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"Conspiracies Fiction"
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Overtaken
\"After the mysterious pulses changed Nica Ashley's life forever, she was sure things could only get worse when Dana Fox returned. Her reappearance after having gone missing for months surely meant losing her friendship with Jackson but also that something more ominous is simmering under the surface of quiet Barrington\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Secret Agent
Secret terror cells, political conspiracy, police bungling, state-sponsored bomb plots… This is London, 1896. Inspired by Joseph Conrad's classic novel, The Secret Agent is theatre O's heartbreaking and hilarious chronicle of passion, betrayal and terrorism. Set at a time of social upheaval and growing disparity between rich and poor, at the heart of this tale is a woman fighting to protect her young brother from exploitationand violence. In their trademark highly imaginative style, described by The New York Times as, \"vivid, enlightening, inventive and compelling\", music halland early cinema collide in theatre O's return to the stage after five years away.
eBook
The limit
When his family exceeds its legal debt limit, thirteen-year-old Matt is sent to the Federal Debt Rehabilitation Agency workhouse, where he discovers illicit activities are being carried out using the children who have been placed there.
Book
A God-Tier LARP? QAnon as Conspiracy Fictioning
The QAnon movement, which gained a lot of traction in recent years, defies categorization: is it a conspiracy theory, a new mythology, a social movement, a religious cult, or an alternate reality game? How did the posts of a (supposedly) anonymous government insider named Q on an obscure online imageboard in October 2017 instigate a serious conspiracy movement taking part in the storming of the US Capitol in early 2021? Returning to the origins of QAnon on 4chan’s Politically Incorrect board and its initial reception as a potential LARP, we analyze it as an instance of participatory online play that fosters deep engagement above all. Drawing on concepts from play and performance studies, we theorize the dynamics by which QAnon developed into an influential conspiracy narrative as instances of “conspiracy fictioning.” In particular, we revive the notion of hyperstition to make sense of how such conspiracy fictionings work to recursively “bootstrap” their own alternate realities into existence. By thus exploring the participatory and playful engagement mechanisms that drive today’s conspiracy movements, we aim to elucidate the epistemological and socio-political dynamics that mark the growing entanglement of play and politics, fact and fiction in society.
Journal Article
Randoms
\"A twelve-year-old boy is chosen to join a four-person applicant team to work towards membership in the Confederation of United Planets, and stumbles across conspiracies resembling science fiction he's been a fan of his entire life\"-- Provided by publisher.
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Reflections on the Popularity of ‘Conspiracy Mentalities’
In this text from a lecture made in 2006, Serge Moscovici (1925–2014) seeks to update his earlier work on the ‘conspiracy mentality’ (Moscovici, 1987) by considering the relationships between social representations and conspiracy mentality. Innovation in this field, Moscovici argues, will require a thorough description and understanding of what conspiracy theories are, what rhetoric they use and what functions they fulfill. Specifically, Moscovici considers conspiracies as a form of counterfactual history implying a more desirable world (in which the conspiracy did not take place) and suggests that social representations theory should tackle this phenomenon. He explicitly links conspiracy theories to works of fiction and suggests that common principles might explain their popularity. Historically, he argues, conspiracism was born twice: first, in the middle ages, when their primary function was to exclude and destroy what was considered as heresy; and second, after the French Revolution, to delegitimize the Enlightenment, which was attributed to a small coterie of reactiories rather than to the will of the people. Moscovici then considers four aspects (‘thematas’) of conspiracy mentality: 1) the prohibition of knowledge; 2) the duality between the majority (the masses, prohibited to know) and ‘enlightened’ minorities; 3) the search for a common origin, an ‘Ur-phenomenon’ that connects historical events and provides a continuity to history (he notes that such a tendency is also present in social psychological theorizing); and 4) the valorization of tradition as a bulwark against modernity. Some of Moscovici’s insights in this talk have since been borne out by contemporary research on the psychology of conspiracy theories, but many others still remain fasciting potential avenues for future research.
Journal Article
Demon in the hole : a thriller
The demon has waited a long time. Hidden away in a location so secret, even the President doesn't know about it, the demon has outlasted its creators and its keepers and become lost to human memory. But now it has been found--and it will soon bring mankind to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Douglas Wright is an unemployed aerospace engineer. Broke, divorced, homeless, and bitter, he has no idea where to turn next. Two very different and powerful men, both utterly ruthless, are ready to tell him. Ben Savitch, a former wheat farmer turned bank robber and anarchist, offers Wright a million and a half dollars to re-awaken the demon. The other man, known only as Mr. Black, is the enigmatic head of a rogue agency within Homeland Security. Wright thinks both men are insane. He would like to collect the money being offered to him, but he would also like to avoid starting World War III, and the cost of disobeying either of his new masters is death... -- Adapted from page [4] cover.
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Shattering Reality: Monsters from the Multiverse
Kaijū media frequently features dangerous scientific experiments as a central theme, invented by scientists who are falsely convinced that they both completely understand and control their advanced technology. In the past few decades, this has included the introduction of high-energy physics (HEP) experiments—especially mammoth particle accelerators—that, among other destructive results, allow for the entrance of equally large and dangerous creatures into our world from parallel dimensions. Public concerns voiced about the safety of the creation of two groundbreaking energy accelerators—the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe—in the early 21st century are tied to related science fiction media that capitalize on such fears (including Godzilla vs. Megaguirus [2000], Pacific Rim [2013], The Cloverfield Paradox [2018], The Kaiju Preservation Society [2022]). Particular attention is paid to the Netflix original series Stranger Things (2016–) as a detailed case study. This study concludes with an analysis of scientists’ attempts to embrace the popularity of Stranger Things in their communication with the general public, and suggests that ongoing issues with conspiracy theories have been fueled in part by such attempts, coupled with long-standing issues with the HEP community and their peculiar scientific naming conventions.
Journal Article
John Fowles, Oscar Wilde, and the Conspiracy of Fiction
John Fowles's 1965 novel The Magus , in which a mysterious and far-reaching \"godgame\" subjects the novel's protagonist to a series of deceptions that toy with his desires and punish his vanity, is a prime example of what one could call the \"conspiratorial style\" in fiction. Buried within the unfolding plot of Fowles's novel seem to be telling references to another text about the dangerous appeal of elaborate but unsubstantiated theories, Oscar Wilde's \"The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,\" a story about one man's fatal obsession over discovering the true identity of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's sonnets. The Magus parallels Wilde's cautionary tale not only in its focus on the evocative power of the artistic muse but also in how it explores the distorting effects of desire and the lure of solving what may well be unsolvable.
Journal Article