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Weekend Reads - 180324

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Welcome to the weekend, first up a question, what are you currently reading? Let me know in the comments below or on my Facebook page, The BistroMath, I'm interested in knowing.

I'm just about to finish off Legacy (First Colony Book 3) by Ken Lozito, which has been an interesting military science fiction series, I've really enjoyed it. I have a classic The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett  lined up next and am slowly working my way through another classic The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.

In the article first up this week, Nature asked six prominent sci-fi writers to reflect on what the genre has to offer at the end of an extraordinary year (2017). It's an interesting read.

We also look at the possibility of getting a Star Trek replicator, or at least it's forerunner, in the near future plus some more book, movie and space related stuff. So when it's time to relax this weekend, grab your favourite beverage and have a read of the following articles.




Nature asked six prominent sci-fi writers — Lauren Beukes, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, Hannu Rajaniemi, Alastair Reynolds and Aliette de Bodard — to reflect on what the genre has to offer at the end of an extraordinary year.

A startup with alumni from MIT and Yale says it's made a breakthrough in creating a next-generation material that should make it possible to 3-d print literally anything out of thin air.

You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole.

Sylvia Beach—probably the most notorious bookstore owner in modern history, and the founder of what is still arguably the most famous bookstore in the world: Paris’s Shakespeare and Company. On the occasion of this, her 131st birthday, I was inspired to look into the history of Beach and the bookstore—as well as the stories behind some of the other best, most visited, and most talked-out bookstores around the world.

Now Denis Villeneuve (Sicario, Arrival, Blade Runner 2049) is taking a crack at the material, and his approach is interesting. Villeneuve is noted for balancing characters with spectacle while telling interesting sci-fi stories. In other words, Villeneuve seems like a fantastic match for Dune.






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