A near-future dystopian fantasy and a new way of explaining the origin of life

New releases of fiction, non-fiction and comics have caught our attention.

Hum by Helen Phillips

Robots have become a common tool for workers, and people are losing their jobs to AI. Climate change is wreaking havoc on the planet. It is becoming more and more difficult for the average person to make a living. Facial recognition technology is used for surveillance. Sound familiar? In his new book, author Helen Phillips paints a picture of what our near future might look like.

Its main character, May, has lost her job after technology made her role obsolete, and, desperate for money to support her family, she agrees to participate in an experiment that changes her face to make her invisible. For an extra payment, she takes her husband and children on a short, low-tech vacation to the Botanical Garden – but things go dangerously wrong. Hum it’s a fascinating, unsettling work of dystopian fiction that makes it hard not to draw parallels to our current reality.

Life As Nobody Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence by Sara Imari Walker

There is much we do not know about the origin of life on Earth, and how it might have evolved on other worlds. Arizona State University philosopher and astrophysicist Sara Imari Walker answers the perennial question, “What is life?” and much more in his book, Life As Nobody Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence. It explores integration theory, which, as Walker recently explained as a guest on podcast, says “life is the only way the universe has to make things complicated. So complex things don’t happen by chance, they only happen through evolution and selection.”

It’s an endlessly fascinating topic that has sparked much debate over the years, and Walker’s book presents its case in a compelling and readable way even for us non-scientists. It’ll certainly give your brain a little exercise, though… and maybe spark some (friendly) arguments. he called it, “Smart, but not for the faint of heart.”

Cruel Universe #1

The return of EC Comics continues with the release of another new series, Cruel Universe. The upstart publisher dropped the first issue of the science fiction series this week, featuring stories by Corinna Bechko, Chris Condon, Matt Kindt and Ben H. Winters, with art by Jonathan Case, Kano, Artyom Topilin and Caitlin Yarsky. it takes us to the battlefield of the stars, face to face with a black hole, in search of eternal life and more.

It’s a great follow-up to , the new horror anthology from EC. If you like the old one Weird Science comics and other EC science fiction series, this one is definitely worth checking out.

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