Too Kwell: Human Genre Project; Cool Horses

huge hattip to Biology in Science Fiction - HUGE

The Human Genre Project is a (proposed) collection of fiction, flash fiction, and poetry relating to the human genome - yeah, that genome, the one they've just finished mapping. They're still taking contributions.

This is so cool.

(Related: Micheal Swanwick's Periodic Table of Science Fiction)

A different post on the Biology in Science Fiction had me scratching my head to remember the title of a book I'd read -

- read at least part of, and that twenty odd years ago -

but could remember nothing of the title or author's name - but possibly what the cover looked like.

The cover I remembered was Rowena's Project Pope. Do you have any idea what fraction of Rowena artwork sites come up as listed under 'pornography'? (Not that I disagree, but sheez. All I wanted was a perfectly clean pic of two fully dressed robots - one in bishop's robes, for crying out loud - and I kept getting hit with 'your filter blocks this site.') And those that weren't so listed (yet!) generally didn't have titles associated with the pictures.

(There's a joke about looking at art for the text in here somewhere but I can't make it come out straight.)

And that wasn't the right book (Project Pope by Clifford D. Simak). So I thought some more, and the idea of a human confronting a man (robot) on a rearing mechanical horse came into hazy focus. Back to google I went.

And I eventually found it, via TV Tropes and it's Cool Horse page. TV Tropes is a listing of plot elements used in TV, literature, movies, just about anywhere. In addition to cool horses, they also discuss Hell Horses, Mechanical Horses, and Horses of A Different Color.

This is just neat.

(The book I was looking for was James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker. And yes, one of the old mass market books had a man in a space suit confronting a robot on a rearing mechanical horse. Success!)