Book Review - Counter-Clock World

Image of book cover taken by David Wilder.

In Counter-Clock World, Philip K Dick creates a world where time flows backward, resulting in various interesting environmental characteristics. For example, instead of inhaling cigarette smoke, smokers light up finished cigarette butts and exhale smoke into them to form brand-new cigarettes. People greet each other with "Goodbye" and end interactions with "Hello". Deceased folks wake up in their graves and shout until they are heard and rescued by "vitariums"—businesses that dig up "old-born" dead people and revive them.

One of the "deaders" who is pulled out of the ground happens to be a controversial religious figure named Anarch Peak. The novel centers around his coming back to life and how it affects the people involved. This is a pretty action-packed PKD book, complete with a lot of drama between the involved parties. Some are excited that Anarch has been revived, others are not, and still others are caught in between the two of them in some sort of paranoid fantasy—the likes of which only Dick can create.

The book was published in 1967 and combines the best of Dick's older writing themes with the more science fiction style approach used in his later works. I definitely enjoyed this one, although not as much as many other PKD novels. The story is engaging enough, and there were certainly parts that really gripped me. However, I rate PKD novels against one another, and this one comes out somewhere near above average. Regardless, a Dick book is consistently a great read, and I wouldn't hesitate to suggest Counter-Clock World to anyone new to his writing or science fiction in general!

3/5 stars. 222 pages.

Weekend Thoughts - 2.13.16

Image by William Cho, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. Computer viruses in the good old days had certain characteristics—they might call you names, insult you with foul language, or play games before they performed some nefarious task to cripple your machine. Viruses nowadays operate in a silent fashion, possibly infecting a machine without the owner being aware of their existence at all. WIRED published an article featuring a new website called The Malware Museum, which exhibits some of the older, more interesting viruses for nerds like myself to check out.

2. I came across a video of digitally-animated photographs taken at Burning Man 2015. It's mind-blowing—you really have to check it out to understand why.

3. Science fiction author William Gibson, also famous for having coined the term "cyberspace" (pre-Internet, no less!), wrote a piece in The Guardian describing the process involved in writing his phenomenal first novel, Neuromancer. The book is amazing—science fiction fans should definitely be aware of it, but if you're not then go check it out! Gibson's twitter account is also well worth reading.

4. An Ontario man who was missing for 30 years was found after remembering his own identity last month. Edgar Latulip experiences mental health problems and vanished when he was 21 years old, arriving in St. Catharines, 120 kilometers southeast of his hometown. Upon his arrival, Latulip fell and suffered a head injury which left him with virtually no memory of his personal history and who he was, so he created a new identity for himself. After three decades of living as another person, Latulip met with a social worker in January and expressed that he was not quite who he thought he was. The social worker found his missing persons case file and Latulip agreed to participate in DNA testing to prove that he is the missing man from 30 years ago. Quite a happy ending to a bizarre story.

5. I found out about this from one of the vegan YouTubers I watch regularly (High Carb Hannah—check her out, she's awesome!). An Australian man will be eating nothing but potatoes for all of 2016 in an effort to lose weight and address his binge eating issues. Unfortunately, the article includes misleading nutritional advice from a spokesperson who states that "carbohydrates are not a good source of protein". The issue with that statement is that potatoes are not "carbohydrates"—they contain carbohydrates (along with a complete amino acid profile and plenty of other nutrients). Thinking of foods as being various macronutrients (such as saying things like "Meat is a protein", "Pasta is a carbohydrate", or "Oil is a fat") is potentially harmful thinking because most foods contain more than one nutrient. Of course the carbohydrates themselves aren't a good source of protein—proteins are a good source of protein! Anyways, the so-called "potato cleanse" is something that I have been considering trying during the last few weeks. In fact, I may do something to alter it like Hannah is doing currently with her "only-potatoes-low-fat-sauces-and-non-starchy-vegetables" cleanse that she has been vlogging about on her YouTube channel. From what I've been learning, potatoes are pretty much the perfect food to eat. If I decide to try it out for myself, I'll be sure to blog about it here and let you know!

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Weekend Thoughts - 2.6.16

Image by Priya Saihgal, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. It's high time for the Global Drug Survey, which is an annual effort to gather as much information about global drug use as possible, in an effort to understand drug use trends worldwide. The organization is hoping to receive over 120,000 participants this year, so I would like to encourage the Think Wilder audience to check it out and submit a response if you have time.

2. As a massive Philip K. Dick fan, I was elated to see an article discussing his unfinished novel, The Owl in Daylight, show up in my Twitter feed this week. The book would have been his last, but was never completed (much less started, really). The article is worth a read for fans of PKD, and for those of you who aren't familiar with him, I'd suggest reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. PKD was a prolific contributor in the science fiction genre and many of his books were later adapted to movies, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, and A Scanner Darkly. I really can't explain the influence he had on the science fiction genre, the world as a whole, or myself. To put it simply, his works have been extremely influential. Give him a read or a watch sometime soon!

3. I'm also a bit of a sucker for colorful stuff. That's why this article featuring the Brooklyn-based Bagel Store, which sells rainbow bagels caught my eye. Would ya look at those? Just look at 'em!

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.

Book Review - The Stars My Destination

Photograph taken by David Wilder.

This classic science fiction novel was first introduced to me about ten years ago in a Sci-Fi Lit course that I took at my university. I barely remembered reading it as I was glancing at my bookshelves, and decided it would be worth picking up again for a re-read.

The Stars My Destination is a novel by Alfred Bester that was serialized in four parts in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in 1956. The book was originally published in Britain with the title Tiger! Tiger!—after William Blake's poem The Tyger. In fact, the first verse of that poem is found on the first page of The Stars My Destination.

The novel is set in the 25th century, when a technology called "jaunting" is commonplace. Jaunting is essentially the ability to teleport from one place to another; there are various distances that one is able to jaunt, depending on his or her ability. The widespread adoption of jaunting has disrupted the social and economic balance of the universe, and the Inner Planets are at war with the Outer Satellites. The book's main character, Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle, starts out marooned in space after his ship was attacked and is the only crew member that survived. Another ship passes him by, ignoring his requests for help. From that point forward, Gully begins an obsessive revenge quest with the goal of finding and destroying the person aboard the ship that gave the order to abandon him in space.

Overall, the book is an enjoyable read, although certainly not one of my favorite pieces of science fiction literature. The writing, even though it's only about 60 years old, still seems like older science fiction, which I find simultaneously endearing and yet difficult to read. I realize that this is a classic science fiction novel and attempted to treat it as such, but I wouldn't rank it up there with the works of Philip K Dick, William Gibson, or Neal Stephenson. I do, however, plan to eventually read one of Bester's other highly-acclaimed works, The Demolished Man. If you're interested in classic science fiction, give this one a shot!

3/5 Stars. 258 pages.

Weekend Thoughts - 12.19.15

Image by Jutta M. Jenning, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.

Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:

1. As a followup to last week's news article about the identity of Bitcoin's founder, it seems that it may have been a hoax after all. Not surprising, really. Andrea Castillo, writing for Reason, argues that we should entirely halt the hunt to identify the cryptocurrency's creator, because "The entire purpose of the Bitcoin project is to facilitate a way for humans to access financial channels regardless of personal circumstances. That its leader would be pseudonymous and impersonal is therefore appropriate, even necessary". I really enjoyed reading Castillo's take on it, and have to agree—why does the mainstream media feel the need to know who the founder of Bitcoin is (or was) in the first place!?

2. There is yet another followup from last week's Weekend Thoughts, when I published a link to #GOPDildos, an art project that takes photos featuring them Republicans holding guns and replaces the weapons with dildos. The project's creator wrote an article that discusses the motivation behind it and the artist's personal opinion on the issue of gun control. It's definitely worth reading for anyone interested in politics, Republicans, guns, and/or dildos.

3. I enjoyed this 2015 edition of the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, from science fiction author Philip K Dick's seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the hit film Blade Runner. The 2015 version includes a satirical political spin, mentioning the movements #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter in a fairly humorous (depending on your take, I suppose) way.

4. An article written by a well-known YouTuber made the rounds this week, pointing out the economic difficulties that online content creators face. Many people who have tens (or even hundreds!) of thousands of followers have trouble affording to pay for their basic bills like rent or groceries. It is essentially necessary for them to publish company-sponsored videos/posts or ask their followers to sponsor them with a service like Patreon. The catch-22 for many creators is that they are seen as too big to ask for money from their followers but too small for advertisers to consider working with. It's an interesting article, and it brings up something that I wanted to mention about Think Wilder—as of now, I haven't made a single penny off of this website. So far, all of this content that I have created has been not only free for my followers, but it has actually costed me money (in hosting and domain name registration fees). I consider this project to be a labor of love, so for the time being I don't mind paying to share my work. In the future, I may consider instituting a sponsorship program for readers to chip in or running sponsored posts from time to time, but I haven't made a decision on that yet. However, I'm lucky in that I have a steady day job and don't rely on an inconsistent income source, so my situation is simply different from the ones that are described in the article. At any rate, give the article a read, and if you have any input on whether or not I should attempt to make money off of this website, feel free to contact me using one of the social share icons below!

That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.