Alex Wellerstein
Historian of science, secrecy, and nuclear weapons. Professor of STS at @FollowStevens. UC Berkeley alum with a Harvard PhD. NUKEMAP creator. Coder and web dev.
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Alex Wellerstein
“@JBWolfsthal @nealstephenson Snow Crash and Diamond Age are the easy ways in. I tend to recommend people start with them. I think his best book is Anathem but if you start with it, you probably won't like it — it's very long, very strange. But rewarding!” (from X)
A #1 New York Times Bestseller, Anathem is perhaps the most brilliant literary invention to date from the incomparable Neal Stephenson, who rocked the world with Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and The Baroque Cycle. Now he imagines an alternate universe where scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians live in seclusion behind ancient monastery walls until they are called back into the world to deal with a crisis of astronomical proportions. Anathem won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the reviews for have been dazzling: “Brilliant” (South Florida Sun-Sentinel), “Daring” (Boston Globe), “Immensely entertaining” (New York Times Book Review), “A tour de force” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), while Time magazine proclaims, “The great novel of ideas…has morphed into science fiction, and Neal Stephenson is its foremost practitioner.”
Recommended by Alex Wellerstein
“@jaivirdi @pal8g2015 My favorite intro book on it is Diane Paul's Controlling Human Heredity — it's slim, thoughtful, critical. https://t.co/z7V5u6yXEc” (from X)
