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Samedi, 7 janvier 2023

Stories of Your Life and Others

Traduction: [ Google | Babelfish ]

Catégories : [ Livres ]

ISBN: 9781529039436

© Amazon.fr

Tower of Babylon

A tower has been built over many centuries in Babylon, reaching the sky. When miners reach the top and start opening the sky, most are drown in a flood, but one manages to climb up and emerges on the ground, outside the city.

Understand

Leon's brain is repaired after an accident, giving him to know the world accurately and predict people's reactions, starting to control the world in the shadows. He's eventually contacted by another person with the same ability who beats him at his own game.

Division by Zero

A mathematician manages to correctly prove that one equals two and goes into depression as mathematics don't make sense anymore.

Story of Your Life

Louse, a linguist, starts to learn the language of extra-terrestrials who just landed on Earth. The spoken language has no relation to the written form, which requires to know in advance what will be written. This gives Louise the ability to see the future, including the death at 25 of her yet-unborn daughter, but that is not preventing her from having a baby.

Seventy-two Letters

In a world where words animate statues (Golem-style), Stratton tries to find words allowing to build dextrous machines that could replace humans in complex labour, but is opposed by the workers who build the statues. He meets researchers who have discovered that men will become sterile after a few generations and is asked to work with them on a word that, once printed onto a women's ovum, would make it evolve into a human. As this would lead to eugenics and the control of the population by a few people, he instead has the idea of hiding inside the word the commands for the evolved ovum to create ova where the word is already printed.

The Evolution of Human Science

A scientific article describing human science after meta-humans have appeared and develop science without communicating with humans anymore, the latter focusing on understanding what the formers have discovered.

Hell is the Absence of God

In a world where angels regularly appear on Earth, perform miracle cures but also kill people in the process, Neil's wife Sarah is one such victim. Neil is struggling because he wants to start believing in God so that he would rejoin her in Paradise, but doing so for selfish reasons would ensure he won't succeed. Neil eventually becomes a believer when touched by an angelic apparition's fire (which is a sure way to start believing unconditionally), dies from his wounds and still goes to Hell (which is just like regular life for non-believers).

Liking What You See: A Documentary

As marketing has been abusing the humans' weakness to trust beautiful people, a neural switch has been discovered that can reversibly cause calliagnosia and become unable to distinguish beauty from ugliness in people. A university is considering making calli a requirement, but the debate is biased by the lobby of cosmetics manufacturers who uses minute visual enhancements to make its spokesperson more convincing, leading the rejection of the pro-calli proposal, and displacing the original problem with marketing.

[ Posté le 7 janvier 2023 à 17:23 | pas de commentaire | ]