientific Age came to a whimpering end? The one trait shared by anti-modernists of both left and right appears to be disdain for our ability to learn and do bold new things. My published review of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, explores how partisanship can explain much of this collapse of confidence... and why partisan interpretations don't cover everything.
On a related note, two recommended books that tout assertive problem solving are The Past and Future of America's Economy: Long Waves of Innovation that Power Cycles of Growth By Robert D. Atkinson and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near. The first explores measures that would allow us to play our roles better in the world economy. The latter pursues Kurzweil's argument that our scientific competence and technologically-empowered creativity will soon skyrocket, propelling humanity into an entirely new age. I don't entirely agree. But boy, what a ride.
The clichés that most hobble us are those we don't notice, because we accept them so readily. Like the common belief -- shared across the political spectrum -- that the world is going to hell. Or the truism that "our wisdom hasn't kept up with technology." In December 2003 I reviewed a book that challenges this truism. The Progress Paradox: How Things Get Better While People Feel Worse, by Gregg Easterbrook, suggests we may be better than we thought. There's a world to be saved and those who spread either complacency or gloom aren't helping. What we need is confidence and a sense that our efforts can matter. That will come, if we open our eyes to how much good has already been done.
In The Coming Democracy: New Rules for Running a New World, Ann Florini dares to raise a long-neglected question -- how will Planet Earth be governed during the next century and beyond? Some say we are living in just the latest in a long series of imperial ages -- an era of Pax Americana. Even if the USA is the 'best' pax the world has ever known, should we count on its 'beneficial hegemony' lasting forever? Or might it be wise to start thinking now about using that great influence for its most noble and most pragmatic purpose -- by taking a lead in helping to design Whatever Comes Next (WCN)? Before history inevitably takes that power and leadership away from us.
How would YOU design a loose, accountable and flexible 'world governance'? One that has two contrary but essential traits -- capable of meeting Earth's challenges while forever staying off our backs? One worthy of representing us when we head forth to the stars? Ann Florini's book is a step toward dealing with such bold issues. I wish there were more pundits with as clear a vision, looking beyond all those residual 20th Century ideologies -- such as the 'left vs. right' nonsense that we inherit from the 1789 French Assembly, and that no one ever can define! Ideologies that thwart the mental agility we need to solve tomorrow's problems.
Out of Control, by Kevin Kelly, explores the new field of "emergent properties," showing how marvelous and surprising new complexities and capabilities often arise out of systems that began simply or primitively. Wonderful examples.
Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, by Edward Tenner. We are often fooled by our own best-laid plans. Possibly the most tragic human character flaw is our tendency to avoid the very criticism that may help us find our mistakes before they erupt and ruin our hopes. Tenner's look at this phenomenon is dour and incomplete... I point out some cause for hope in The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? Still, his cautionary tome should be studied, especially by anyone who feels certain about any grand plan or scheme.
Speaking of which... Project Orion, by George Dyson, is a wonderful tour of a razzle-dazzle might-have-been, describing how geniuses of the 1960s planned to send skyscraper-sized spaceships to Mars, driven there atop firecracker chains of exploding nuclear bombs. This one should be read alongside Tenner's book!
Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy, by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. Prescient, spooky and worrisome, yet hopeful about our ability to cope -- over the long run -- with terror threats to our complex civilization.
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and The Woman That Never Evolved. Author, anthropologist and feminist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy takes a fresh look at evolution fact and theory, then moves on to a cross-cultural view of motherhood, in this pair of stimulating books, re-evaluating things we thought we knew.
A good companion volume, with a wider focus on the biological foundations we all have to work with, is Melvin Konner's recently updated The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. (For my own anthropological speculations, click over to my essay, "Neoteny and Two-Way Sexual Selection in Human Evolution: Paleo-Anthropological Speculation" and Real Science.)
A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change by William Calvin. The latest in a series of wonderful scientific speculations by neurologist / evolutionist Calvin takes you on a tour of the new science that links deep ocean currents with the climate patterns that made Earth a crucible for human development. Did ice ages and hot spells act as a 'pump' forcing our ancestors to adapt and change? Europe lies at the same latitude as Canada, yet supports 20 times as many people, because of the Gulf Stream... which may 'switch off' because of Global Warming. Find out more, it's important.
Again, touching on topics discussed in The Transparent Society, anyone interested in the dilemmas we face in the digital age should look at legal scholar Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. From a more technical background, encryption expert Bruce Schneier talks common sense in Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World.
Striking off to the very boundaries of this universe -- and about a trillion others -- fasten your seat belts for one of the boldest ideas of our era in The Life of the Cosmos, by physicist Lee Smolin, who lays out the notion that universes may behave like a form of life, evolving within the context of a meta-time far, far vaster than mere billions of years. This book inspired my novella "What Continues... and What Fails," which is contained in the story collection Otherness.
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