Open Buddha

Since today is payday and I never seem to have enough books (hah!), I ordered
a few more today:

• The Nature of Magic : An Anthropology of Consciousness by Susan Greenwood
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
• Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder
• Scardown by Elizabeth Bear

The first is Susan Greenwood’s new work on the nature of magical consciousness for practitioners of pagan and magical faiths. It’s an academic texts but Susan is a scholar-practitioner and it comes highly recommended to me by other members of the Nature Religion Scholars e-mail list.

Accelerando is Charles Stross’ new novel. You can also find it online at http://www.accelerando.org for free if you don’t want a physical copy.

Lady of Mazes is the brand new Karl Schroeder book. He wrote Ventus a few years back and Permanence. I liked both of them though the fairly hard science fiction vision of a potentially depressing future in Permanence was actually quite good. One of its primary questions is "What happens to sentient life if it is inevitable that it will decline or evolve out of
intelligence, which is only a temporary feature of creatures?"

Scardown is the sequel to Hammered, Bear’s debut novel. She is an up and coming author, I think, and her work is pretty fun.

Schroeder and Stross are both computer people who happen to have become science fiction writers. Schroeder’s work is pretty intellectually rigorous. The other recent novels that I recommend for thinking science fiction readers are the three books by John Wright comprising The Golden Age.

I’m currently about 60 pages into the Peter Watts novel I mentioned yesterday along with some of Thrangu Rinpoche’s Buddhist work.