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Aria of the sea
By Dia Calhoun. 2000
In a magical kingdom by the sea, talented thirteen-year-old commoner Cerinthe wins a place in the School of the Royal…
Dancers. She ignores her gift for healing until a life-threatening accident occurs. Then Cerinthe realizes she must decide which career to follow to truly be herself. For grades 6-9. 2000Siegel and Shuster's Funnyman
By Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Thomas Andrae, Mel Gordon. 2010
Here is a kaleidoscopic analysis of Jewish humor as seen through Funnyman, a little-known super-heroic invention by the creators of…
Superman. Included are complete comic-book stories and daily and Sunday newspaper panels from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's creative fiasco.Siegel and Shuster, two Jewish teenagers from Cleveland, sold the rights to their amazing and astonishingly lucrative comic book superhero to Detective Comics for $130 in 1938. Not only did they lose the ownership of the Superman character, they also agreed to write and illustrate it for ten years at ten dollars per page. Their contract with the DC publishers was soon heralded as the most foolish agreement in the history of American popular culture.After toiling on workman's wages for a decade, Siegel and Shuster struggled to come up with a new superhero, one that would right their wrongs and prove that justice, fair-play, and zany craftsmanship was the true American way and would lead to ultimate victory. But when the naïve duo launched their new comic character Funnyman in 1947, it failed miserably. All the turmoil and personal disasters in Siegel and Shuster's postwar life percolated into the comic strip.This book tells the back story of the unsuccessful strip and Siegel and Shuster's ambition to have their funny Jewish superhero trump Superman.Mel Gordon is the author of Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.Thomas Andrae is the author of Batman and Me.His Master's Voice
By Stanislaw Lem. 2020
Scientists attempt to decode what may be a message from intelligent beings in outer space. By pure chance, scientists detect…
a signal from space that may be communication from rational beings. How can people of Earth understand this message, knowing nothing about the senders—even whether or not they exist? Written as the memoir of a mathematician who participates in the government project (code name: His Master's Voice) attempting to decode what seems to be a message from outer space, this classic novel shows scientists grappling with fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the confines of knowledge, the limitations of the human mind, and the ethics of military-sponsored scientific research.Highcastle: A Remembrance
By Stanislaw Lem. 2020
A playful, witty, reflective memoir of childhood by the science fiction master Stanisław Lem. With Highcastle, Stanisław Lem offers a…
memoir of his childhood and youth in prewar Lvov. Reflective, artful, witty, playful—“I was a monster,” he observes ruefully—this lively and charming book describes a youth spent reading voraciously (he was especially interested in medical texts and French novels), smashing toys, eating pastries, and being terrorized by insects. Often lonely, the young Lem believed that he could communicate with household objects—perhaps anticipating the sentient machines in the adult Lem's novels. Lem reveals his younger self to be a dreamer, driven by an unbridled imagination and boundless curiosity. In the course of his reminiscing, Lem also ponders the nature of memory, innocence, and the imagination. Highcastle (the title refers to a nearby ruin) offers the portrait of a writer in his formative years.Time and Chance: An Autobiography
By L. Sprague DeCamp. 1992
Time and Chance is the autobiography of Hugo, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Award-winning author, L. Sprague de Camp.…
It is a fascinating insight into a man who began writing in the late 1930's and remained an active voice in the genre up until his death in the last year of the twentieth century, and who was a prime mover in the formation of the fields of Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know them today.Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine
By E. Paul Zehr. 2011
Tony Stark has been battling bad guys and protecting innocent civilians since he first donned his mechanized armor in the…
1963 debut of Iron Man in Marvel Comics. Over the years, Stark’s suit has allowed him to smash through walls, fly through the air like a human jet, control a bewildering array of weaponry by thought alone, and perform an uncountable number of other fantastic feats. The man who showed us all what it would take to become Batman probes whether science—and humankind—is up to the task of inventing a real-life Iron Man.E. Paul Zehr physically deconstructs Iron Man to find out how we could use modern-day technology to create a suit of armor similar to the one Stark made. Applying scientific principles and an incredibly creative mind to the question, Zehr looks at how Iron Man’s suit allows Stark to become a superhero. He discusses the mind-boggling and body-straining feats Iron Man performed to defeat villains like Crimson Dynamo, Iron Monger, and Whiplash and how such acts would play out in the real world. Zehr finds that science is nearing the point where a suit like Iron Man’s could be made. But superherodom is not just about technology. Zehr also discusses our own physical limitations and asks whether an extremely well-conditioned person could use Iron Man’s armor and do what he does.A scientifically sound look at brain-machine interfaces and the outer limits where neuroscience and neural plasticity meet, Inventing Iron Man is a fun comparison between comic book science fiction and modern science. If you’ve ever wondered whether you have what it takes to be the ultimate human-machine hero, then this book is for you.What's So Funny?: A Cartoonist's Memoir
By David Sipress. 2022
From a longtime New Yorker staff cartoonist, an evocative family memoir, a love letter to New York City, and a delightful exploration of…
the origins of creativity—richly interleaved with the author&’s witty, beloved cartoons A wry and brilliantly observed portrait of the budding young cartoonist and his Upper West Side Jewish family in the age of JFK and Sputnik. Sipress, a dreamer and obsessive drawer, goes hazy when it comes to the ceaselessly imparted lessons-on-life from his father, the meticulous, upwardly mobile proprietor of Revere Jewelers, and in the face of the angsty expectations of his migraine-prone mother. With self-deprecation, wit, and artistry, Sipress paints his hapless place in his indelibly dysfunctional family, from the time he was tricked by his unreliable older sister into rocketing his pet turtle out his twelfth-floor bedroom window, to the moment he walks away from a Harvard PhD program in Russian history to begin his journey as a professional cartoonist. In What&’s So Funny?—reminiscent of the masterly, humane recall of Roger Angell and the brainy humor of Roz Chast—Sipress's cartoons appear with spot-on precision, inducing delightful Aha moments in answer to the perennial question aimed at cartoonists: Where do you get your ideas?The Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials: With an Introduction by Philip Pullman
By John Gribbin, Mary Gribbin. 2004
The amazing true science behind the fiction of His Dark Materials, ideal for fans of the original trilogy and The…
Book of Dust, with an introduction by Philip Pullman.Award-winning science writers Mary and John Gribbin reveal how the world of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass) is rooted in astonishing scientific truth. Drawing on string theory and spacetime, quantum physics and chaos theory, they answer fascinating questions such as: could parallel worlds like Will's and Lyra's really exist? How does the subtle knife cut through anything? Could there be a bomb like the one made with Lyra's hair? And, of course, what are the Dark Materials?Dawn: A Proton's Tale of All That Came to Be (BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity)
By Gijsbert Van den Brink, Cees Dekker, Corien Oranje. 2020
This is an adventure that began almost fourteen billion years ago, one that so often threatened to fail. It's truly…
a miracle I'm still here. Despite everything, I wouldn't have wanted to miss one second of it. And the best is yet to come.With the help of an extraordinary narrator, you're invited to discover the wonder and drama of the history of the cosmos. In this story we follow the journey of one proton who comes into existence at the beginning of creation and makes it all the way through history to today. By becoming a part of atoms and molecules that turn up at some of the universe's most important moments, our friend Proton witnesses emerging galaxies, the origin of life, its evolution into a wild diversity of life forms, the first human beings, the birth and life of Jesus, the beginnings of the Christian church, all the way up to the present day. Through it all, the mysterious, seemingly unbelievable plans of the Creator continue to unfold. . . .DawnBioLogos Books on Science and Christianity invite us to see the harmony between the sciences and biblical faith on issues including cosmology, biology, paleontology, evolution, human origins, the environment, and more.Edge
By Koji Suzuki. 2012
Edge begins with a massive and catastrophic shifting of the San Andreas fault. The fears of California someday tumbling into…
the sea--that have become the stuff of parody--become real. But even the terror resulting from this catastrophe pales in comparison to the understanding behind its happening, a cataclysm extending beyond mankind's understanding of horror as it had previously been known. The world is falling apart because things are out of joint at the quantum level, about which of course there's never been any guarantee that everything has to remain stable.Koji Suzuki returns to the genre he's most famous for after many years of "not wanting to write any more horror." As expected from Suzuki, the chills are of a more cerebral, psychological sort, arguably more unsettling and scary than the slice-and-dice gore fests that horror has become known in the U.S. Never content to simply do "Suzuki"--as it were--but rather push the envelope on what horror is in general and for which readers have come to know him, Edge City borders on being cutting-edge science fiction. The author himself terms this novel, which he has worked on for some years, a work of "quantum horror."