Hace tiempo estaba indeciso, ahora ya no estoy tan seguro

Otro libro que me prestó Pedro, en este caso un autor de relatos de ciencia ficción que no conocía. Me lo ha recomendado bastante, ya veremos que tal resulta.

De la contraportada

«His almost unfathomably wonderful sotries tick away with the precision of a Swiss watch -and explode in your awareness with shocking, devastaing force.»

Kirkus Review (starred review)

Ted Chiang’s first published story, «Tower of Babylon,» won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won him the Hugo Adward, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Adward, the Sidewise Adward, The Saiun Adward, and a second Nebula. He won the John W. Campbell Adward for Best New Writer in 1992. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF.

Now, collected for the first time, here are all seven of this extraordinary writer’s stories-plus an eighth story written especially for this volume.

What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven-and broke through to Heaven’s other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science to naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity wre literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into pits were a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the storeis of Ted Chiang. Storeis of your life… and others

«My only problem with Ted Chiang’s writing is that he doesn’t do enough of it. A short story collection from his is a real treat.»

-Octavia E. Butler.

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Some even see God in the iPod. Sal Sberna, the forty-seven-year-old pastor of the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Houston, has constructed and elaborate Gospel of the Gizmo in a series of sermons devoted to «iPod Theology.» He siezes on the design of the iPod to dramatize one’s faith. «The reason the ouside of the iPod is so simple to use and so beautiful to look at is because of the way they designed the inside,» he told his congregation. «And so when Jesus talks to us about simplification, it must start on the inside.»

The Perfect Thing por Steven Levy

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With quantum computing comes a fundamental shift. The ability to spin up and down, to hold multiple states in superposition, to become entangled -all this is what atoms naturally do. Performing a quantum computation is a matter of jumping on the wagon and going along for the ride.

So maybe this kind of computing has always been going on. The particles that have been bouncing around since creation, fiipping each other’s sping, exchanging information, have been performing some kind of great cosmic calculation. The universe might itfself be a quantum computer. But that is another book.

A Shorcut Through Time: The Path to the Quantum Computer por George Johnson.

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