The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building


David J. Peterson - 2015
    Peterson comes a creative guide to language construction for sci-fi and fantasy fans, writers, game creators, and language lovers. Peterson offers a captivating overview of language creation, covering its history from Tolkien’s creations and Klingon to today’s thriving global community of conlangers. He provides the essential tools necessary for inventing and evolving new languages, using examples from a variety of languages including his own creations, punctuated with references to everything from Star Wars to Michael Jackson. Along the way, behind-the-scenes stories lift the curtain on how he built languages like Dothraki for HBO’s Game of Thrones and Shiväisith for Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World, and an included phrasebook will start fans speaking Peterson’s constructed languages. The Art of Language Invention is an inside look at a fascinating culture and an engaging entry into a flourishing art form—and it might be the most fun you’ll ever have with linguistics.

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You


Sam Gosling - 2001
    What he has discovered is intriguing: When it comes to the most essential components of our personality—from friendliness and flexibility to openness and originality—the things we own and the way we arrange them can say more about who we are than even our most intimate conversations.Packed with original research and a wealth of fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guide to our not-so-secret selves, and reveals how intensely connected we are to the places in which we live and work.

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece


Michael Benson - 2018
    Clarke created this cinematic masterpiece.Regarded as a masterpiece today, 2001: A Space Odyssey received mixed reviews on its 1968 release. Despite the success of Dr. Strangelove, director Stanley Kubrick wasn’t yet recognized as a great filmmaker, and 2001 was radically innovative, with little dialogue and no strong central character. Although some leading critics slammed the film as incomprehensible and self-indulgent, the public lined up to see it. 2001’s resounding commercial success launched the genre of big-budget science fiction spectaculars. Such directors as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and James Cameron have acknowledged its profound influence.Author Michael Benson explains how 2001 was made, telling the story primarily through the two people most responsible for the film, Kubrick and science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke. Benson interviewed Clarke many times, and has also spoken at length with Kubrick’s widow, Christiane; with visual effects supervisor Doug Trumbull; with Dan Richter, who played 2001’s leading man-ape; and many others.A colorful nonfiction narrative packed with memorable characters and remarkable incidents, Space Odyssey provides a 360-degree view of this extraordinary work, tracking the film from Kubrick and Clarke’s first meeting in New York in 1964 through its UK production from 1965-1968, during which some of the most complex sets ever made were merged with visual effects so innovative that they scarcely seem dated today. A concluding chapter examines the film’s legacy as it grew into it current justifiably exalted status.

The Psychology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained


Nigel C. Benson - 2011
    Clearly explaining more than 100 groundbreaking ideas in the field, The Psychology Book uses accessible text and easy-to-follow graphics and illustrations to explain the complex theoretical and experimental foundations of psychology.From its philosophical roots through behaviorism, psychotherapy, and developmental psychology, The Psychology Book looks at all the greats from Pavlov and Skinner to Freud and Jung, and is an essential reference for students and anyone with an interest in how the mind works.

Body Language


Julius Fast - 1970
    Unconsciously, it telegraphs your thoughts as you fold your arms, cross your legs, stand, walk, move your eyes and mouth. The new science of kinesics deals with these physical signals that we all send out.

Cayenne Pepper Cures (Miracle Healers from the Kitchen)


Sharon Daniels - 2012
    It is more powerful than any other." - Dr. Richard Schulze, Medical Herbalist from herbdoc.com.Hats off to you! You've just plunged into a wealth of information that hardly any professional doctors have a clue about. Get ready to relish in the brilliance of the kitchen miracle that surgeons shun and doctors disgrace.A sea of unknown, unrevealed information awaits you. This book will act as your guide, so that you will soon be able to harness the full power of cayenne - the herb I once took for granted, and the herb that I now owe my health.Everyone out there seems to be promoting good health. Well, that's great. Good health is something that needs to be promoted. You need herbs, not drugs. You need nature, not synthetics. You need to use the proven, natural, side-affect-free healers that the earth is full of, not the clear, cold liquids that scientists processed through a test tube.If I had the time, I'd drive from house to house, shaking people out of their beds and telling them to wake up to the miracles of cayenne. But I can't, so I've got the next best thing.This report, which I've been compiling for a while, is brimming with the fiery brilliance of cayenne and all that I've found out about it.For example, cayenne has been known to cure 17 big diseases. It has been known to stop a heart attack in a matter of minutes. It can sharpen your vision better than the most powerful contact lenses available. It can expand your arteries like anything, giving the blood room to really flow and travel everywhere, from your arms (giving you strength) to your brain (giving you better brainpower). It can cure arthritis and much, much more.If your heart can't pump enough blood to a certain area, take cayenne pepper.Because if you're on prescription medications, you could take up to a year (or more!) to heal. But if you take cayenne, you could cut it down to a month or two.Did you know that if you take garlic in the right proportions, you can bring your blood pressure back to normal in three months?Well, if you add cayenne, you could cut that down to three days.Cayenne can unclog your kidneys and your sinuses, allow you to breathe freely and restore broken, bleeding gums to normal. Cayenne, in short, is a kitchen miracle.I owe my health to cayenne. I hope that by reading this report, you soon will too.To your health,Sharon Daniels

Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets


Charles Wohlforth - 2016
    But Beyond Earth does not offer another wide-eyed technology fantasy: instead it is grounded not only in the human capacity for invention and the appeal of adventure but also in the bureaucratic, political, and scientific realities that present obstacles to space travel - realities that have hampered NASA's efforts ever since the Challenger fiasco. In Beyond Earth, the authors offer groundbreaking research and argue persuasively that not Mars but Titan - a moon of Saturn with a nitrogen atmosphere, a weather cycle, and an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy, where we will be able to fly like birds in the minimal gravitational field - offers the most realistic and thrilling prospect of life without support from Earth.

13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time


Michael Brooks - 2008
    The effects of homeopathy don’t go away under rigorous scientific conditions. The laws of nature aren’t what they used to be. Thirty years on, no one has an explanation for a seemingly intelligent signal received from outer space. The US Department of Energy is re-examining cold fusion because the experimental evidence seems too solid to ignore. The placebo effect is put to work in medicine while doctors can’t agree whether it even exists.In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they simply can’t explain. But, if the past is anything to go by, these anomalies contain the seeds of future revolutions. While taking readers on an entertaining tour d’horizon of the strangest of scientific findings – involving everything from our lack of free will to Martian methane that offers new evidence of life on the planet – Michael Brooks argues that the things we don’t understand are the key to what we are about to discover.This mind-boggling but entirely accessible survey of the outer limits of human knowledge is based on a short article by Michael Brooks for New Scientist magazine. It became the sixth most circulated story on the internet in 2005, and provoked widespread comment and compliments (Google “13 things that do not make sense” to see).Michael Brooks has now dug deeply into those mysteries, with extraordinary results.

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance


Steven D. Levitt - 2009
    Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first.Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What's more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it's so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary?SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?How much good do car seats do?What's the best way to catch a terrorist?Did TV cause a rise in crime?What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?Can eating kangaroo save the planet?Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is – good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky.Freakonomics has been imitated many times over – but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.

Bad Science


Ben Goldacre - 2008
    When Dr Ben Goldacre saw someone on daytime TV dipping her feet in an 'Aqua Detox' footbath, releasing her toxins into the water, turning it brown, he thought he'd try the same at home. 'Like some kind of Johnny Ball cum Witchfinder General', using his girlfriend's Barbie doll, he gently passed an electrical current through the warm salt water. It turned brown. In his words: 'before my very eyes, the world's first Detox Barbie was sat, with her feet in a pool of brown sludge, purged of a weekend's immorality.' Dr Ben Goldacre is the author of the Bad Science column in the Guardian. His book is about all the 'bad science' we are constantly bombarded with in the media and in advertising. At a time when science is used to prove everything and nothing, everyone has their own 'bad science' moments from the useless pie-chart on the back of cereal packets to the use of the word 'visibly' in cosmetics ads.

Guinness World Records 2013 Bonus Chapter


Guinness World Records - 2012
    Featuring additional content in the form of photographs and record-breaking facts, The Bonus Chapter also provides a behind-the-scenes look at Guinness World Records. The Bonus Chapter is available exclusively as a richly designed eBook and includes our Top 10 Claimants, a 'Day in the Life of an Adjudicator' as well as a special section on the Olympics and a quiz to test your superlative knowledge. A perfect accompaniment to Guinness World Records 2013, The Bonus Chapter is for all those fans who want to learn even more about the ultimate authority on record-breaking.

CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis


Warren Ellis - 2015
    CUNNING PLANS collects several of NYT-bestselling author Warren Ellis' lectures on the nature of the haunted future and the secrets of deep history, given in recent years at events in London, New York, Los Angeles and Berlin.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach


Ben Falk - 2013
    The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies(relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading.The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings."The Resilient Homestead" is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.

Robotech Art 1: From the Animated Series Robotech


Kay Reynolds - 1986
    

Terminal World


Alastair Reynolds - 2009
    Clinging to its skin are the zones, a series of semi-autonomous city-states, each of which enjoys a different—and rigidly enforced—level of technology. Horsetown is pre-industrial; in Neon Heights they have television and electric trains . . .Following an infiltration mission that went tragically wrong, Quillon has been living incognito, working as a pathologist in the district morgue. But when a near-dead angel drops onto his dissecting table, Quillon's world is wrenched apart one more time, for the angel is a winged posthuman from Spearpoint's Celestial Levels—and with the dying body comes bad news.If Quillon is to save his life, he must leave his home and journey into the cold and hostile lands beyond Spearpoint's base, starting an exile that will take him further than he could ever imagine. But there is far more at stake than just Quillon's own survival, for the limiting technologies of the zones are determined not by governments or police, but by the very nature of reality—and reality itself is showing worrying signs of instability . . .Terminal World is a snarling, drooling, crazy-eyed mongrel of a book: equal parts steampunk, western, planetary romance, and far-future SF.