I finished Darwin's Radio early this week, after the previous Sunday Morning Book Thread. It was an interesting take on how a dormant virus inside all of us wakes up periodically to invoke sudden evolutionary changes in humanity. It's very vague about the underlying causes for this awakening, though perhaps it may be caused by the needs of the population at the time. The world is freaking out over the changes that are happening to women all over the world. Because of the unnatural pregnancies, abortion is rampant as nearly all of the fetuses have horrific deformities. However, after a period of time, things sort out and normal-looking children start to be born, but they aren't quite like their parents, displaying some rather unnatural traits. The book hasn't aged all that well. At one point the government trots out Bill Cosby (yes, THAT Bill Cosby) as a spokesman to help calm down Americans who are violently rioting in the cities.

I haven't read any Simak in a while, so I went back to reread this one. Simak, like Asimov, wrote many stories featuring robots. Simak's robots tend to have a very symbiotic relationship with humanity. Although they are not programmed with Asimov's Three Laws, they develop their own set of ethics to respect the humans who built them. Sometimes they can go awry, but for the most part robots see themselves as the inheritors of the world that humans have built. In Project Pope a society of robots and humans at the edge of the galaxy (End of Nowhere) build a supercomputer to find the ultimate faith. They feed it data collected by "Listeners," psychic humans who send out their astral bodies to explore the cosmos--possibly even other realities. One of them claims to have found "Heaven"--the true Heaven as depicted in Christianity, which causes a crisis of faith among the robots and humans.

Since this is a Simak novel, things are rarely quite as they appear and the main characters go on a quest to uncover the truth of Mary's visions. Did she really find Heaven? What will this mean for the Project? Good stuff. Recommended if you like science fiction.

This is a Zelazny novel, so things get very weird very quickly. We start out with the main character, Jack, being beheaded for a crime he didn't commit. This inconveniences him a bit as he wakes up again in the Dung Pits of Glyve at the West Pole of the World (equivalent to the Bog of Eternal Stench from Labyrinth. He then goes on an epic quest of vengeance against those who have wronged him.

It's a dark tragedy of a novel as Jack's entire world comes crashing down around him once he gains access to the ultimate power in the cosmos. In the end, his thirst for vengeance and his desire to rule lead to the destruction of the world. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Shub-Niggurath is also known as the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. She's the Outer God of fertility. Although her true form is somewhat nebulous, she's often depicted with goat-like features by the cultists who worship her. Price has collected 15 stories that involve an incarnation of Shub-Niggurath in some way. They're pretty creepy.

On a side note, Shub-Niggurath is the final boss of the video game Quake. The only way to kill her is to teleport to her location at just the right moment, thus causing a "telefrag."

Alan Dean Foster has written a number of movie novelizations, including the novelization of Star Wars. This one was available at the recent library book sale, so I picked it up as I figured it would be an easy, breezy read. I was also curious how Foster would handle the moments of tension and suspense in novel form.

It's obvious that most of the crew of the Nostromo are idiots as they constantly make dumb decisions. In the novelization, Foster lampshades this through Dallas' internal dialog--he doesn't want to be a captain, making hard decisions. He'd much rather be stashed in the engineering decks tinkering on engines.

Also, when I got to the part where the alien bursts out of Kane's chest, I couldn't help but be reminded of the famous scene from spaceballs...

Full disclosure: I've never watched the movie from start to finish. I've watched parts of it here and there, but never all at once. I'll have to rectify that one day.