"The Peripheral" 2014 novel by William Gibson

I very much enjoyed Vancouver science fiction author William Gibson's latest novel The Peripheral. He said he drew inspiration from the 1985 story "Mozart in Mirrorshades" by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. That story appeared in Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology edited by Bruce Sterling (1986). I'd call Gibson's novel a sci-fi thriller, one that would make for a pretty good movie in the right hands. The novel's short chapters more or less alternate between a future, not our own, and a past whose future has been changed by that future. It's time travel, but not in any physical sense nor between the same time streams. I found the novel to be a real page turner. There are some strong female characters, including one of the protagonists. You might find it a little tough to get into at first, but if you stick with it I think you'll find it a rewarding, stimulating read.

http://www.amazon.ca/Peripheral-William-Gibson/dp/0399158448

The Darkest Hour (2014) novel: if Germany had won World War 2

Finished an absorbing first novel by British author Tony Schumacher called The Darkest Hour (2014). It's an alternate history where Germany won World War 2 and occupied much of England, including London. Set in 1946 in London, the work is very dark but compelling. It follows a former police sergeant and war hero, John Henry Rossett, who's being used by the Germans to round up Jews and deport them to the Continent. I thought I had the ending figured out, but I got fooled along the way as the novel took a different turn than I expected. Highly recommended for anyone into alternate  histories. This one also has movie all over it.

How Intelligent Design spoiled a good novel

Just when I was beginning to get into Philip Kerr's 1999 science fiction novel The Second Angel, set near the end of the 21st century, I felt he spoiled it on page 19 of the hardcover edition by lecturing on an aspect of biology and attributing his omniscient narrator's explanation to Intelligent Design. Anyone unfamiliar with this discredited ID argument would not even have suspected its author of being less than truthful. The author's blurb on the dustjacket claims he has an "encyclopedic intelligence," but this does not mean that he's 100% right all the time. So what does he say:

"It is certain that the mathematics of blood, the numbers inherent in its complex structure, provide perhaps the best evidence for the existence of some kind of Creator.

Take something like the process of coagulation, which requires the participation of several hemostatic proteins. ... It is hard not to understate the irreducibly complex nature of this system. The ratio of the probability that such a system might come into being by pure chance to the probability that it might not come into being is so enormous that it is almost impossible to find a number large enough to express these odds."

The code words in this explanation that link it to ID are "complex structure", "irreducibly complex", "pure chance" and the linking of this biochemical process to "evidence for the existence of some kind of Creator."

Kerr based his information, though, oddly he did not cite his source despite numerous footnotes throughout the novel, on the work of ID proponents Michael Behe, a biochemist, and William Dembski, a mathematician.

If you want to read more about how scientists and others have thoroughly discredited Intelligent Design and its predecessors Creationism and Creation Science, go to the National Center for Science Education's Web site, a United States organization that promotes the teaching of science in public schools. Use the NCSE site search and look up "blood clotting" to find several examples that debunk the ID claims that blood clotting is evidence of a designer of biological life, that is, a God.

Why spoil good fiction with pseudoscience when there's all kinds of perfectly good science out there?