Author: Max Barry
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307743225
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
Scientist Charles Neumann loses a leg in an industrial accident. It's not a tragedy. It's an opportunity. Charlie always thought his body could be better. He begins to explore a few ideas. To build parts. Better parts. Prosthetist Lola Shanks loves a good artificial limb. In Charlie, she sees a man on his way to becoming artificial everything. But others see a madman. Or a product. Or a weapon. A story for the age of pervasive technology, Machine Man is a gruesomely funny unraveling of one man's quest for ultimate self-improvement.
Author: Marvin Mudrick
Publisher: Berkshire Publishing Group
ISBN: 1614728720
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 158
Get Book Here
Book Description
The Man in the Machine consists of lively, iconoclastic assessments of major writers and critics by Marvin Mudrick, about whom the critic Roger Sale wrote: "T. S. Eliot was not so good a reviewer as Marvin Mudrick." The book takes its title from Mudrick’s introduction, in which he writes about Edgar Allan Poe’s pervasive influence on modern literature: "[Poe] had the effrontery to palm off on us the silliest, least interesting, and most influential of twentieth-century critical dogmas: that books are machines with nobody inside." Writing about such masters as Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Jane Austen, Trollope, Saint-Simon, Conrad, Chekhov, and Solzhenitsyn, Mudrick shows us the pyrotechnics that can occur when a towering intellect meets characters from the past with all dogma and theories of literature tossed to the wind.
Author: Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 9780872201941
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 100
Get Book Here
Book Description
The first modern translation of the complete texts of La Mettrie's pioneering L'Homme machine and L'Homme plante, first published in 1747 and 1748, respectively, this volume also includes translations of the advertisement and dedication to L'Homme machine. Justin Leiber's introduction illuminates the radical thinking and advocacy of the passionate La Mettrie and provides cogent analysis of La Mettrie's relationship to such important philosophical figures as Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, and of his lasting influence on the development of materialism, cognitive studies, linguistics, and other areas of intellectual inquiry.
Author: Susan Cox
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466872799
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Get Book Here
Book Description
When former party girl and society photographer Theophania Bogart flees to San Francisco to escape a high-profile family tragedy, a series of murders drags her unwillingly out of hiding. In no time at all she discovers she's been providing cover for a sophisticated smuggling operation, she starts to fall for an untrustworthy stranger, and she's knocked out, tied up and imprisoned. The police are sure she's lying. The smugglers are sure she knows too much. Her friends? They aren't sure what to believe. The body count is rising and Theo struggles to find the killer before she's the next victim or her new life is exposed as an elaborate fraud. But the more deeply entangled she becomes, the more her investigation is complicated by her best friend, who is one of her prime suspects; her young protégé, who may or may not have a juvie record; her stern and unyielding grandfather, who exposes an unexpected soft center; and the man on her washing machine, who isn't quite what he appears, either. Susan Cox's Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award-winning novel is a charming debut with wacky, colorful characters and a delightfully twisted mystery.
Author: Ryan North
Publisher: Machines of Death LLC
ISBN: 0982167121
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 468
Get Book Here
Book Description
MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.
Author: Katie Williams
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525533133
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Get Book Here
Book Description
FINALIST FOR 2018 KIRKUS PRIZE NAMED ONE OF THE "BEST LITERARY FICTION OF 2018' BY KIRKUS REVIEWS "Sci-fi in its most perfect expression…Reading it is like having a lucid dream of six years from next week, filled with people you don't know, but will." —NPR "[Williams’s] wit is sharp, but her touch is light, and her novel is a winner." – San Francisco Chronicle "Between seasons of Black Mirror, look to Katie Williams' debut novel." —Refinery29 Smart and inventive, a page-turner that considers the elusive definition of happiness. Pearl's job is to make people happy. As a technician for the Apricity Corporation, with its patented happiness machine, she provides customers with personalized recommendations for greater contentment. She's good at her job, her office manager tells her, successful. But how does one measure an emotion? Meanwhile, there's Pearl's teenage son, Rhett. A sensitive kid who has forged an unconventional path through adolescence, Rhett seems to find greater satisfaction in being unhappy. The very rejection of joy is his own kind of "pursuit of happiness." As his mother, Pearl wants nothing more than to help Rhett--but is it for his sake or for hers? Certainly it would make Pearl happier. Regardless, her son is one person whose emotional life does not fall under the parameters of her job--not as happiness technician, and not as mother, either. Told from an alternating cast of endearing characters from within Pearl and Rhett's world, Tell the Machine Goodnight delivers a smartly moving and entertaining story about the advance of technology and the ways that it can most surprise and define us. Along the way, Katie Williams playfully illuminates our national obsession with positive psychology, our reliance on quick fixes. What happens when these obsessions begin to overlap? With warmth, humor, and a clever touch, Williams taps into our collective unease about the modern world and allows us see it a little more clearly.
Author: Mark O'Connell
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385540426
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Get Book Here
Book Description
“This gonzo-journalistic exploration of the Silicon Valley techno-utopians’ pursuit of escaping mortality is a breezy romp full of colorful characters.” —New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice) Transhumanism is a movement pushing the limits of our bodies—our capabilities, intelligence, and lifespans—in the hopes that, through technology, we can become something better than ourselves. It has found support among Silicon Valley billionaires and some of the world’s biggest businesses. In To Be a Machine, journalist Mark O'Connell explores the staggering possibilities and moral quandaries that present themselves when you of think of your body as a device. He visits the world's foremost cryonics facility to witness how some have chosen to forestall death. He discovers an underground collective of biohackers, implanting electronics under their skin to enhance their senses. He meets a team of scientists urgently investigating how to protect mankind from artificial superintelligence. Where is our obsession with technology leading us? What does the rise of AI mean not just for our offices and homes, but for our humanity? Could the technologies we create to help us eventually bring us to harm? Addressing these questions, O'Connell presents a profound, provocative, often laugh-out-loud-funny look at an influential movement. In investigating what it means to be a machine, he offers a surprising meditation on what it means to be human.
Author: Daniel Strasel
Publisher: Daniel Strasel
ISBN: 1947052993
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Get Book Here
Book Description
Synopsis: An uninteresting man of mistaken importance struggles to understand his role in life. This imaginative and thought-provoking book of quips, reflections, and antagonisms reads in the spirit of science fiction. The author deems it “philosofiction”. Δ * * * The year is 2066. Silverberg, the world’s youngest and undisputedly most powerful country, generally entertains only the most prominent visitors and immigrants. However, this year it has intentionally attracted an otherwise uninteresting young man of average station. When the powers that lured him cannot find him, the hunt begins. Misunderstanding his importance, multiple operatives of high station and various loyalties race to find him. As time progresses, the intensity thickens. Those who join this man find their own lives disrupted and changed forever, swept up by the storm surrounding him. While he means no harm to anybody, his pursuers will not rest until he is found and destroyed. It is only a matter of time. Bombarded with varying opinions about the truth, this man struggles for discernment and understanding, but what he believes cannot save him - or can it? * * * Pragmatic dogma, theology, and atheology collide and argue in the background as we follow this unhero through a quick, comedic, dark, and philosophical journey of determining what he is - deciding between God, Man, and The Machine. This 316 page volume includes maps, art, footnotes, appendices, and more. Δ Phi·los·o·phy Investigation of the nature, causes, or principles of reality, knowledge, or values, based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods. Fic·tion A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.
Author: Robert Lacey
Publisher: Little Brown
ISBN: 9780316511667
Category : Automobile industry and trade
Languages : en
Pages : 862
Get Book Here
Book Description
Master biographer Robert Lacey tells the fascinating, authoritative account of the ambitious men and glamorous women behind the world's largest family-controlled business empire. From Henry Ford -- the original in every sense of the word -- whose revolutionary standards created a new way of life for America and the world, to Henry Ford II, old Henry's grandson, who rose from a frivolous playboy to become an industrial giant in his own right, to the tragic figure of Edsel Ford, old Henry's son and young Henry's father, smothered by the one and overshadowed by the other, to brash Lee Iacocca, whose visionary plans for the company would put him in conflict with Henry Ford II. "Richly anecdotal and wonderfully readable . . . irresistable." The Washington Post Book World
Author: Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521478496
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Get Book Here
Book Description
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-51), author of Machine Man (1747), was the most uncompromising of the materialists of the eighteenth century, and the provocative title of his work ensured it a succès de scandale in his own time. It was however a serious, if polemical, attempt to provide an explanation of the workings of the human body and mind in purely material terms and to show that thought was the product of the workings of the brain alone. This fully annotated edition presents an English translation of the text together with the most important of La Mettrie's other philosophical works translated into English, and Ann Thomson's introduction examines his aims and the scandalous moral consequences which he drew from his materialism.
