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Author: Christopher Priest
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590172698
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels Winner of the British Science Fiction Award Nominated for the Hugo Award The “devilishly entertaining” masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world—from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York) The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
Author: Christopher Priest
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590172698
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Get Book Here
Book Description
Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels Winner of the British Science Fiction Award Nominated for the Hugo Award The “devilishly entertaining” masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world—from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York) The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
Author: Christopher Priest
Publisher: Gollancz
ISBN: 9780575121195
Category : Time travel
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Deep in the Advanced Technique Concentration, Wentik created a mind-altering drug. Suddenly he is transported to the jungles of Brazil in the 22nd century and a world devastated by nuclear war and poison gas. Only South America survived but even here 'The Disturbances' create havoc. Can Wentik find a way back? For himself? And all of humanity?
Author: Michael Nolan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782386602
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 154
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Book Description
It is hard to imagine nowadays that, for many years, France and Germany considered each other as "arch enemies." And yet, for well over a century, these two countries waged verbal and ultimately violent wars against each other. This study explores a particularly virulent phase during which each of these two nations projected certain assumptions about national character onto the other - distorted images, motivated by antipathy, fear, and envy, which contributed to the growing hostility between the two countries in the years before the First World War. Most remarkably, as the author discovered, the qualities each country ascribed to its chief adversary appeared to be exaggerated or negative versions of precisely those qualities that it perceived to be lacking or inadequate in itself. Moreover, banishing undesirable traits and projecting them onto another people was also an essential step in the consolidation of national identity. As such, it established a pattern that has become all too familiar to students of nationalism and xenophobia in recent decades. This study shows that antagonism between states is not a fact of nature but socially constructed.
Author: Jonathan Basile
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1947447505
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 110
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Book Description
TAR FOR MORTAR offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature's greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story "The Library of Babel" is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges's narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator's claims of the library's universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library - is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges's imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.
Author: Héctor Olea Galaviz
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300102690
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 618
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Book Description
In the twentieth century, avant-garde artists from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean created extraordinary and highly innovative paintings, sculptures, assemblages, mixed-media works, and installations. This innovative book presents more than 250 works by some seventy of these artists (including Gego, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, Xul Solar, and Jose Clemente Orozco) and artists' groups, along with interpretive essays by leading authorities and newly translated manifestoes and other theoretical documents written by the artists. Together the images and texts showcase the astonishing artistic achievements of the Latin American avant-garde. The book focuses on two decisive periods: the return from Europe in the 1920s of Latin American avant-garde pioneers; and the expansion of avant-garde activities throughout Latin America after World War II as artists expressed their independence from developments in Europe and the United States. As the authors explain, during these periods Latin American art was fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia - an inversion of the original premise that drove the European avant-garde - and serve as a model for
Author: Rob Halpern
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781734317633
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 72
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Book Description
Poetry. California Interest. LGBTQIA Studies. Rob Halpern's new sequence of poems speaks to social, environmental, and personal crisis--from white supremacist violence and wildfires raging just north of San Francisco, to the death of his father--all of which are tempered by the joyful birth of his daughter, whose new life offers relief in the darkness. He calls the poems "hieroglyphs" with a tip of the hat to Marx, for whom the "hieroglyphic" appearance of the world translates "the secret" of our catastrophe. But as Halpern notes, "the secret of the thing may well be that there is no secret." Here, investigation, analysis, and healing converge, as HIEROGLYPHS OF THE INVERTED WORLD tests the promise and the failure of cultural production, specifically lyric poetry, in the midst of disaster. In his afterword to the book, Halpern asks, "Can the moment arrested by the poem's burnished amber show us something we don't already know about the world?" And if not, what is the social function of the poem? Perhaps the question is unanswerable, but this book attempts a response.
Author: Nick Chater
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300240619
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
In a radical reinterpretation of how the mind works, an eminent behavioral scientist reveals the illusion of mental depth Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In this profoundly original book, behavioral scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: rather than being the plaything of unconscious currents, the brain generates behaviors in the moment based entirely on our past experiences. Engaging the reader with eye-opening experiments and visual examples, the author first demolishes our intuitive sense of how our mind works, then argues for a positive interpretation of the brain as a ceaseless and creative improviser.
Author: Christopher Priest
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0575098228
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 159
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Book Description
As Europe looks for ways to deal with the humanitarian crisis of Syria's misplaced population and the influx of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Christopher Priest's second novel has a new, timely, edge. Survivors of a terrible African war flee their blighted continent, and look for refuge in the countries of the West. But Britain is falling into civil war and anarchy. One of Christopher Priest's earliest novels, FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND is a powerful work whose subject matter has become increasingly relevant in recent years. Christopher Priest is a genre-leading author of SFF fiction. His novel, THE PRESTIGE, won a number of awards and was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated film directed by Christopher Nolan (TENET, INCEPTION) starring Hugh Jackman (THE GREATEST SHOWMAN, X-MEN), Christian Bale (THE BIG SHORT, BATMAN BEGINS), Michael Caine (THE ITALIAN JOB) and Scarlett Johansson (MARRIAGE STORY, THE AVENGERS).
Author: Christopher Priest
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943910236
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The western democracies are disintegrating, scarred by violence and gripped with fear of terrorist attacks. Trying to find solutions to today's problems, Julia Stretton and other specialists at the Wessex Project have created a virtual reality projection of a utopian future where all current issues have been resolved - how did they achieve it? But on entering Wessex, they lose all memory of their 'real' lives outside, and as they move back and forth the lines between dream and reality become obscured. When Julia's ex-lover, the sadistic Paul Mason, joins the project, he has a sinister plan to take the Wessex projection to a new and terrifying level . . . Christopher Priest's fifth novel, A Dream of Wessex (1977), is a classic of science fiction that will keep readers guessing until the startling, mind-bending conclusion. Priest's novels The Space Machine, The Affirmation, and The Separation are also available from Valancourt. '[An] excellent and intriguing novel ... the characters and their emotions are real, the concepts fascinating, and the sense of foreboding almost unbearable.' - Library Journal 'This fine novel about time-unravellers has hallucinatory powers ... Priest is a novelist of real distinction.' - The Times (London) 'Christopher Priest is one of our most gifted young writers of science fiction. I recommend A Dream of Wessex. I can best convey its quality by saying that I think not only H.G. Wells but Thomas Hardy himself would have enjoyed and approved of it.' - John Fowles, author of The Magus 'It is a strange novel, technically very assured in its shifts of time and handling of place-in-time, sketching in the edges of the dream with considerable vividness. A fine, exciting novel - SF if you want a label, but an enrichment not only of the sub-genre, but the whole genre too.' - The Guardian
Author: Laurel Federbush
Publisher: CreateSpace
ISBN: 9781507782170
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 38
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Book Description
Have we been completely wrong about the universe? This book presents a startlingly different, yet simple and plausible model of our cosmos, derived from concepts as ancient as flat earth, and as modern as scalar wave theory and torus energy flow. It could really turn your world upside-down!
