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Warrior of the light: a manual
By Paulo Coelho. 2003
A collection of philosophical sketches prefaced by the brief parable of a grown man returning to the beach of his…
childhood. There he is inspired to write about the "Warrior"--one who is "capable of understanding the miracle of life." Inspirational companion to The Alchemist (DB 37602). 2003Flip
By David Lubar. 2003
Eighth-grader Taylor and her twin brother, Ryan, are complete opposites. So when trouble-making Ryan discovers mysterious alien disks that enable…
him to become legends from the past--Babe Ruth, Albert Einstein, and others--Taylor tries to keep him out of trouble. For grades 5-8. 2003Theory Of Mind And Science Fiction
By Nicholas O. Pagan. 2014
Theory of Mind and Science Fiction shows how theory of mind provides an exciting 'new' way to think about science…
fiction and, conversely, how science fiction sheds light not only on theory of mind but also empathy, morality, and the nature of our humanity.Cyborgs in Latin America
By J. Andrew Brown. 2010
A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform, www. oapen.…
org . Cyborgs in Latin America explores the ways cultural expression in Latin America has grappled with the changing relationships between technology and human identity.Today the names of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, and Clark Ashton Smith, all regular contributors to…
the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the first half of the twentieth century, are recognizable even to casual readers of the bizarre and fantastic. And yet despite being more popular than them all during the golden era of genre pulp fiction, there is another author whose name and work have fallen into obscurity: Seabury Quinn.Quinn’s short stories were featured in well more than half of Weird Tales’s original publication run. His most famous character, the supernatural French detective Dr. Jules de Grandin, investigated cases involving monsters, devil worshippers, serial killers, and spirits from beyond the grave, often set in the small town of Harrisonville, New Jersey. In de Grandin there are familiar shades of both Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, and alongside his assistant, Dr. Samuel Trowbridge, de Grandin’s knack for solving mysteries-and his outbursts of peculiar French-isms (grand Dieu!)-captivated readers for nearly three decades.Collected for the first time in trade editions, The Complete Tales of Jules de Grandin, edited by George Vanderburgh, presents all ninety-three published works featuring the supernatural detective. Presented in chronological order over five volumes, this is the definitive collection of an iconic pulp hero. The first volume, The Horror on the Links, includes all of the Jules de Grandin stories from "The Horror on the Links” (1925) to "The Chapel of Mystic Horror” (1928), as well as an introduction by George Vanderburgh and Robert Weinberg.Francia contra los robots
By Georges Bernanos. 1947
En 1948, el reconocido escritor de inspiración mística Georges Bernanos desapareció, dejando el manuscrito de un último libro, publicado póstumamente:…
Francia contra robots. Esta apasionada defensa de la libertad es un desafío a las idolatrías paganas de ganancia y fuerza, con una increíble actualidad. Esta diatriba contra la "sociedad de las máquinas" es un grito futurista, para señalar una sociedad en la que es posible llevar una vida digna de seres humanos.Esta visionaria obra señala una Sociedad futura donde la tecnología domina a los seres humanos y los deshumaniza. Atacando la conformidad burguesa en nombre de sus creencias católicas, el autor afirma "que no es ni de izquierda ni derecha" y los conflictos internos son especialmente la fuente de las maldades que disminuyen al hombre y todas las tiranías que lo aplastan.“El peligro no está en las máquinas, de lo contrario deberíamos hacer este sueño absurdo de destruirlas por la fuerza, a la manicura de los iconoclastas que, rompiendo las imágenes, se halagaron aniquilando también las creencias. El peligro no está en la multiplicación de máquinas, sino también en el número cada vez mayor de hombres, que desde su infancia, solo desean lo que las máquinas pueden proveer”.As you ride down the intergalactic bike path, you come to a crossroads. Which path will you take? Your choice…
could determine your future, or the future of all humanity, forever. These twelve stories explore a variety of intersections set in distant, outlandish, or disturbingly realistic futures and dimensions—all involving bicycles and the breaking of gender stereotypes. A bicycle race spans a rift between worlds. A teenager learns a valuable lesson from her prepper mom. A young fruit seller gets closer to her dream of becoming an astronaut. An overwhelmed mom finds unexpected solace at a bicycle collective. And much more! Contributors include Tuere T.S. Ganges, Gretchin Lair, Ayame Whitfield, Julia K. Patt, Elly Bangs, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Monique Cuillerier, Kat Lerner, Hella Grichi, and Summer Jewel Keown, with illustrations by Elly Bangs and Paul Abbamondi.Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout
By Caroline Alphin. 2021
Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of…
five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault’s biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.Lost Empress
By Sergio De La Pava. 2018
"Ambitious, affecting, intelligent, plangent, comic, kooky and impassioned. I've read a lot of novels this year, between judging the Man…
Booker prize and the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, and I've yearned for this kind of exuberant, precise fiction" Stuart Kelly, Guardian on A Naked SingularityIt would take something huge to put Paterson, New Jersey on the map.But Nina Gill is determined to do just that. She is the daughter of the ageing owner of the Dallas Cowboys and the well-kept secret to their success. Shocked when her brother inherits the team, leaving her with the Paterson Pork, New Jersey's only Indoor Football League franchise, she vows to take on the N.F.L. and make her new team the pigskin kings of America.Meanwhile, Nuno DeAngeles - a brilliant criminal mastermind - contrives to be thrown into Rikers Island prison to commit one of the most audacious crimes of all time. Now he's on the inside, he has two good reasons to get out. But how does a person of culture go about breaking out of the penal system when the whole of the land of the free is addicted to keeping him in it?Without knowing it, or ever having met, Nina and Nuno have already had a profound effect on each other's lives. As his bid for freedom and her bid for sporting immortality reach crisis point, their stories converge in the countdown to an epic conclusion. Thrilling, touching, insightful and shockingly hilarious, De La Pava's extraordinary novel gets under the skin and into the minds of a vast cast of characters from the fringes of society - immigrants, exiles and outsiders.The Last Man Standing: The chilling apocalyptic thriller that predicts Italy's collapse
By Davide Longo. 2010
A chillingly plausible novel about the collapse of Italian society and one man's struggle to retain his humanity amid the…
horror"A bleak, lyrical tale that evokes Cormac McCarthy's The Road.... Gruesome, intense, and strange... a eurozone nightmare brought to life on the page."--James Lovegrove, Financial TimesIt is 2025, and Italy is on the brink of collapse. Borders are closed, banks withhold money, the postal service stalls. Armed gangs of drug-fuelled youths roam the countryside. Leonardo was a famous writer and professor before a sex scandal ended his marriage and career. Heading north in search of her new husband, his ex-wife leaves their daughter and her son in his care. If he is to take them to safety, he will need to find a quality he has never possessed: courage.The Guard
By Peter Terrin. 2009
Isolation, terror, paranoia. Two guards in a luxury apartment block stick to their posts while the world collapses around them.'A…
mix of psychological thriller and SF fable, this is a strange, wonderfully claustrophobic novel' John O'Connell, Guardian. (Guardian)Harry and Michel are stationed in the basement of a luxury apartment block, guarding the 1%. Until all the residents leave - apart from a man on floor 29. Harry and Michel stick to their posts. The world might be at war, plunged into nuclear winter or decimated by a disease; they may be the last inhabitants in the city. All they know is that if they are vigilant, 'the organisation' will reward them: promotion to an elite cadre of security officers remains their goal, and their days are punctuated by vivid dreams of everything they are missing. But what if there were no-one left to guard? And if the promised third officer arrives, how will he fit into Michel and Harry's studied routine of boredom and paranoia?The Goldsmith's Secret
By Elia Barceló. 2003
4 A.M. End of December . . .Clinton Street, New York. A lonely goldsmith reflects on his life. He decides…
to return to his home village in Spain, hoping to see again an older woman with whom he had a passionate affair as a teenager.Instead he meets a young woman who captivates him instantly. Their affair feels so natural it evokes an eerie familiarity, as if he were playing a role already played out. The Goldsmith's Secret is a remarkable story of a love trapped between parallel times, by a writer with a gift for the impossible.The Guard
By Peter Terrin. 2009
Isolation, terror, paranoia. Two guards in a luxury apartment block stick to their posts while the world collapses around them.'A…
mix of psychological thriller and SF fable, this is a strange, wonderfully claustrophobic novel' John O'Connell, Guardian. (Guardian)Harry and Michel are stationed in the basement of a luxury apartment block, guarding the 1%. Until all the residents leave - apart from a man on floor 29. Harry and Michel stick to their posts. The world might be at war, plunged into nuclear winter or decimated by a disease; they may be the last inhabitants in the city. All they know is that if they are vigilant, 'the organisation' will reward them: promotion to an elite cadre of security officers remains their goal, and their days are punctuated by vivid dreams of everything they are missing. But what if there were no-one left to guard? And if the promised third officer arrives, how will he fit into Michel and Harry's studied routine of boredom and paranoia?The Last Man Standing: The chilling apocalyptic thriller that predicts Italy's collapse
By Davide Longo. 2010
A chillingly plausible novel about the collapse of Italian society and one man's struggle to retain his humanity amid the…
horror"A bleak, lyrical tale that evokes Cormac McCarthy's The Road.... Gruesome, intense, and strange... a eurozone nightmare brought to life on the page."--James Lovegrove, Financial TimesIt is 2025, and Italy is on the brink of collapse. Borders are closed, banks withhold money, the postal service stalls. Armed gangs of drug-fuelled youths roam the countryside. Leonardo was a famous writer and professor before a sex scandal ended his marriage and career. Heading north in search of her new husband, his ex-wife leaves their daughter and her son in his care. If he is to take them to safety, he will need to find a quality he has never possessed: courage.The Goldsmith's Secret
By Elia Barceló. 2003
4 A.M. End of December . . .Clinton Street, New York. A lonely goldsmith reflects on his life. He decides…
to return to his home village in Spain, hoping to see again an older woman with whom he had a passionate affair as a teenager.Instead he meets a young woman who captivates him instantly. Their affair feels so natural it evokes an eerie familiarity, as if he were playing a role already played out. The Goldsmith's Secret is a remarkable story of a love trapped between parallel times, by a writer with a gift for the impossible.Extreme Fabulations: Science Fictions of Life
By Steven Shaviro. 2021
An examination of science fiction narratives and the light they shed on human life, the unknowable future, and the vagaries…
of unforeseeable change.With this book, Steven Shaviro offers a thought experiment. He discusses a number of science fiction narratives: three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. Shaviro not only analyzes these works in detail but also uses them to ask questions about human, and more generally, biological life: about its stubborn insistence and yet fragility; about the possibilities and perils of seeking to control it; about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman; and about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation. Shaviro pursues these questions through the medium of science fiction because this form of storytelling offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy and renders it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience, and respond to, the vagaries of unforeseeable change.Enter The Expanse to explore questions of the meaning of human life, the concept of justice, and the nature of…
humanity, featuring a foreword from author James S.A. Corey The Expanse and Philosophy investigates the philosophical universe of the critically acclaimed television show and Hugo Award-winning series of novels. Original essays by a diverse international panel of experts illuminate how essential philosophical concepts relate to the meticulously crafted world of The Expanse, engaging with topics such as transhumanism, belief, culture, environmental ethics, identity, colonialism, diaspora, racism, reality, and rhetoric. Conceiving a near-future solar system colonized by humanity, The Expanse provokes a multitude of moral, ethical, and philosophical queries: Are Martians, Outer Planets inhabitants, and Earthers different races? Is Marco Inaros a terrorist? Can people who look and sound different, like Earthers and Belters, ever peacefully co-exist? Should science be subject to moral rules? Who is sovereign in space? What is the relationship between human progress and aggression? The Expanse and Philosophy helps you answer these questions—and many more. Covers the first six novels in The Expanse series and five seasons of the television adaptation Addresses the philosophical issues that emerge from socio-economics and geopolitics of Earth, Mars, and the Outer Planets Alliance Offers fresh perspectives on the themes, characters, and storylines of The Expanse Explores the connections between The Expanse and thinkers such as Aristotle, Kant, Locke, Hannah Arendt, Wittgenstein, Descartes, and Nietzsche Part of the popular Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, The Expanse and Philosophy is a must-have companion for avid readers of James S.A. Corey’s novels and devotees of the television series alike.Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem (Studies in Global Genre Fiction)
By Agnieszka Gajewska. 2022
This book is a groundbreaking study of one of the greatest science fiction writers, the Polish master Stanisław Lem. It…
offers a new direction in research on his oeuvre and corrects several errors commonly appearing in his biographies. The author painstakingly recreates the context of Lem’s early life and his traumatic experiences during the Second World War due to his Jewish background, and then traces these through original and brilliant readings of his fiction and non-fiction. She considers language, worldbuilding, themes, motifs and characterization as well as many buried allusions to the Holocaust in Lem’s published and archival work, and uses these fragments to capture a different side of Lem than previously known. The book discusses various issues concerning the writer’s life, such as his upbringing in a Jewish, Zionist-minded family, the extensive relations between the Lem family and the elite of Lviv at that time, details of the Lem family killed during the German occupation and attempts to reconstruct what happened to Lem’s parents and to the writer himself after escaping the ghetto. Part of the Studies in Global Genre Fiction series, this English translation of the Polish original, which has already been considered a milestone in Lem studies, offers a fresh perspective on the writer and his work. It will be an important intervention for scholars and researchers of Jewish studies, Holocaust literature, science fiction studies, English literature, world war studies, minority studies, popular culture, history and cultural studies.Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin
By Ursula K. Le Guin. 2018
'By turns sharp, funny and insightful, high-minded but never mean-spirited, the book embodies its author's lifelong quest for freedom: freedom…
as a woman, freedom to write what she pleased, freedom to like what she liked. Genre fiction - and literature in general - has lost not just one of its brightest exponents but one of its bolshiest champions.' FINANCIAL TIMES'Excellent' CHOICE'Le Guin is one of the singular speculative voices of our future, thanks to her knack for anticipating issues of seminal importance to society' TLSUrsula K. Le Guin has won or been nominated for over 200 awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Awards. She is the acclaimed author of the Earthsea sequence and The Left Hand of Darkness - which alone would qualify her for literary immortality - as well as a remarkable body of short fiction, including the powerful, Hugo-winning 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and the masterpiece of anthropological and environmental SF 'The Word for World is Forest' - winner of the Hugo Award for best novella. But Ursula Le Guin's talents do not stop at fiction. Over the course of her extraordinary career, she has penned numerous essays around themes important to her: anthropology, environmentalism, feminism, social justice and literary criticism to name a few. She has responded in detail to criticism of her own work and even reassessed that work in the context of such critiques. This selection of the best of Le Guin's non-fiction shows an agile mind, an unparalleled imagination and a ferocious passion to argue against injustice. In 2014 Ursula Le Guin was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and her widely praised acceptance speech is one of the highlights of this volume, which shows that one of modern literature's most original voices is also one of its purest consciences.High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
By Erik Davis. 2019
An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and…
Robert Anton Wilson.A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.