I don’t have my Kindle with me, but it definitely exists if it wasn’t designed by GE. The Navy has designed many portable reactors that could serve the same purpose, and many research facilities already use them. Most of the designs have been around for decades. It isn’t a question of engineering, safety, waste or proliferation. It is purely political and it comes from a position of ignorance. Those that know the most fear the least.
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That sounds like my sort of book. I’m pretty sure the human race is getting dumber.
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I’ve read the whole series a few times now. “Children” is a tougher read than “Messiah”. However, it’s Dune.
That said, if you happen to like Haruki Murakami you’re in for a treat with “God Emperor”. A book where nothing happens, yet at the same time, so much happens. When I first read the series as a teen, I hated GE. As an adult, it’s my favorite, next to the very swashbuckling “Heretics”.
“Chaperhouse” is also fantastic, its main flaw being that there was supposed to be a seventh book as it ends with many unanswered questions (Herbert died).
Btw, there’s been plenty of scifi in the past 15 years that’s among the best ever written, imho.
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Right, however, do you think that suspicion is based in the reality of the recent advances in nuclear technology or say, The Sierra Club and Greenpeace, who voice opposition to nuclear while at the same time taking big money from big oil to promote…wait for it…natural gas, bc renewables simply cannot do what they want it to do?
Atwood refuses to call it scifi, no, it’s speculative fiction! However, if you liked that book, might I recommend:
(1) Oryx and Crake
(2) Year of the Flood
(3) Maddaddam
It’s a three-part series by the same author as The Handmaid’s Tale. That book was written in the 80s when big religion and the mega churches were just taking root. These three were written in 2003 - 2013 and tackle corporations and excessive government. Set in the near future, the story revolves around a…global pandemic.
THT is the ‘the hobbit’ while the trilogy is the LOTR. It’s brilliant and blows handmaid out of the water. It starts a little slow and confusing, but so worth it. She builds a world, our world but changed. I’ve read the series 3x.
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Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check them out.
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I’m trying to finish this before the movie comes out…you know, because…“Actually, I read the book! it’s blah, blah, blah”
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From the big postwar push on nuclear power, where the promises outran the reality, both on economics and safety. Now, a lot of it is motivated by hysteria. The Germans closing down their nuclear power after Fukushima was pure panic-stricken silliness.
I wouldn’t put it past the Sierra Club, but do you have any links to show that Greenpeace is taking money from oil companies to promote natural gas? I can see them pushing gas as a bridging fuel- still think they can’t do it without nuclear for backup and adverse situations- Norway in winter, as you suggested.
yep.
Sierra Club, funding hypocrisy, pp, 203, 207-9, 220.
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Thanks for this one - it looks really interesting. I have it queued up on the kindle for when I have some free time this weekend.
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Finally working my way through Dream of the Red Chamber (called The Story of the Stone in the five-volume Penguin Classics edition I’m reading).
I feel like if I’m going to live in Taiwan for a lengthy period of time, as I hope to do, I owe it to myself to read the “Four Classic Novels” of China. Surely not doing so would be like a Chinese person moving to England without having ever read Shakespeare or Dickens? Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, but as a fan of literature I feel like I should make the effort.
Fortunately, nearly a thousand(!) pages in to this massive tome, it doesn’t yet feel like “effort”. It’s actually more enjoyable than I expected. It’s an easy book to dip in and out of without having to worry about forgetting what happened. Maybe that’s because nothing much actually happens. Yet, for an enormous book about people going about their ordinary lives and not doing much of any real significance, it’s surprisingly fun!
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Out of curiosity, what would your classic American novels be?
I love this question.
I’m a big fan of the “Great American Novel” idea, in which the American canon should embody the essence of America. There are many authors I could list in that category, but the powerhouses for me (my equivalents of “Shakespeare and Dickens”) would be Twain and Steinbeck. Pure Americana.
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The fact that you excluded F.Scott makes me smile.
Rabbit, Run by whatshisface is great if not generationally constrained.
V and Vineland by Pynchon are his more accessible works.
And quite honestly, if you don’t have Whitman in there ya’ought to be shot. 
Lots more of course. Melville. Vonnegut. And that’s just the white men!
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Cormac McCarthy ‘Blood Meridian’
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Walkable cities sublimation to ideas discussed in Brand’s book.
Very cool.
Yes I do.
Are you recommending GE and these others by who?
I got back to reading Bellow’s Herzog, which I had started last year.
I’ve only met few people who’ve heard of Bellow, in spite of the fact that he’s won numerous prizes, Nobel included. I’ve loved him for a decade, love his style mixing streetwise and cultured perspectives along with the depiction of Jewish American life. His heroes (mostly representations of Bellow himself) are never great, they never succeed but almost never fail either.
For the classic American novel I’d suggest The Adventures of Augie March.
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