Reading Challenge Week 44 - A book about science.

This week’s Reading Challenge is all about a little something called “science”. Or, as they say in French: science.

Science is the scientifical study of things with a certain scientificity. Scientists study science in order to gain a sciential knowledge and produce scientisms. A good scientist can scientize with the best of them. Some scientists are so scient, they study scientometrics. You could say such scientistic persons are well scienced - these scientiates are better versed in scientificalness than scientasters, at the very least.

Say, did you know we have a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary?

How about some book reviews?

Scott Dale read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson


Science fiction is about science. It’s in the name.

There are many books on science fiction written by scientists, take Carl Sagan’s Contact, or one of Arthur C. Clarke’s many books. There is also JCU research that suggests science fiction has a part to play in how we communicate real science.  

And that takes us to Red Mars, the first in Kim Stanley Robinson’s award winning Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars). The story begins in the near future and tells the story of the colonisation of Mars. Red Mars starts us on Mars, inside a tent city before backtracking and telling the story of the first hundred people who were sent to establish a human presence on the planet. 

Where’s the science? There’s the space elevator, the terraforming of a whole planet, the creation of soil, and a whole lot more.

Kim Stanley Robinson researches the science and bases his work on the potentially possible. This first book of the immense trilogy introduces the political, social and environmental aspects of forming a new colony on another planet.

This big book is part of an even bigger trilogy so it’s a good thing that this is a page-turner. 


Sharon Bryan read The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology by Masaharu Takemura, illustrated by Sakura.

Yes, once again I have managed to shoehorn a graphic novel into my book choice for a Reading Challenge. That’s just the way I roll, baby. If I can find something illustrated, I will.

The Manga Guide To series consist of a number of books that use the ancient and noble Japanese art of comic books to provide an introduction to a topic that might be mindnumbingly boring or a conceptual leap beyond what normal people do, think and understand. As soon as our budget lets us get away with it, I will be ordering The Manga Guide to Statistics.

Two first year college students, Ami and Rin, are on the verge of failing their introductory molecular biology course due to the fact that they haven’t turned up to any classes. If you did that at JCU, you’d be sent a strongly worded email. In Rin and Ami’s case, however, they are sent to an island belonging to the professor (a Dr Moro – geddit?) so a cute research assistant called Marcus can use an immersive virtual reality device called the “Dream Machine” to take them on a tour though the building blocks of cells.

Call me crazy, but if the cute research assistant used the fancy virtual reality machine to deliver the lectures in an immersive and engaging way in the first place, maybe the girls wouldn’t have skipped class. But I digress.

It’s a bit like the Magic Schoolbus, only hyped up on sugar and with more exposed midriffs. I learnt that a chicken egg is actually just one big cell and that “helix” is a shape – the shape of a coiled telephone cable, to be precise. I also learnt actual information about DNA, RNA, replication and transcription – which was all very interesting, but in the long term I’ll probably remember that thing about the egg and the helix. What can I say? Dammit, Jim, I’m a librarian, not a doctor.

Comments