Some Smart Sci-Fi

Two recommendations for sci-fi lovers:

1) if you're overly worried about the surveillance state we live in . . . or if you're not worried at all about the surveillance state we live in, then take some time off from the screens and read Normal, the new Warren Ellis novel: it's short (148 pages) and fast-paced and vivid, a locked-room mystery set in a high-end asylum/refuge for depressed futurists broken by the digital age . . . and there are lots of bugs;

2) if you're overly worried about alien invasion . . . or not worried at all about alien invasion, then watch Arrival, where Louise Banks (Amy Adams) and Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) truly get lost in translation; screenwriter Eric Heisserer takes a page out of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five: his heptapods see time all at once, like the Tralfamadorians, but this story doesn't have the surreal breezy irony of Vonnegut . . . it's paradoxical, cerebral and byzantine-- and done very realistically-- it's definitely not a thriller, and rather sad, but I loved it and so did my eleven year old son.

Go Ahead and Squash It

 One of my students confessed to having killed a praying mantis when she was young-- and she referred to this bug-slaughter as "committing a felony"-- and I can remember hearing the same thing when I was a kid: that it is against the law to kill a praying mantis, but according to the myth-busting website snopes.com, this is an urban legend . . . so if one of those large green alien-headed critters surprises you while you're on the john and you smash it with a magazine, you don't have to chop the body into little pieces and sneak it down to the Pine Barrens for a a clandestine burial.