Artificial Life in a Digital World
by Stefan Helmreich, MA ’92,
lecturer in anthropology,
University of California Press,
1998; $29.95 (ethnography)
In the information age, life itself -- coded in DNA -- becomes just so much software. That’s the starting point for the nascent scientific field known as artificial life. A cultural anthropologist, Helmreich takes you inside this rapidly growing specialty, where researchers believe that self-replicating computer programs -- such as computer viruses -- are new forms of life, the beginning of an alternate universe “ready to be populated with reproducing, mutating, competing and ultimately unpredictable programs.” Much of the action takes place at the Santa Fe Institute, an offshoot of Los Alamos National Laboratory. The author explores how the field’s pioneers are combining high-end science with their own sometimes unconscious notions of gender, kinship, race, class and cosmology.
Friendly Fire
by Kathryn Chetkovich, MA ’85,
University of Iowa Press, 1998;
$15.95 (fiction)
These short stories portray a world where everyday interactions carry insidious risks. People mix edgily with friends and family, wondering when the next well-meaning sniper will attack -- waiting for someone to say, “I think we should talk,” or worse, never connecting with loved ones at all. Chetkovich finds significance in the unexpected detail, the odd observation (“Lila offers her a champagne drink, pale gold with a stain of red at the bottom”). The 11 stories in this first collection by the Santa Cruz-based writer are built more on situations than plots. They are tales of men and women whose lives are missing something, and, fittingly, the story lines are not tied up neatly at the end.
Which World? Scenarios for the
21st Century,
by Allen Hammond, ’66,
Island Press, 1998; $24.95
(economics)
Where is humanity headed in the next 50 years -- toward a more civilized world or one mired in poverty, terrorism and environmental ruin? The author, director of strategic analysis at the World Resources Institute in Washington, D.C., uses social, political, scientific and economic data from seven major regions to imagine three possible scenarios for 2050. Some long-term trends -- increased industrial efficiency, declining birthrates in developing countries -- are heartening. Others, like growing famine in sub-Saharan Africa and bigger-than-ever gaps between rich and poor, are cause for alarm. But Hammond argues that the worst outcomes can be averted if society musters the will to change.
This Body,
by Laurel Doud, ’76,
Little, Brown and Co., 1998;
$23.95 (fiction)
In dark moments it's a fantasy perhaps every middle-aged wife and mother has had: going to sleep and waking up in the body of a thin, rich, young woman. But when Katharine Ashley dies and ends up a year later in the body of Thisby Bennet, she also inherits the 22-year-old's drug habit and dysfunctional family. In this first novel, which has been purchased by the 20th Century Fox movie studio, Doud explores the link between body and soul. Imagined through the prism of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Thisby and her family take their names from the Bard's characters), the book traces Katharine's identity crisis, her efforts to repair the lives of Thisby and younger sister, Quince, and her pain when she discovers her husband and children have moved forward without her.
