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The article advances a synthesized view of the world based on an intelligently communicated undivided Universe. It presents a fundamental component-based architecture and characterizes the controlling role of info-communication processes in the interplanetary system. The Fermi Paradox is then considered, which leads to a discussion about the concept of God as it pertains to Albert Einstein's and Stephen Hawking's theories. The article next introduces the author's own understanding of God. The approach adopted in this study situates Earth's civilization within the broader context of extraterrestrial civilizations, and it considers what this means for modern humans. Further research is also suggested in this area regarding the current needs of human civilization on Earth. The study uses an IT approach that is based on systemintegrated info-communication processing. The approach is horizontal rather than vertical, which is popular for natural sciences such as physics and chemistry.

'10 But even before the formal study and appreciation of chaos theory, visionaries questioned whether inventions and scientific and technological changes ever permitted what Herman Kahn called surprise-free futures - that is, futures based on current trends and foreseeable inventions.11 For speculative fiction writers contemplating the future of news, the past is not prologue, the present is not a key to the future. Doctorow's description strikes me as an especially apt explanation of science fiction writing - of why the storytelling of speculative fiction, committed to the notion of extraordinary change in the world, may contain a significant measure of meaning and understanding about the potentially quite otherworldly future of news.

In 1993, cultural critic Mary Dery coined the term \"Afrofuturism\" as a means of describing a then nascent aesthetic movement emerging across a variety of media forms. As he defined the term: \"Speculative fiction which treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture— and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.\" As such, he primarily defines black speculative thought in relation to technology and privileges a forward-looking trajectory. While I consider Dery's intervention to be both an important and necessary one, I nonetheless wish to push back against this assumption.This is not in an antagonistic way, but in the interest of not privileging visions of the future over speculative works which engage in other modes of temporality. Works such as Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1898) or Samuel Delany's Neveryon stories set in a pre-modern secondary world, are not necessarily \"futurist\" per se, but I believe them to be just as vital to the black cultural imaginary as works which look beyond our contemporary moment. Moreover, these works serve as more than mere escapism. They serve the invaluable purpose of constructing a \"usable past\" to serve as the foundation for a more utopian future.This dissertation looks at this phenomenon in three different facets. The first would be stories about the African American folk magic tradition known as Conjure and the ways in which it serves as a means of resisting the culturally homogenizing forces of modernity by enabling the performance of a uniquely black ethnic identity. The second highlights speculative visions of Africa and the ways that they express a nostalgia for a homeland to which one has never been. And finally, speculative neo-slave narratives which address the eerie afterlife of slavery and ways in which its impact can be felt in the present day, in impactful if seemingly intangible ways. These speculative visions serve a purpose beyond mere escapism, they help lay the foundation for more utopian visions of the future by constructing a \"usable past.\".

The essay seeks to assess and to appreciate the significance of the short stories collected in Leo Szilard's The Voice of the Dolphin. Drawing on Szilard's other publications and books about his life and the turbulent times in which he lived, this paper discusses the significance of the stories in the context of Szilard's life as a scientist and activist. In particular, the essay looks at the short stories in terms of Szilard's important contributions to the creation of the first chain nuclear reaction and of atomic bombs, leading to the struggle that consumed the remaining years of his life: Szilard's unrelenting efforts to halt the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Science fiction is a unique genre that can help bridge the divide of what C.P. Snow calls the \"two cultures\" of the sciences and the humanities. Neal Stephenson, the subject of this dissertation, is a Hugo and Locus award-winning author who has received both critical and public attention over the last two decades. There has been insightful scholarship about Neal Stephenson, from the first peer reviewed article David Pourush's \"Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson's Snow Crash\" (1994) to the first collection on Stephenson Tomorrow through the Past: Neal Stephenson and the Project of Global Modernization edited by Jon Lewis. However, it is my contention that like Philip K. Dick before him Neal Stephenson will gain more critical attention in the coming years. This project is the first multiple chapter examination of Stephenson's work by a single author. Using critical insights from SF scholars that have written about Neal Stephenson, including N. Katherine Hayles, Jay Clayton, Sherryl Vint, Walter Benn Michaels, Neil Easterbrook and others, I explore a variety of topics referencing Stephenson's work. These include: literary maximalism, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, the didactic role of the novel, fandom and the SF Megatext, pedagogy and technology, cybernetics and posthumanism. Each of the five chapters position Stephenson as a maximalist writer creating novels in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, and as an important bridge between the \"two cultures\" of the sciences and humanities. Keywords: Neal Stephenson, Science Fiction, Maximalism, Modernism, Postmodernism, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Cyberpunk, Thomas Pynchon, C.P. Snow, Two Cultures, SF Megatext, Fan Studies, N. Katherine Hayles, Sherryl Vint, Digital Humanities

The author of ‘No Shadow of a Doubt’ on a childhood love of fantasy and science fiction that inspired a career in physics What sort of books inspired you as a child? I especially enjoyed folk tales and books with folkloric influence. Alex Pang’s Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions is a fascinating account of how such expeditions were mounted. Daniel Kennefick is associate professor of physics at the University of Arkansas and the author, most recently, of No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Princeton University Press).