extropianzealot

Today in odd-but-true: Steven Bannon, yes that Steven Bannon, was at one point the CEO of the Biosphere 2 project.



Vice has a detailed article on the whole thing, so I won't repeat it. But gosh even just appearance wise the guy went from Nathan Fillion to the right wing, male equivalent of Hillary Clinton.

What a world.

A Note On Reviews

Before we begin it may help if I explain my perspective on reviewing books. Realistically, the main bottleneck in book reading is time. I do not necessarily expect to live very long, largely because I'm not sure I expect our civilizations to live very long. There are far too many threats to our continued survival as a species for me to list in a brief aside. However, taking it as a given that we'll only live somewhere in range of a normal human lifespan there's not all that much time for reading books. Facing this grim reality I try to only read the minority of books that are worth the time I spend on them. I rate books with respect to how well they rewarded my time expenditure.

My Rating Scale

5: Life changing, a gem of a work that either hugely changes my perspective or informs my decisions

4: A good investment, delivers strong value for time spent.

3: Fair trade. A work worth approximately the time I put into reading it.

2: On reflection, I would prefer to have the time I spent reading this back.

1: Garbage, with little to recommend it.

This naturally leads to a few consistent preferences. I tend to favor books that are short and novel.

Now for our feature presentation..

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The Lady And Her Monsters

Overview

The Lady And Her Monsters tells the tale of Frankenstein's authorship. Frankenstein is of some interest to me because it's often credited as the first work of Science Fiction. More than that, it's a founding work which takes on themes of reanimation and the limits of man's creative abilities directly. The Lady... is not however exclusively focused on Frankenstein's author Mary Shelley, but rather spends most of its time on the 18th and early 19th century scientific personalities and theories which inspired her. These are the titular monsters that form the backdrop of Frankenstein's narrative. Clocking in at a not-too-long 269 pages of not too densely packed text, it is tempting to give this book a four. However I found the portions about Shelley herself sufficiently drama-laden and offputting to knock this book down from a solid 4 to a 3.5. I can hardly fault the author for discussing her when she's the principal character, but The Lady is simply not as interesting as her inspirations.

My Rating: 3.5, somewhere between a fair trade and a good investment

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