Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
195
result(s) for
"Astronomers Fiction"
Sort by:
Ecocritical Perspectives in Fiction: Object Earth as a Lens for the Planetary and the Global in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital
The numerous causes of climate change and the unintended scalar effects of human activity are increasingly highlighting the chasm between the workings of the planet and human actions, entangled in a complex web of causes and effects that seems to eschew a comprehensive view. This widening gap is posing challenges to human cognition and, as a result, to ecocritical fiction. This article aims to analyse how the fracture between the planetary and the global, discussed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, is rendered in fiction in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital through the representation of object Earth. By interweaving Iovino and Oppermann’s material ecocriticism with ecocritical scholarly reflections, I will show how the object Earth in the novel —apparently observed from the outside area of the International Space Station— thematises the difference between the planetary and the global, and how Harvey’s narrative strategies attempt to capture climate change and the planet by circumventing the hurdle posed by scale. Las numerosas causas del cambio climático y los efectos escalares accidentales de la actividad humana resaltan cada vez más la diferencia entre los mecanismos de funcionamiento del planeta y las acciones humanas, en un entramado multifacético de causas y efectos que parece eludir una visión integral. Esta creciente diferencia está planteando desafíos a la cognición humana y, en consecuencia, también a la ficción ecocrítica. Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar cómo la fractura entre lo planetario y lo global, comentada por Dipesh Chakrabarty, se representa a nivel narrativo en Orbital, de Samantha Harvey, a través de la representación delobjeto Tierra. Entretejiendo la ecocrítica material de Iovino y Oppermann con las reflexiones ecocríticas de varios académicos, mostraré cómo el objeto Tierra novelístico —observado desde el lugar aparentemente externo de la Estación Espacial Internacional— pone en primer plano la diferencia entre lo planetario y lo global, y cómo las estrategias narrativas de Harvey intentan captar el cambio climático y el planeta, sorteando el obstáculo de las magnitudes escalares.
Journal Article
The stargazer's sister : a novel
Caroline, known as \"Lina\" to her family, has always lived in the shadow of her older brother William Herschel's accomplishments. And yet when William invites Lina to join him in England to assist in his musical and astronomical pursuits--not to mention to run his bachelor household--she accepts, finding a new sense of purpose. William may be an obsessive genius, but Lina adores him and aids him with the same fervency as a beloved wife. When William decides to marry, however, Lina's world collapses. As she attempts to rebuild a future, we witness the dawning of an early feminist consciousness--a woman struggling to find her own place among the stars.
Book
Life under another Sun: From Science Fiction to Science
Initiated in the sixteenth century, the Copernican revolution toppled our Earth from its theological pedestal, revealing it not to be the centre of everything but a planet among several others in orbit around one of the zillions of stars of our Universe. Already proposed by some philosophers at the dawn of this major paradigm shift, the existence of exoplanets, i.e. planets in orbit around stars other than our Sun, remained suspected but unconfirmed for centuries. It is only in the last decade of the twentieth century that the first of these extrasolar worlds were found. Their seminal discoveries initiated the development of more and more ambitious projects that led eventually to the detection of thousands of exoplanets, including a few dozen potentially habitable ones, i.e. terrestrial exoplanets that could harbour large amounts of liquid water – and maybe life – on their surfaces. Upcoming astronomical facilities will soon be able to probe the atmospheric compositions of some of these extrasolar worlds, maybe performing in the process the historical detection of chemical signs of life light-years away. But while the existence of extraterrestrial life remains pure speculation for now, it has been a major theme of science fiction for more than a century. By creating countless stories of encounters between humans and alien forms of life, science-fiction authors have pursued, in a sense, the Copernican revolution, confronting us with the idea that not only could life be widespread in the Universe, but also that our species may be far from the Cosmic pinnacle in matters of intelligence and technological development.
Journal Article
Gravity well
Lotte is an astronomer who spends her nights peering into deep space rather than looking too closely at herself. When she returns to her hometown after years in South America, reeling from a devastating diagnosis, she finds that much has changed. Lotte's father has remarried, and she feels like an outsider in the house she grew up in. She's estranged from her former best friend Eve, who is busy with her own life & unsure of how to recover the closeness they once shared. Initially, Lotte's return causes disharmony, but then it is the catalyst for a much more devastating event, an event that will change Lotte and Eve's lives forever.
Book
\Thalesian Lessons: Mad Astronomers in British Fiction of the Long Eighteenth Century.\ Reading Swift: Papers from the Seventh Munster Symposium on Jonathan Swift
In \"Thalesian Lessons: Mad Astronomers in British Fiction of the Long Eighteenth Century,\" Florian Klaeger's deluded stargazers are drawn from a spectrum of the long eighteenth century: Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World (1666), book 3 of Swift's Travels (1726), brief interludes in Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752), Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and Mary Shelley's Last Man (1826). The discussion of the six fictions is good, but one is left with a feeling of \"OK, mad astronomers were portrayed as, well, mad astronomers.\" Like some other essays in this Munster Symposium volume, Klaeger's piece seems more like a worked-up conference paper, less like a journal article. In fairness, that is probably all the essay is intended to be.
Journal Article
The comet seekers
\"A magical, intoxicating debut novel that imagines the future and history of two lovers who are connected by the passing of great comets overhead and by the ancestors that bind them together\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Rocket of One's Own: Scientific Gender Bending by Isabel M. Lewis, Clare Winger Harris, and Leslie F. Stone in the Early U.S. Science Fiction Pulps
The work of the three women writers analyzed in this article-Isabel M. Lewis, Clare Winger Harris, and Leslie F. Stone-was recognized when they were writing in the early twentieth century, but by the time academic attention included science fiction in the 1970s, their work had been forgotten. Although today, the fiction writers Harris and Stone have gained a place in science fiction scholarship, it is still a challenge to create a space for the non-fiction writer Lewis as well. This article considers the history of their reception in the context of the history of diversity in science and engineering more generally. The waning and waxing of their reputations reflect the history of women in STEM, and the past one hundred years have shown a remarkable change in the scientific consensus on the nature of gender differences as well. Therefore, science fiction offers valuable evidence for understanding how women were included, then excluded, and finally re-included in the STEM professions. Re-reading these authors in this context shows how a concern about gender was central to the formation of the genre itself, which deserves greater attention from critics and fans alike.
Journal Article