Ten books that might change the way you understand the mind

At io9 Annalee Newitz named ten books that might change the way you will understand the mind, including:

Queen City Jazz, Kathleen Ann Goonan

Goonan's 1990s Nanotech Quartet series begins with Queen City Jazz, which imagines a very different nanotech apocalypse from Bear's Blood Music. In Goonan's future, the city of Cincinnati has become what today we'd call a "smart city," with every building and piece of infrastructure wired together using a nano/biological system of heavily-modified "flowers" and "bees." But when the city malfunctions, it consumes every life form and piece of architecture, remolding them into Jazz Age Cincinnati. Every human in the city becomes an aspect of the city's broken, crashing mind, forced to act out historical fantasies and searching desperately for a way to escape.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Nanotech Quartet also is among Newitz's twenty essential books about the next step in human evolution.

Writers Read: Kathleen Ann Goonan (August 2011).

--Marshal Zeringue