Thoreau’s Microscope
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The innovative novels and stories of Michael Blumlein, MD, have introduced new levels of both terror and wonder into the fiction of scientific speculation. His work as a medical researcher and internist at San Francisco’s UCSF Medical Center informs his tales of biotech, epigenetics, brain science, and what it means to be truly if only temporarily human.
Our title piece, “Thoreau’s Microscope,” inspired by a historic High Sierra expedition with Kim Stanley Robinson and Gary Snyder and first published here, is a stunning mix of hypothesis and history, in which the author inhabits Thoreau’s final days to examine the interaction of impersonal science and personal liberation. A journey as illuminating as it is intimate.
Plus… A selection of short stories with Blumlein’s signature mix of horror, “hard” science, and wicked humor. “Fidelity” coolly deconstructs adultery with the help of an exuberant tumor, an erotic cartoon, and a male malady. “Y(ou)r Q(ua)ntifi(e)d S(el)f” will reset your Fitbit and your workout as well. “Paul and Me” is a love story writ extra-large, in which an Immortal from Fantasy comes down with a distinctly human disorder. In the chilling “Know How, Can Do” a female Frankenstein brings romance to life in the cold light of the lab.
And Featuring:Our overly intrusive Outspoken Interview, in which the ethics of experimental medicine, animal surgery, the poetry of prose, cult film acclaim, Charles Ludlam, Darwin, and gender dysphoria all submit to examination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This small, intense collection of "language writer" and physician Blumlein's short fiction focuses on bodies and people's relationships with them. The title piece, original to the collection, creates a delightfully strange atmosphere of simultaneous intimacy and intellectual detachment in an autobiographical first-person narrative of how a doctor deals with the "morbid curiosity" of experiencing his own cancer as both patient and professional. Previously published stories are equally successful in their incongruities: the sweet "Paul and Me" combines mythic masculinity and AIDS, the carefully crafted "Know How, Can Do" addresses dilemmas around experimentation by reframing Frankenstein's monster as a self-aware worm with a human brain, and the quirky and emotional "Fidelity" is as much about infant circumcision as it is about romantic longing. An interview with Blumlein by series editor Terry Bisson feels prefabricated and clunky, checking off discussion of the status of each of Blumlein's old projects, but Blumlein also gets some space to talk explicitly about the elements of medicine and ethics that feature in his work. Blumlein completists will be glad to have this on their shelves.
