Reading List

[delosharriman]

The Internet is such a vast repository of information that it can sometimes become a total morass. To get properly introduced to and informed on a subject, it is often better to have recourse to books and other printed matter. This list will remain under cultivation — comments with suggestions are welcome.

Space Settlement and Development

Gerard K O'Neill, The High Frontier

“Is a planetary surface the best place for a growing technological civilization?”

TA Heppenheimer, Colonies in Space and Toward Distant Suns

Lavishly-illustrated (if at all possible, get the editions with colour plates) popular treatment of the O'Neill ideas as elaborated by early L5ers

Arthur C Clarke, The Promise of Space

Substantially a revision of the author's The Exploration of Space, beautiful and poetic in an entirely unexpected manner, and more than usefully factual to boot — a reprint without the halftones exists, and should be avoided if possible

Marshall Savage, The Millennial Project

Some of the author's ideas are quite unsound (free-fall orbital settlements are ruled out by the failure of mammalian embryos to implant under microgravity, for instance), but the sweep of his vision cannot be faulted, & the book would be worth the price of admission just for the footnotes

Space Settlements : a Design Study (NASA SP-413)

Report of the 1975 Stanford Summer Study, which fleshed out the concepts provided by O'Neill with some practical engineering — not directed toward actual implementation, but as a first check on overall feasibility

Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century

Reports of two conferences under that name, in 1984 (a single large softcover volume with a lovely wrap-around illustration) & 1988 (two volumes, each almost as large as the first, in bright orange), ranging from contributions to the pure sciences, through practical considerations of various kinds of problems, to broad high-level speculations

Space Resources (NASA SP-509)

A remarkable four-volume hardbound set with a wealth of technical information, & coverage far beyond what the title implies (volume 4 is “Social Concerns”)

Atomic Energy

Glenn Seaborg and William Corliss, Man and Atom, Building a New World through Nuclear Technology

Professor Seaborg needs little introduction, but Mr Corliss was the author of many of the splendid Understanding the Atom booklets put out by the USAEC

Jacques Leclercq and Michel Durr, The Nuclear Age

The head of Electricite de France walks us through all aspects of civil nuclear energy as seen from circa 1985, in a huge volume full of beautiful photographs and illustrations, and quite a bit of original artwork as well

Robert Gerwin, Nuclear Power Today and Tomorrow, A Chance for Our Time

Original title Kernkraft Heute und Morgen, this lavishly-illustrated volume was translated into English and distributed by the German government at the Fourth Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1971, known (in contradistinction to the preceding three “Atoms for Peace” conferences) as the “Atoms for Development” conference

Samuel Glasstone, Sourcebook on Atomic Energy

The first edition of this work is little more than a historical curiosity, as most of the pertinent data had not yet been declassified — the content is not quite what the name suggests, as the organization is largely chronological, and it could be treated as a contribution to the history of science

John Hogerton, The Atomic Energy Deskbook

One could dearly wish for an updated equivalent to this dictionary-style work, which attempts to cover all phases of the subject

Canada Enters the Nuclear Age, A Technical History of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited as Seen from Its Research Laboratories

The various chapters of this book are written by specialists, and it blends personal reminiscences with technical information in a fascinating way

Geoffrey Greenhalgh, The Future of Nuclear Power and The Necessity for Nuclear Power

A good mixture of facts and polemic — Future is largely a revision of Necessity

Sir Fred Hoyle, with Geoff Hoyle, Commonsense in Nuclear Energy and Energy or Extinction? The Case for Nuclear Energy

Excellent writing by the scientist for the layman, a mixture of facts and polemic, with excursions into various by-ways as expected from Sir Fred (possible abiotic origin of natural gas, unlikely due to oxidizing conditions in the interior of the Earth — Rainhill Trials and later life of the great Stevenson, including adventures in vegetable cultivation — Soviet involvement in Western anti-nuclear movement, very much denied at the time, but same tactics are being repeated today with anti-vaccine and anti-GMO campaigns) ; some overlap between the two books

Stanley Hunt, Fission, Fusion, and the Energy Crisis

Lots of good information and perspective

Bernard Cohen, Nuclear Science and Society and Before It's Too Late, a Scientist's Case for Nuclear Energy and The Nuclear Energy Option, an Alternative for the 90s

The first volume mentioned, in particular, contains a truly astonishing amount of information in a manner the non-academic can actually hope to assimilate, and is almost pocket-size — the latter two are a bit more polemic, and well worth reading

Walter Zinn, Nuclear Power USA, and John Lawrence, Radioisotopes and Radiation, Recent Advances in Medicine, Agriculture, and Industry

Two out of a set of four volumes distributed by the US at the 1964 Geneva “Atoms for Peace” conference, and dedicated to the memory of John F Kennedy