Announcements! Announcements! Book announcements!

It’s always difficult to know when to make an announcement about a book – at least before it actually appears. Deals can fall through at all sorts of stages prior to actual publication, titles change, life interferes and causes long delays, etc.

So it is with some provisionality and tentativeness – but also a lot of excitement – that I announce a couple of big bits of news. Ta da!

First, I have now submitted the manuscript of my book on the technologies of genetic choice (human reproductive cloning, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, genetic engineering) to MIT Press, where it is under contract. The current title is Humanity Enhanced: Genetic Choice and the Challenge for Liberal Democracies. It is very much about the issues in legal and political philosophy surrounding these technologies, rather than being about the transhumanist movement, say, or the straightup moral issues. The book is based on my Monash University doctoral dissertation, but considerably reworked and updated. I don’t know of any other book on these technologies that deals with this set of issues in anything like the depth that Humanity Enhanced does, although the superb Buchanan, et al., book From Chance to Choice is the state of the art for a sub-set of the issues.

Second, Wiley-Blackwell has just given the green light to a book to be edited by Damien Broderick and myself about topics related to minds and machines – mind uploading, artificial intelligence, machine consciousness, etc. We have a very strong list of contributors whom we now have to contact with the good news.

You’ll be hearing much more about these projects as events unfold.

And meanwhile, Udo Schuklenk and I will soon be getting page proofs to look at for 50 Great Myths About Atheism, which is due for publication from Wiley-Blackwell later this year. We’ve also been looking at cover proposals. You’ll be hearing a lot more about this book as well.