杏吧原创

FOR some people, stem cells are workers of miracles, a potential panacea for broken-down brains or backs. For others, using them is degenerate and exploitative. Stem cell research is fraught with scientific and ethical struggles. Elizabeth Finkel offers a way through them in Stem Cells (ABC Books, A$27.95).

For something a bit more beguiling, try Ernst Haeckel鈥檚 Art Forms from the Ocean (Prestel, 拢12.99), a facsimile of which is just out. Haeckel, a German zoologist, was fascinated by radiolarians 鈥� tiny marine organisms 鈥� he made a series of drawings classifying them by their skeletal structures. His work was published in 1862, and he was one of the first to weave Darwin鈥檚 evolutionary ideas with taxonomy: his radiolarians, later recognised as single-celled protozoa that evolved about 550 million years ago, show the mutability of species.

Change is everything in China Mi茅ville鈥檚 Iron Council (Macmillan, 拢7.99), which has just won him a second Arthur C. Clarke prize for the best science fiction novel. For a snapshot of what鈥檚 what and who鈥檚 who in this genre, read Essential Science Fiction (Porcupine Books, 拢8.90).

For the most sexist paperback cover of the year so far, see Sex and Rockets (new edition from Feral House, 拢10.99), a biography of rocket-fuel chemist and occultist John 鈥淛ack鈥� Whiteside Parsons. It may read like SF, but John Carter looks at a real life that ended in a mysterious explosion at Parsons鈥檚 home lab. Parsons helped found the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was a poet, part-time Antichrist and best 鈥渕agick鈥� practitioner since the great early 20th-century occultist Aleister Crowley. He even has a crater named after him on the moon.