Search Results for: how the mind works

Ray Bradbury: DANDELION WINE

Posted on Thursday 8 March 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

DANDELION WINE (DW) is certainly Bradbury’s most personal book, because it is so clearly based on Bradbury’s own life as a boy in small-town Illinois. It was published in 1957 as a novel, not a short story collection, though actually … Continue reading →

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SFNF: Bretnor, Modern Science Fiction

Posted on Friday 19 January 2018 by Mark R. Kelly

Reginald Bretnor’s 1953 Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Future is one of the earliest critical volumes about SF. If follows Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s 1947 OF WORLDS BEYOND (summarized here) and precedes the anonymously-edited 1959 volume THE SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL … Continue reading →

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Lunacies: On Finland and Flat-Earthers

Posted on Friday 24 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Vice, from December 2016: This Dude Accidentally Convinced the Internet That Finland Doesn’t Exist. The article touches on how some people will believe anything, and the notion of Poe’s Law There is an internet adage named after a commenter by … Continue reading →

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A Very Short Book by A.C. Grayling

Posted on Thursday 9 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

A.C. Grayling, AGAINST ALL GODS (2007), subtitled “Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness” I saw this referenced from Tim Crane’s book that I mentioned a couple posts ago, and ordered it without realizing that it’s very short, … Continue reading →

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Sfadb progress toward ultimate Top 100 Lists

Posted on Friday 3 November 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Over the past two weeks I’ve made much progress on the next stage of my sfadb.com site — the compiling of all awards references and citations references into overall scores and rankings. One product of this effort will be Top … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Philip Pullman meets Matthew Hutson

Posted on Wednesday 25 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

There was a big profile of Philip Pullman in the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago– Philip Pullman Returns to His Fantasy World — on the occasion of the first book in his new trilogy that parallels his … Continue reading →

Posted in Atheism, MInd | Comments Off

Links and Comments: Reviews of Books about Religion and Science

Posted on Monday 23 October 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

NY Times: “Ivory Tower” column review of three university press books on religion: Unknown Unknowns: Three Inquiries Into Religion, by James Ryerson. The most interesting of the three seems to be the first, Tim Crane’s THE MEANING OF BELIEF: Religion … Continue reading →

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Isaac Asimov: Foundation

Posted on Thursday 21 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Rereading classic SF in the 21st century: In which I both tease out themes of, and try to summarize, Isaac Asimov’s first Foundation book. I reread Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, i.e. the first book in the ‘Foundation Trilogy,’ a couple weeks … Continue reading →

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Many Such Journeys: TOS #28, “The City on the Edge of Forever”

Posted on Thursday 17 August 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The Enterprise visits a planet where a time portal enables a deranged McCoy to inadvertently change Earth’s history, forcing Kirk and Spock to travel to 1930s Earth, where Kirk falls in love. This justly celebrated episode is not without its … Continue reading →

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The Chamber of the Ages: TOS #26: “The Devil in the Dark”

Posted on Tuesday 8 August 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

The Enterprise comes to the aid of an underground mining colony where miners are being killed, and machinery destroyed, by an unseen monster that moves through solid rock. This is a justly famous episode that challenges our assumptions and overturns … Continue reading →