I just finished Melissa Holbrook Pierson's The Perfect Vehicle, an introspective account of how a nice, well-educated girl from the metropolitan Northeast wound up doing something so disreputable as zipping about on Moto Guzzis and enjoying doing so. It's rare that someone so polysyllabic writes about Why We Ride, and I'd recommend it to anyone struggling to put words to their feelings when asked why they'd risk life & limb on something so outrageously dangerous as riding a motorcycle.
I'm currently re-reading James P. Hogan's Minds, Machines, and Evolution, a collection of essays, short stories, and commentary from one of the better Hard Science types still active in SF. He has a long-running website with articles about topics as diverse as AI, plate tectonics, nuclear power, global warming, and AIDS. Personally, however, his recent seeming conversion to strident Velikovskianism is disturbing; like watching an old friend turn up on your doorstep with shaven head, saffron robes, and calling himself "Moonbeam".
Ewww... Tinfoil wings on a collander helmet, too! Velik-k-kant say it.
ReplyDeleteMy brother was into that for a while, (after the whole Native Shamanism thing), as a kind of postmodernist protest against The Scientific Establlishment Man. I tried to explain that even weird determinism was still determinism, and he didn't have a real good case.