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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.
Book
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
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.
Book
Benevolent Conspiracy: Biopolitics and Paranoia in Shane Carruth's Upstream Color
Celebrated by critics for its elliptical, fragmentary aesthetics, Shane Carruth's Upstream Color deploys elements of the paranoid science fiction thriller, albeit without the requisite affective register of panic and anxiety. The fictional biotechnological process at the core of its narrative evolves into a complex web of visual and thematic associations in which paranoid anxiety gradually dissipates. While this appears at first glance as a critical deconstruction of conspiracy theories--all the more relevant at a time when American politics engages more than ever in what Richard Hofstadter has called a \"paranoid style\"--the film actually steers clear of conventional gestures of opposing or debunking paranoia. Instead, it expands the representational range in which paranoia can be rendered and experienced. Proposing what amounts of a version of conspiracy that is no longer nefarious in methods and intents, but potentially beneficial in its outcomes, Upstream Color assumes particular relevance in regard to the biological metaphors it selects to make its point--an exploration of biopolitics which, viewed in hindsight of the COVID-19 pandemic, accounts both for the productive management of biotechnological anxieties and the conspiracy theories in which these anxieties manifest themselves.
Journal Article
How Narratives and Evidence Influence Rumor Belief in Conflict Zones: Evidence from Syria
Armed conflict creates a context of high uncertainty and risk, where accurate and verifiable information is extremely difficult to find. This is a prime environment for unverified information—rumors—to spread. Meanwhile, there is insufficient understanding of exactly how rumor transmission occurs within conflict zones. I address this with an examination of the mechanisms through which people evaluate new information. Building on findings from research on motivated reasoning, I argue that elite-driven narrative contests—competitions between elites to define how civilians should understand conflict—increase the difficulty of distinguishing fact from fiction. Civilians respond by attempting thorough evaluations of new information that they hope will allow them to distinguish evidence from narratives. These evaluations tend to involve some combination of self-evaluation, evaluation of the source, and collective sense-making. I examine this argument using over 200 interviews with Syrian refugees conducted in Jordan and Turkey. My findings indicate that people are usually unable to effectively distinguish evidence from narratives, so narrative contests are powerful drivers of rumor evaluation. Still, civilian mechanisms of rumor evaluation do constrain what propaganda elites can spread. These findings contribute to research on civil war, narrative formation, and information diffusion.
Journal Article