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Level 7
Level 7 is the diary of Officer X-127, who is assigned to stand guard at the \"Push Buttons,\" a machine devised to activate the atomic destruction of the enemy, in the country’s deepest bomb shelter. Four thousand feet underground, Level 7 has been built to withstand the most devastating attack and to be self-sufficient for five hundred years. Selected according to a psychological profile that assures their willingness to destroy all life on Earth, those who are sent down may never return. Originally published in 1959, and with over 400,000 copies sold, this powerful dystopian novel remains a horrific vision of where the nuclear arms race may lead, and is an affirmation of human life and love. Level 7 merits comparison to Huxley’s
A Brave New World and Orwell’s
1984 and should be considered a must-read by all science fiction fans.
eBook
I, Yantra
What does it mean to be human? I , Yantra examines ancient
Indian narratives about robots and mechanically constructed beings
to explore how their Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist authors approached
this question. Making translations of many of these texts available
in English for the first time, author Signe Cohen argues that they
shed considerable light on South Asian religious notions of
humanity, self, and agency. She also documents connections between
ancient and modern responses to the ethical problems of what
precisely constitutes a sentient being and what rights such a being
should have. Situated at the intersection of humanities and
bioethics, this cross-disciplinary study will be of interest to
scholars of South Asian languages and literature as well as
specialists in religion and technology.
eBook
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court
A Connecticut Yankee is Mark Twain's most ambitious work, a tour de force with a science-fiction plot told in the racy slang of a Hartford workingman, sparkling with literary hijinks as well as social and political satire. Mark Twain characterized his novel as \"one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities of our poor human race.\" The Yankee, suddenly transported from his native nineteenth-century America to the sleepy sixth-century Britain of King Arthur and the Round Table, vows brashly to \"boss the whole country inside of three weeks.\" And so he does. Emerging as \"The Boss,\" he embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot—with unexpected results.
eBook
Once and Future Antiquities in Science Fiction and Fantasy
In 15 all-new essays, this volume explores how science fiction and fantasy draw on materials from ancient Greece and Rome, ‘displacing’ them from their original settings—in time and space, in points of origins and genre—and encouraging readers to consider similar ‘displacements’ in the modern world. Modern examples from a wide range of media and genres—including Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and the novels of Helen Oyeyemi, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and the role-playing games Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K—are brought alongside episodes from ancient myth, important moments from history, and more. All together, these multifaceted studies add to our understanding of how science fiction and fantasy form important areas of classical reception, not only transmitting but also transmuting images of antiquity. The volume concludes with an inspiring personal reflection from the New York Times-bestselling author of speculative fiction, Catherynne M. Valente, offering her perspective on the limitless potential of the classical world to resonate with experience today.
eBook
Afrofuturisms : ecology, humanity, and francophone cultural expressions
An exploration of Francophone African literary imaginations and expressions through the lens of Afrofuturism Generally attributed to the Western imagination, science fiction is a literary genre that has expressed projected technological progress since the Industrial Revolution. However, certain fantastical elements in African literary expressions lend themselves to science fiction interpretations, both utopian and dystopian. When the concept of science is divorced from its Western, rationalist, materialist, positivist underpinnings, science fiction represents a broad imaginative space that supersedes the limits of this world. Whether it be on the moon, under the sea, or elsewhere within the imaginative universe, Afrofuturist readings of select films, novels, short stories, plays, and poems reveal a similarly emancipatory African future that is firmly rooted in its own cultural mythologies, cosmologies, and philosophies.Isaac Joslin identifies the contours and modalities of a speculative, futurist science fiction rooted in the sociocultural and geopolitical context of continental African imaginaries. Constructing an arc that begins with gender identity and cultural plurality as the bases for an inherently multicultural society, this project traces the essential role of language and narrativity in processing traumas that stem from the violence of colonial and neocolonial interventions in African societies.Joslin then outlines the influential role of discursive media that construct divisions and create illusions about societal success, belonging, and exclusion, while also identifying alternative critical existential mythologies that promote commonality and social solidarity. The trajectory proceeds with a critical analysis of the role of education in affirming collective identity in the era of globalization; the book also assesses the market-driven violence that undermines efforts to instill and promote cultural and social autonomy.Last, this work proposes an egalitarian and ecological ethos of communal engagement with and respect for the diversity of the human and natural worlds.
eBook