Sciencefiction.com finally published my 'amusing' article on 'Higgs for Dummies', posted here some days back. I think its content jars with the comic-book, TV and film news pieces which now define the identity of the site. However, my post has attracted an acceptable number of likes and tweets. Sufficient, in any event, to move my thoughts on to further articles.
Just read Ken MacLeod's well-written 'Intrusion', which extrapolates the current nanny-state to something like fascism carried out by well-meaning, cheery types who are convinced they are oppressing you in your own interests.
The plot centres around a perfectly ordinary middle-class couple who feel uninclined to take "the fix" which will rewrite and correct any non-standard genes in the wife's unborn child-to-be. How antisocial of them!
However, it turns out that the child may well be carrying a beneficial (and science-fictional) mutation so the state might not be, well, ... right about this.
MacLeod writes better than most SF authors and the book is both intelligent and a page-turner. It doesn't quite reach the bar as a literary work as the characters, though well-realised, never seem to offer us any psychological insight. The author is more interested in ideas ... but this is SF. He wears his Marxism lightly, in any event.
