Ignota推荐的科学史新书｜书讯

Ignota books是一家成立于2017年末的独立出版社。“Ignota”的意思是“未知”。Ignota books对未知的世界充满了兴趣，出版书籍主题集中在技术，神话和魔法这几个话题的交汇处。Ignota books的成立起初是为了回应当下面临的政治、历史、生态、心理和物质等各方面的挑战，希望在共识被逐渐破坏的时代建立一种新的叙述，为不同的知识形式寻找一种新的表达，重新想象日常世界的诸种可能。作为一个独立出版社，Ignota books始终秉持勇于尝试的实验精神，以寻找其他探索者为努力目标，涉足许多大出版社因为商业利润而谨慎行事的未知领域。

今年12月，Ignota books在博客上更新了自己的2020年推荐书单，书单内容非常丰富，从AI写作到吸血植物传说，从技术创新到魔法咒语，也关注科幻小说，诗歌，批判理论等。

详细内容可以点击阅读原文直接跳转原网址，以下为部分内容的搬运~

K Allado-McDowell

The Anthropocene is producing a remembered form of literature that unravels narrow definitions of the individual and the human to regenerate a transhumanism that has always existed in ancestral and Earth networks, and in oceanic awareness.M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (Duke) reconstructs the future of our world through a Blackness beyond the bounded knowledge of the capitalist episteme. When I want to think this way, I dive into this book.

Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History by Thomas Moynihan (Urbanomic) traces the emergence of human consciousness through geological trauma and upright posture in a hypergenealogy of thought that sees our subjective differentiation from the external world internalized and re-rendered as technical exoskeleton. Looking into the deep time stored in morphology, this book seeks out the limits of a twisted future. A few dark drops go a long way.

Laurel Halo

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (Penguin), Conversations with Iannis Xenakis by Bálint András Varga (Faber) and The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard (Fitzcarraldo) are three books all centered on duration and spatiality, offering insight on the limits of human perception. Whether regarding the space/time continuum (Rovelli), listening or (extra)musical language (Xenakis/Varga), or one’s existence as an animal on planet Earth (Hildyard), I found all three valuable for appreciating and navigating restrictions, imposed from without or within.

Johanna Hedva

This year many of my anxieties were ameliorated by reading recent nonfiction about totalitarianism and the mess of democracy (How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley (Random House), How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (Penguin), and Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone by Astra Taylor (Verso)) although Yoko Ogawa's 1994 novel, The Memory Police (Harvill Secker), has burrowed deeper into me than anything else. Set in one of the most unspeakably terrifying worlds I can think of, where things — peaches, music, novels — are systematically and totally forgotten by a complacent citizenry, I was stunned at the book's depictions of small joys. The birthday party in the hidden crawlspace, where the characters let themselves laugh too loudly, then worry the police will hear them, then forget and laugh again, is one of the most devastating scenes of human perseverance that I've ever read. My other favorite book this year was Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic (British Library), part of the British Library's Tales of the Weird series. I had no idea there was a genre that featured killer plants, zombie fungus, homicidally carnivorous flowers, and interspecies vampirism, nor that it would be so aptly descriptive of psychic and political unease, as only the best horror can do. Also, it was hilarious.

Daisy Lafarge

I loved we are opposite like that by Himali Singh Soin—the book is a conceptual and typographic wonder, a paratactical almanac of texts written during a residency in the Arctic Circle. Soin’s lapidary, fictive-factive prose exfoliates various Arctic imaginaries, from Coleridge’s Arctic-as-metaphor to the fabled icy origins of the Vedas, and a manifesto of ‘subcontinentment’ solidarity via South Asian Futurism. The excellent SPAM Press published their first book-length venture, portals by Rosie Roberts—part drizzly canicular love song, part Arcades Project, portals writes Glasgow like nothing else I’ve read, a city reassembled through overheard conversations, copses of thought, birdsong, fishy aggregations and collectivity as the bells of bodies chiming beyond their positions. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’sA Treatise of Stars was also a highlight, and I’ve loved discovering the cosmological poetics of Will Alexander. Fiction-wise I was devastated by Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (Norton), and my favourite slow burner has been The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner (Virago), very on the 2020 anchorite trend, but a sobering ~400 pages on the rainy economics of being a nun in 14th c. Norfolk. Top of my hopeful holiday reading pile is Sianne Ngai’sTheory of the Gimmick (Bellknap).

Jenna Sutela

2020 didn’t feel quite so lonely thanks to two extraordinary new books by my ingenious friends: forthcoming on Deluge Books is Emily Segal’s Mercury Retrograde and just out on Ignota is K Allado-McDowell’s Pharmako-AI. Both books interact with the future.

In Mercury Retrograde, messages from hereafter come in the form of a visual shimmer across the protagonist’s perceptual field: a form of “future nausea” or “a distortion of the manufactured field of normalcy as it stretches to accommodate the future.” Future also speaks to Emily through eye twitches, which must be one of my favorite visceral moments in the book. She asks: “How are you supposed to operate when the scripts you’re running are not your own?” When, as subjects of late capitalism, we don’t have full control over our consciousness.

Pharmako-AI is written in collaboration with OpenAI’s neural net language model GPT-3. In the book, K inhabits the world of the AI, meditating on and experimenting with a language ecology that’s not limited to human meaning. The scripts running here are founded on spiritual, ancestral and ecological concerns as well as the idea of symbiosis between humans and machines. Together, the two authors imagine a post-cyberpunk future where the objective, in the words of GPT-3, “is to live in the expression of the universe in its own image, which is semiosis, or the creation of meaning.”

Interdependence: Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon

One book we return to quite often for our work is causal inference pioneer Judea Pearl’s The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Penguin). Pearl pioneered Bayesian Networks in the 80s that enabled powerful probabilistic associations within data; today, a large proportion of what we understand AI to be can be accounted for by similar techniques. However, Pearl argues that the insights gathered from such techniques, while deceptively sophisticated, do not come close to what we might commonly understand as intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to understand why something happened, not simply make associations, and is also the ability to understand counterfactuals, or how something might have been different. This emphasis on why weighs heavily on our thinking, not only in enjoying the current suite of machine learning tools for what they are, but also as an opportunity to renew emphasis on our own (as yet unique) capacity for meaning making. Sure, we have now developed the ability to produce infinite music based upon probabilistic associations of notes and sounds, but beyond the initial novelty, why would we want that?

Irenosen Okojie

The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell (Vintage)

This superb novel follows the adventures of an old drifter in a settlement on the banks of the Zambezi River who mistakenly entangles the fates of an African busboy and an Italian hotelier. This is a daring amalgamation of historical, science fiction and fable.

Tai Shani: I have found it impossible to focus on reading this year, the only thing I have found more impossible is writing, so I ended up reading fragments of novels, essays, lots of nonfiction, poems. I was blown away by Anne Boyer's The Undying (Penguin); it is vast, an excavation into cancer and care. I am in total awe of her ability to bring together poetic artefacts, histories, painful and existential personal narrative. The writing is prodigious and masterful, the politics are radical and profound, it is a total gift. I also really enjoyed re-reading Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker (Bibliotech) and to be struck again by what a wonderful, provocative form science fiction is.

Jaya Klara Brekke

Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of Peoples by Erica Lagalisse (PM Press)

I attended a lecture by Erica Lagalisse, organised by David Graeber—rest in power—at the LSE last year, and I was in awe at the rigour she applied to looking at some of the awkward questions of radical political organising. She started off with an interrogation of the awkwardness of anarchists when encountering the spirituality of Indigenous groups whose struggles they had adopted, and how anarchist groups in Canada and Mexico invariably frame Indigenous struggles through a gendered distinction between the spiritual, which they would sideline as domestic, private and not politically relevant, and what could be read as secular aspects of their lives and organising, and therefore properly political. From there, she ventured into a deep investigation of the roots of anarchism in occult philosophies, which is what is covered in this fantastic but brief book. It traces the historical origins of anarchism through to the secret society of the Illuminati. It is a reminder of the true meaning of conspiracy—to conspire, breathing together—where secret societies become the birthplaces of organising and practices of imagining new possible worlds. And this time, not described in the innocent yet arrogant terms of being the chosen ones (whether in religious or revolutionary terms), but with all the fraught and problematic historical detail of people trying to do things in relation to power.

The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Minnesota University Press)

I have been writing and thinking a lot about a term “digital sovereignty” this year. It is a term that has come up in response to a sudden awareness by municipal, national and regional governments, as well as digital rights organisations and activists, that cloud computing means that people and organisations have very little actual control over the digital infrastructures that they depend on. But I was curious about how so many different types of people and organisations were beginning to use this same term. I mean, what does ‘sovereignty’ mean to a group of crypto-anarchists, versus a nation state? Surely not the same thing. And in the process I became interested in the concept and history of sovereignty more generally. Is there a way to avoid digital sovereignty simply meaning extending the bordered and controlled territories of states and state regulations into the digital sphere? This book by a distinguished Indigenous professor in Australia, takes a hard look at settler-colonial forms of sovereignty and how it is tied to particular white ideas about property. I am still working my way through the wealth of Indigenous scholarship on concepts of sovereignty, and it is helping me to think through different ideas, approaches and problems in this new concept of “digital sovereignty”.

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