We’ve been loading the 28 volumes of the Gorean Chronicles, John Norman’s bestselling cult science fiction series, onto the Kindle, and we’re told a bunch of them are now available with the rest to follow in pretty short order. Go to the Kindle store and download to your heart’s content. Don’t worry if you see a “No Image Available” icon – it takes a while for their site to grab the images from ours. Your Kindle will have the full image, such as the one displayed here for Tarnsman of Gor, the first novel in the series. And if you should enter “Gor by John Norman” in the Kindle search box and be asked “Do you mean God by John Norman,” you tell them No, we mean Gor!

Tarnsman was released by Ballantine in 1966, and over the next fifteen years or so another 24 were published by Ballantine and then DAW. The books were enormously popular and sales were tremendous – until, one day it all ground to a halt, mysteriously, like that scene at the end of War of the Worlds where a seemingly invincible alien catches cold and drops dead. What happened? Tastes in reading habits change but usually they evolve rather than fall off a cliff as Gor did.

To learn what happened, read Are John Norman’s Gors “Boy Books”?

And for the full inventory of his works, visit the John Norman page on E-Reads.

RC

Okay, hotshots, name the sources of the following quotes about science:

1) “The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind—a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you’ve just made a down payment on a house.”
2) “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
3) “A walk in the rain forest is a walk into the mind of God.”
4) “I abjure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect contrary to the said Holy Church; and I swear that I will never more in future say, or assert anything, verbally or in writing, which may give rise to a similar suspicion of me.”
5) “The universe was dictated but not signed.”
6) “All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
/Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.”
7) “I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.”
“It is absurd to deny the role of fantasy in even the strictest science.”

These come from Science Says: A Collection of Quotations on the History, Meaning and Practice of Science selected and edited by Rob Kaplan. Perhaps no other topic is as relevant to our lives today as science. We look to its practitioners and observers for insights into the nature of the universe.

Here then is an indispensable collection of the best that has been written and spoken about science from ancient times to today. Uttered by scientists, philosophers and (if you haven’t guessed by now) wits and wags, the passages in this handy volume are filled with wisdom and thought-provoking quotes.

You can download the e-book or purchase it in paperback from E-Reads.

Guessed the attribution of the quotes? Here they are:

1) Woody Allen
2)Albert Einstein
3) Birute M. F. Galdikas
4) Galileo Galilei
5) Christopher Morley
6) Alexander Pope
7) Mark Twain
V. I. Lenin

Isaac Asimov, a seminal figure in twentieth century science fiction, was also a brilliant popularizer of science, making clarity out of the chaos of complex concepts and formulas.

Could there be any more challenging concept than the creation of the universe? Early civilizations attributed it to gods or to one God. In Asimov’s In the Beginning: Science Faces God in the Book of Genesis, the author attempts to reconcile the religious with the scientific, painting a picture of Creation, the beginning of time and the origin of life itself.

In his line-by-line annotation of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, Asimov carefully and even-handedly compares the two accounts, pointing out where they are similar and where they are different.

“There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiriting as that of the Book of Genesis,” Asimov says. However, human knowledge does increase, and if the Biblical writers, “had written those early chapters of Genesis knowing what we know today, we can be certain that they would have written it completely differently.”

Isaac Asimov brings to this fascinating subject his wide-ranging knowledge of science and history—and his award-winning ability to explain the complex with accuracy, clarity, and wit.