and Science in the Capital Series: 40 Signs of Rain; 50 Degrees Below; and 60 Days and Counting
are artworks of fiction by UCSD alum Kim Stanley Robinson. A month or two back, he was a guest speaker at UCSC but his works will outlive him. Major themes are ecological sustainability, Buddhism, ecological ethics, politics, technology, feral community living, etc. The Memory of Whiteness deals with ethical issues surrounding the creation and preservation of a one-man-orchestra piece of technology someplace in the future, sometime in the solar system. If you read one of these books, you will not be sorry. They all apply to the issues of this class, and are great reads. They take the issues into the level of art. Just as in history, they now often advise reading historical novels, here novels have value too.