On Books

Snow Crash is absurd, loud, deeply weird, and somehow still full of ideas that escaped into the real world.

I've just finished reading Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and I devoured it in just a few days. It’s one of those books that grabs your imagination from the start and doesn’t let go until the last page.

I finally finished Echopraxia by Peter Watts this June—a sequel (or rather companion) to my beloved Blindsight, long awaited and wildly anticipated. This is hardcore hard‑SF: dense with ideas, heavy with references, and often more rewarding to read the annotations than the book itself. And yet, that very richness is both its virtue and its vice.

Books were hard to get when I was a kid. They were expensive and, on top of that, in short supply. Many people owned no books at all; some copied them by hand. But there were always plenty of books in our family, and it was shocking to me to see a room with no books in it.

I became acquainted with Glen Cook quite a long time ago, but, as it turned out, through the back gate: I swallowed his entire series about detective Garrett and was very pleased with it.

It is impossible to pass by this book if you are interested in evolutionary biology. And although science has moved far ahead since those distant days, it is interesting to learn where thinking in this field began.

A logical question may arise for a person of our time looking deep into the centuries: why did civilizations develop exactly this way, and not otherwise?

A sequel to the wonderful book The Selfish Gene, which tells of the distant influence genes have on our world: it is far from exhausted by the properties of organisms themselves.

A rare specimen of damn strong science fiction, without the slightest bows toward adventure literature.

The remarkable science of ethology, which studies animal behavior, can lead a curious person to very interesting conclusions if one studies the common human belief in God from its point of view.