Books

It’s nearly impossible to think of the Beatles in the context of their times without thinking of their politics: their positions on the Establishment, the counterculture, the Vietnam War, the Feminist Movement, the class struggle – we remember it all.

And yet… the fact is, they were constrained from sharing their political opinions either in...

It’s nearly impossible to think of the Beatles in the context of their times without thinking of their politics: their positions on the Establishment, the counterculture, the Vietnam War, the Feminist Movement, the class struggle – we remember at all.

During their eight years recording together as a band, they delivered 14 songs that had...

The Beatles left an indelible mark not only on music, but on the culture in which they created it. In a time of great and sudden change, they led a generation into new territory, redefining the social landscape as a place where men and women could try on new roles. They led this change through their music, their public personae, and - under...

There have been few darker days in American history than January 6, 2021.

There have been few darker periods than the eight years following June 15, 2015, when Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. There have been few periods as precarious, as the nation’s...

The first book in the series - “Red Brains, Blue Brains: The Psychology of MAGA” - covered authoritarianism generally, but its focus was more on the moment – the season of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, which still threatens to persist at this writing. This second book seeks to expand the discussion beyond Trump and MAGA, peering into the...

The first entry in the Red Brains, Blue Brains series – The Psychology of MAGA – explored the psychological and neurological foundations of political thought, highlighting how those who lean hard into authoritarianism and patriarchy are not simply advocating a particular worldview, but following impulses in their brains and social responses that...

The Rock Candy series combines pop-music scholarship with a sense of fun and entertainment. This entry surveys the best of what is not-so-commonly known about the Beatles, with broad commentary on their creativity, innovation, cultural experimentation, and the scope of their impact on modern music and culture.

He’s flamboyant. He’s outrageous. He’s as over-the-top as any pop/rock star has ever been. But Elton John is also a consummate musician, a creative force that redefined what music could be. With Bernie Taupin, he is second only to Lennon and McCartney in the pantheon of great songwriters. Rock Candy presents Elton in easily-digested bits and...

From their humble schoolboy origins in England’s workaday Sheffield to the pinnacle of rock superstardom, Def Leppard has forged its own path, defying the expectations of critics, the music industry, and even their own fanbase. Rock Candy takes up the Leppard story and follows the British heavy metal quintet from its earliest rehearsals through...

The music of the Millennials - people born after 1982 and before 2000 - is unlike anything that had ever come before it.

It was a mash-up of punk from the Seventies, heavy metal from the Eighties, and grunge from the Nineties, all wrapped up in ‘alternative’, whatever that still means. It was messy, it was emotional, it was glorious - and it all...

The Rock Candy series continues with Boston: The Classic Years, 1976-1988.

Few bands in classic rock history left a crater as big as Boston did when they hit. Their pristine sound was as hard and gritty as anything ever heard on the radio, yet as clear as the midnight sky. The fiery guitars of Tom Scholz and the celestial vocals of Brad Delp were...

The first volume of Rock Candy: The Beatles was written almost 15 years ago, concurrent with the first edition of The Quotable Beatles and To the Toppermost of the Poppermost. As a result, many quotes from the former and songs from the latter were included in Rock Candy, to add to its variety.

The same is true today, with this second Rock Candy...

The Seventies were a distinct and provocative chapter in the history of rock, and of the bands that emerged in that era, none was more distinct and provocative than Boston. Tom Scholz’s unlikely basement brainchild blasted out of radios across the US with unprecedented energy and melodic integrity and staggering harmonic power, oozing musical...

You never know, when a band first hits the radio, whether the music or the band are going to be timeless.

As big as the Beatles were in 1964, 1965, no one really thought about whether or not we’d still be playing their music 40, 50, 60 years on. And it’s not just the Beatles. We’re still listening to Led Zeppelin. And Queen. And Pink Floyd.

And...

When they were together, the Beatles put out 28 #1 hit singles - a record that remains unbroken, almost years later. Astonishingly, they proceeded to accumulate 20 more as solo artists, a feat likewise never duplicated. All 48 songs are documented in this accessible, trivia-filled compendium, a must-have for lovers of the band’s timeless music.

The Beatles had a lot of music in them, and it’s the best music in the pop/rock universe. They are the all-time best selling band in history, with more #1 hits - both as a band and as solo artists - than any of their peers.

But they also had a great deal to say. As the pacesetters of pop culture in the Sixties, they were at the forefront of young...

Unlike Her Majesty, the Beatles had a lot to say. And the world had much to say about them.

So much so, in fact, that one book can’t hold it all. It would take dozens of books, we can safely assert, to capture everything of value that the Beatles offered up during their tenure as the heralds of youth culture, sexual revolution, and the quest for...

If the Beatles hadn’t written and recorded “A Day in the Life”, “I Am the Walrus”, “Strawberry Fields Forever”, “Blue Jay Way”, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and other proto-progressive songs - if they’d never cobbled together “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”, applied Western tuning to a sitar on “Norwegian Wood”, flipped George’s guitar on...

In his previous book, The Progressive Beatles, Scott Robinson asserted that without the Beatles, there would have been no Yes, no ELP, no Genesis, no King Crimson - no progressive rock genre. In this new work, Robinson argues that without Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and other classical influences, there would have been no Beatles - or at least not...

For seven glorious years, Aaron Sorkin’s masterpiece The West Wing served up a vision of American democracy and governance that informed us, challenged us and inspired us. In this collection of more than 20 essays, all prompted by memorable moments in the series, Scott Robinson surveys the issues, crises, and core principles of greatest impact,...

When I was watching The West Wing during its original run, I was appreciative of how Aaron Sorkin and his team didn’t just serve up good drama, but built stories out of what was going on in the real world. And as time passed after the series ended, and I re-watched it over and over, I was struck by how prescient it turned out to be: many things...

The West Wing generates loyalty on a par with that of Star Trek fans and Deadheads. The most loyal fans own the DVD box sets of all seven seasons and watch them over and over, and know the show inside out.

This book is for them. It contains quizzes for every episode of the series, as well as a number of topical trivia challenges.

Those of us who deeply love The West Wing, and would choose TWW reruns over the finest muffins and bagels in the land without even thinking about it, are all too aware that it is the most quotable TV show in history (surpassing even Star Trek). When we hear a colleague in a meeting at work say, innocently, “What’s next?”, we can’t help but hear...

The West Wing has a fandom that rivals that of Star Trek, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. As with those shows, fans like us buy the DVD box sets and put the show on endless loop – or we used to, until it started streaming. Some re-watch all seven seasons every few years; some watch it annually; some just never stop at all (I’m somewhere...

Democracy. It’s messy, it’s uncomfortable – but it’s better than the alternatives, as Winston Churchill famously assured us. And it is certainly better than Authoritarianism.

The idea of a self-governing society, where all are considered equal, is humankind’s dream. It’s one of the things that makes The West Wing so attractive to its tens of...

“Star Trek was explicitly crafted by its creator, Gene Roddenberry, into a humanist manifesto; the stories Trek told were humanist parables, putting forth the core philosophies to which he was devoted: equality, reason, integrity, fairness, opportunity, community. I was soaking them up before I even really understood what they were. I didn’t...

When Gene Roddenberry conceived Star Trek, he imagined a future very different from what was typically put forth in science fiction - a future where humanity has overcome greed, bigotry, misogyny, materialism, conflict and war. Star Trek’s fans embraced that vision. But many consider it unattainable, if admirable, even those who wrote and...

We first became acquainted with the power of Federation democracy in “Journey to Babel” in the original series, when Kirk’s Enterprise trucked more than 100 Federation delegates to a neutral planetoid to discuss and vote on the admission of Coridan to its ranks. We saw argument, contentiousness – and a serious, violent effort to disrupt the...

It’s hilarious these days to watch misguided, insecure fanboys and transparent political panderers break out in rants and whines that Nu Trek – Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds – is ‘woke’. Anyone who knows Trek, old or nu, can only laugh; Trek has, of course, been utterly woke since 1966.

Woke. Shining a light on racism. War. Sexual...

Smart people love Star Trek. And smart people love thought experiments.

It seems a pretty natural thing, then, to bring the two together. Trek offers up a number of thought-provoking problems all its own, from the questions of identity emanating from the Transporter to the question of Data’s sentience; but thought experiments emanating from...

Trek fans the world over know the following names: Nomad... M-5... Landru... V’Ger... Finnegan... and, of course, Data. Star Trek has given the science fiction universe some of its most interesting and provocative AIs and androids, and with them an insightful flow of concepts to consider as AI makes its way into the real world. Now that we’ve...

Star Trek’s Cmdr. Data... Alien’s Ash and Bishop... Skynet and the Terminator... the androids of Westworld... Ex Machina’s Eva, the Stepford Wives - and the granddaddy of them all, HAL 9000... These and other famous artificial minds are at the heart of this exploration of AI and the possibility of machine consciousness, suggesting the directions...

Review after review of Space: 1999, in the Seventies and since, has noted that its more philosophical style is distinctive, not just from Star Trek, but from most TV sci-fi. It is one of the show’s trademarks – in its first season, anyway – and made it an important entry in the genre, over and above its groundbreaking look and style.

The show...

“The Robinson Biography, written as it was in the mid-21st century (and thankfully published on paper, we estimate around 2080-90) notably references, and thereby confirms, a number of sources thought by many to be apocryphal: the originaldocumentaries of HAL 9000, including the two scholarly Clarke accounts, and the two visual summaries by...

Can machines be intelligent? Yes, that seems settled; but can machines be conscious? That’s not nearly as clear. The dream of machines that not only think, but feel and experience consciousness as humans do has been a canvas of fantasists, a goal of technologists and a conundrum to philosophers for decades. Here in this brief collection are...

This most recent collection of Scott Robinson’s essays gathers together work from a number of previous collections, spanning many disciplines: artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, paleontology, and cognitive science, to name a few. Specific topics are equally diverse, including dissipative adaptation, humanism, feminism,...

Artificial Intelligence, long present in our cultural awareness and musings of the future, has finally arrived - and hasn’t taken the stage with any subtlety. From generative AI chatbots to disturbingly good deepfake art and video to breathtaking medical accomplishments, AI is here to stay - and now we have to figure out how to deal with that.

...

AI is moving forward at breakneck speed. Even in the short months since the first volume of this series was published, we’ve seen stakeholders lobbying the White House and Congress for regulatory action; AI doomers have gotten louder; breakthroughs in processing power and speed have been announced; and Hollywood writers and actors have even gone...

All my life, I’ve been tripping over jaw-dropping, fascinating ideas that few people have ever heard of.

This started happening in my early 20s, when I learned of Douglas Hofstadter’s ‘strange loops’ in Gödel, Escher, Bach. It continued with Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, where all possible books reside. John Searle’s Chinese Room; the...

The Library of Babel blew my mind. The idea of a ‘library of all possible books’, generated by an algorithm that can be written on a napkin – it’s a jaw dropper! That’s what it’s supposed to do, of course; it’s a consciousness-expanding thought experiment, one that rips the lid off many disciplines, from semantics to the theory of algorithms to...

The Trail of Tears is a tragic chapter in American history - as is the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the many that preceded it. The legacy of the European invasion of North America is, at this point, exhaustively documented; the abuses and injustices unleashed by white men on the indigenous inhabitants are, at this point, well known.

What is less...

The first volume of this series presented the concept of the indigenous critique – the observations of Native Americans, emerging in their early encounters with European explorers and colonists. These observations, recorded and pondered deeply by their Western counterparts and thinkers in Europe, challenged a broad array of assumptions and...

This omnibus volume combines the two previous entries in The Indigenous Critique series, which explore the concept of the indigenous critique – the observations of Native Americans, emerging in their early encounters with European explorers and colonists. These observations, recorded and pondered deeply by their Western counterparts and thinkers...

They long to end democracy.

There are three organizations in the United State that have all, in recent years, signaled and even said outright that Democracy’s day is done in the United States - and each is poised to replace it.

These groups include the Grand Old Party - US Republicans, who have declared for almost two decades now their desire to...

This collection of political essays, culled from other, more general collections, puts in one place a great many years of reflection, processing, and rants. The author has invested considerable time and effort in all three pursuits, and the results presented herein are as representative as any.

But this is also a generational portrait. The point...

Freedom is a word with too many meetings, justifying too many wrongs. This collection of essays surveys various aspects of freedom, from its ancient origins to the misuse and abuse of the concept, from the challenges it presents to the possibilities it holds. Humankind does not yet live free; but we could.

Since I was a boy, I’ve loved twist endings – in stories, on television, at the movies, anywhere they can be found. Give me a surprise ending, I’m in. I love them!

The Twilight Zone was, of course, the pacesetter in this arena when I was a kid, with episodes like “Eye of the Beholder” and “The Masks” and “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”...

In the 30th century, human life expectancy has been extended hundreds of years - but it only works for the body. The mind must be rebooted, to make room for another lifetime of memories. When the moment is right, it’s time to Jump - to let the old life go and start a new one in a new place, with a new identity. Talyn Jain’s body is more than 700...

A team of time travelers find themselves stranded in the Paleolithic Era, and present themselves to the locals as deities... In a small northwestern college town, a rogue robot takes up petty theft... In an isolated rural diner in 1957 Georgia, a dark wanderer witnesses a confrontation between a brutal cop, two local hoodlums and a frightened...

This, Scott Robinson’s fourth collection of short fiction, focuses on horror.

Written with a nod toward the great Harlan Ellison, these 13 tales include some science fiction, some fantasy, and some in-between. There’s a time-hopping wraith who selects lives to take; a cell phone app that lures travelers into the dark; a starship crew seduced by...

The Apocalypse. Sometimes we lay waste to the world and it’s about humanity’s remnant struggling to survive. Sometimes humanity doesn’t make it at all. Sometimes we prevail, but we become something horrible. And, always, it’s fascinating and sobering to contemplate.

Many are the ways the world might end, and it will always be worth our time and...

When it comes to moving around in time, a great deal of the fun and delight is that there are so many different variations on the theme. Sometimes a machine – be it a glorified sleigh or a souped-up DeLorean - delivers us to some point in the past or the future. Sometimes it’s a weird, hazy phenomenon that descends up on us and scoops us up;...

When I was young, around 12 or 13 years old, I went to a school that was very old and made of brick and oak, with high ceilings and thick bannisters on the stairs and hardwood floors, like something out of Hoosiers. I loved that old school – especially the third-floor library, which was also where we had study hall. Every day, I would zip...

Like every young nerd and fanboy, I fell in love with robots and AIs at an early age.

The first was, of course, the Robot from Lost in Space, with his “Danger, Will Robinson!” admonition – which my hilarious playground comrades would shout at me at recess when I approached. I later met Robby in Forbidden Planet, as well as Robbie in Asimov. Then...

This collection runs the sci-fi gamut, from space travel (“The Waves”, “When I Waked”) to time travel (“The Local Gods”, “Moonlight in Paris”) to robots (“Song of Aveyron”, “Peacekeeper”) to mind control (“Kenny Is the Boss of Me”) to post-apocalyptica (“The Magus”, “When She Woke at Dawn”). There are echoes of Asimov, Ellison, and Bradbury...

Millennial nerds and Gen Z nerds don’t know how good they’ve got it, with more Star Wars and Star Trek movies and TV series than they can count. It wasn’t always this easy to be a nerd! This memoir from a decorated veteran details the glory days of nerd-dom, when all we had was bad TV sci-fi and only the occasional silver screen gem, just after...

This collection of essays on religion and spirituality are drawn from other, more general collections, in order to focus on a number of questions their author wrestled with during years in the Evangelical Christian church – as the son of a Fundamentalist pastor, as an inquisitive and curious thinker, and as a naturally progressive personality....

Isaac Asimov was a legend, both as a science fiction author and science writer. He wrote over 500 books and countless articles during his lifetime - famously contributing to every topical category in the Dewey Decimal System, from science and technology to history to literature and religion. He amassed a vast following that spanned generations;...

Are you raising a nerd?

If so, this indispensible guide is just what you need! Bringing up a young nerd and preparing them for a nerd’s life in these complicated times is no small challenge - and Scott Robinson’s new book will equip you with everything you need to nurture your nerd kids in all the right ways!

A nerd, by definition, is...

What’s it like, growing up in a Fundamentalist church, a Fundamentalist home, with a Fundamentalist preacher for a dad? It’s a worldview like no other, especially for a Seventies kid reaching for the stars. This warm and humorous memoir explains what it’s like to love the Beatles from afar; to experience Rapture Terror and a sex talk about Debby...

The Outlander novels and TV series have awakened tens of millions to the romance, magic, and darkness of Scotland, a land of mystery and adventure. This wondrous, sometimes ominous, and often eerie corner of the world is the source of endless legends and tales - stories of ghosts and hauntings, fairies and giants, dreadful creatures; magic light...

The Outlander books of Diana Gabaldon (and the TV series by Ron B. Moore) awakened tens of millions of readers and viewers to the alluring romantic and sexual mores of historical Scotland, both fascinating and titillating in their awkward truce between traditional social order and the lusty spirit of the Highlands. But the real stories are just...