Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bug Eyed Numbers, July 12, 2006
Earls zapped me a pdf of this for review when I contacted him about some experimental math matters. I can say that the writing is vivid, even muscular. Reminiscent of 30s and 40s bug eyed monster sci fi, but with irony attached, apparently. Hope so, anyway. It was a surprisingly quick read, because it is 60 or 70 percent digits. Even when one understands what they signify, the best thing to do is to scroll through them quickly and grab the next piece of prose, it seems to me. I suspect this book is an excuse to get certain numerical observations onto the record in a very public venue. It's a clever strategy for publicizing one's research and the pill is coated with some fairly entertaining early 20th century sci fi sugar.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing blend of Mathematics and Fantasy, July 11, 2006
According to his own words: "Jason Earls is a writer and computational number theorist who lives in Blackwell, Oklahoma with his wife Christine. He's had one short story published in The House of Pain, while his poems have appeared in Poethia, Can we have our ball back?, Word for Word, Shampoo, M.A.G., and Side Reality, among others. His mathematical work has been published in Recreational and Educational Computing, The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences, Prime Curios, and elsewhere.
Copyright © 2004 by Jason Earls"
This "Split Novel" is an entertaining and almost inexplicable mixture of the Fantasy outlook on life and the Mathematical viewpoint. The text ironically contrasts the "Two Cultures" view of C.P. Snow (that Scientific intellectuals and Arts/Humanities intellectuals no longer cinercommunicate) with a gonzo melange reminiscent of other recent mathematical Fantasists such as Rudy Rucker and Vernor Vinge. His previous story story "Hand of Something" in 2004's Bewildering Stories leads into the fractal plot, which also echoes the fiction of Scotland-born Caltech Math professor Eric Temple Bell [1883-1960], who wrote under the pseudonym "John Taine" and led at least a double life (new evidence is that he led a triple life). There is a consistently playful poetic imagination with Jason Earls, as he's shown us before in poems such as this from Shampoo Sixteen:
No Solution
1. reverse about sigma
69. split the cleaves
276. live there against it
639. push holes into the void
2556. point your dish to black body `fossil' radiation
?????. rules sequenced all have nothing-wisdom.
I hope that this split novel turns out to be the first book of a trilogy, as he seems to hint with cryptic comments about "3 being the first odd prime."
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bizarro Mathematical Sci Fi Goodness, July 12, 2006
A friend of mine is having a hard time posting a review, so I am posting it for her (it may show up twice):
This book is definitely weird but I liked it. The first novella involves alien visitation and abduction and I am always a sucker for those kinds of stories. But there is a lot of strange numbers with interesting patterns in the first half as well and that is very unusual to see in fiction. I noticed there isn't a book description listed above but I found one on another site and thought I would post it.
0.1361015212836455566789110512013615... Borzag and the Numerical Apocalypse by JASON EARLS. A martial arts instructor by day, not even a science fiction fan, Tyrone Vadas has been receiving strange visits lately from a gargantuan alien with numerous undulating appendages. The alien returns every night attempting to give Tyrone a special gift. But he doesn't want it. Then the numbers begin. They go on and on and never seem to end. Will Tyrone ever accept the alien's gift? And could the multitude of numbers be signaling the end of the world?
life.exe by JASON ROGERS. What if 'people' really did live in a matrices dominated existence?
The second novella in the book, the part by Mr. Rogers, was a lot different than the first novella. The story seems to be set in a class room and the characters are long binary numbers. It was kind of confusing but sort of okay overall with a good quote by Beckett at the end which summed up everything nicely.
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