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 Books Where Did We Come From?September 2006
Where Did We Come From? is the Australian edition of a book sold overseas as The Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins. It is a beautifully illustrated account of human evolution, from the first hominids to relatively recent times when Homo sapiens began to spread across the world.  K-MachinesSeptember 2006
K-Machines is a sequel to Godplayers (2005), with which it forms a complete diptych. They develop an appealing vision of how a high-technology future might turn out, if everything goes as well as we can hope.  Where Stuff Comes FromSeptember 2006
Where Stuff Comes From is interested not so much in objects themselves and how they work, as in the sociology of why we want 'stuff', how it fits into our lives, and how and why designers create it for us.  Space RaceSeptember 2006
Amid the current spate of books concerning the 1960s comes this dramatic retelling of humanity's first steps on its journey into space.  The Unexpected Einstein: The Real Man Behind the IconSeptember 2006
In The Unexpected Einstein, Denis Brian examines and, where necessary, corrects many myths that have grown up around the real Albert Einstein.  Addicted to OilSeptember 2006
Ian Rutledge's book chronicles the rise of America's oil dependency, its political and geological explorations in the Middle East, and some of the science and history of oil itself.  Pushing IceSeptember 2006
Alastair Reynolds has effortlessly produced space operas with a gothic bent and cooler-than cool protagonists. In Pushing Ice, Reynolds tones down the space battles for an intelligent novel of man's future among the stars.  Pi: A Biography of the World's Most Mysterious NumberAugust 2006
Good old pi. The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. According to this book, pi's been known - in an approximate form - since about 2000bc. And, of course, because the thing is 'irrational' (a number which can't be expressed as a finite decimal number) we will never have anything but approximations.  Earth Time: Exploring the Deep Past from Victorian England to the Grand CanyonJune 2006
Less than two centuries ago devout Englishmen pronounced that the fossils of animals that lived tens of thousands (or even millions) of years ago, had once been creatures killed in the Biblical flood survived only by Noah and his 'passengers'. In the standard early Victorian view, the Earth was created in 4004bc, and the alluvial deposits around the mouth of the Thames sat on top of debris left by the flood.  Looking for Life, Searching the Solar SystemJune 2006
Imagine: in belated recognition of your abilities you've just received the call from NASA and are, as of today, in charge of the U.S. space program, with a budget of trillions and carte blanche to explore the universe as and how you will. OK, what next? Where do you start?  Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic EvolutionJune 2006
In Origins, the authors want to "uncover the story of how part of the Universe turned into ourselves". To do that, they need to explain the history of the Universe, and what it is made of: "fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution", as the subtitle says.  The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & FantasyJune 2006
A review of Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy, the latest edition of the book series highlighting the notable and worthy in science fiction and fantasy in Australia.  Century RainJune 2006
Any novel combining wormhole theory, noir, World War II and lots of jazz hardly sounds like typical science fiction. But science fiction Century Rain is - and one of the most charming offerings available.  A Chaos of Delight: Science, Religion and Myth and the Shaping of Western ThoughtApril 2006
Geoffrey Dobson is Associate Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology at James Cook University, Townsville. In A Chaos of Delight, he has ventured far from his speciality into ancient history and mythology and the history of Western science. This book is clearly a labour of love.  Deep Sky ObjectsApril 2006
David Levy is probably most famous as the co-finder of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which slammed into Jupiter in 1994. The discovery, with his friends Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, was the culmination for Levy of decades of comet-hunting. 
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