A. D. Smith Books

Brainwashing! Computer hacking! International intrigue! Psychedelic drugs! Female secret societies! Fringe science! Chinese beer! Walking corpses! The Goddess of Confusion! All the staples of fun and conspiracy meet, shake hands, and get into fistfights in Axis Mundi Sum, a novel where conspirators of all stripes try to further their own ends and make sense of existence. Would-be journalists, freelance criminals, monomaniacal monarchists, dead Taoist sages, sci-fi speedfreaks, computer code fascists, Discordian potentates, lazy college students, Egyptian gods, and more engage in gunplay, mind control, phone phreaking, sexual coercion, disinformation, and other dirty tricks in order to gain the upper hand over anyone they can— with mixed, but always hilarious, results. In a world where someone is pulling everyone’s strings, and it seems there is no escape from the hidden hand of shadowy powers, the only thing that might set you free is good old-fashioned absurdity, and Axis Mundi Sum is the place to find it.

This book provides a survey of current biochemistry and molecular biology in the form of a dictionary. It contains short but informative entries arranged under more than 17,000 headwords, providing fundamental information that is often difficult to locate in today's overspecialized world. The book defines many of the terms used in molecular biology and describes the essential features of over 2,000 enzymes and proteins, including the reactions they catalyze or functions they perform, with filenames that facilitate the location of entries in databases of sequences. Many entries describe chemical compounds of relevance to biochemists, with approximately 950 symbols and abbreviations. In addition, many physico-chemical laws, constants, and formulae are detailed.