Download or read book Storming the Reality Studio written by Larry McCaffery and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The term "cyberpunk" entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson's pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant-garde. By bringing together original fiction by well-known contemporary writers (William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany), critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture (Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard), and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk (William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling), Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age. A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art. Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William Vollman Selected Non-Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean-François Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

Download or read book Across the Wounded Galaxies written by Larry McCaffery and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten writers whose works have a significant influence on the genre over the past quarter-century speak about their works, their backgrounds, and their aesthetic impulses, discussing New Wave, cyberpunk, hard vs. soft SF, and the viability of science fiction as a means of suggesting political, radical, and sexual agendas. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Mirrorshades written by Bruce Sterling and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short stories labeled "Mirroshade," "Neuromanatic," "Cyberpunk," etc. by such authors as Greg Bear, Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley and others.

Download or read book Terminal Identity written by Scott Bukatman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity--referring to both the site of the termination of the conventional "subject" and the birth of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer terminal or television screen--puts to rest any lingering doubts of the significance of science fiction in contemporary cultural studies. Demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge, both of the history of science fiction narrative from its earliest origins, and of cultural theory and philosophy, Bukatman redefines the nature of human identity in the Information Age. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theories of the postmodern--including Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, and Jean Baudrillard--Bukatman begins with the proposition that Western culture is suffering a crisis brought on by advanced electronic technologies. Then in a series of chapters richly supported by analyses of literary texts, visual arts, film, video, television, comics, computer games, and graphics, Bukatman takes the reader on an odyssey that traces the postmodern subject from its current crisis, through its close encounters with technology, and finally to new self-recognition. This new "virtual subject," as Bukatman defines it, situates the human and the technological as coexistent, codependent, and mutally defining. Synthesizing the most provocative theories of postmodern culture with a truly encyclopedic treatment of the relevant media, this volume sets a new standard in the study of science fiction--a category that itself may be redefined in light of this work. Bukatman not only offers the most detailed map to date of the intellectual terrain of postmodern technology studies--he arrives at new frontiers, providing a propitious launching point for further inquiries into the relationship of electronic technology and culture.

Download or read book Fiction 2000 written by George Edgar Slusser and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Will novels and stories be relevant in the next millennium, when the boundaries between illusion and reality, and observer and observed, may dissipate in a whirl of images, signals and data? This essay collection divines the prospects of fiction in the information age by examining cyberpunk literature. A movement less than a decade old, cyberpunk is driven by deep concerns about society, ethics, and new technology and has been defined as the literature of the first generation of science-fiction writers actually to live in a science-fiction world. These essays were first presented at the 1989 annual J. Lloyd Eaton Conference on Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, the field's most prestigious international gathering. They address concerns common not only to cyberpunk and traditional science-fiction scholars, critics, and writers but to their counterparts outside the genre as well. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the essays consider the origins of cyberpunk, the appropriation of its conventions by the mass media, the literature's paradoxical retrogressive/iconoclastic nature, cyberpunk's affinities to and deviations from both traditional science fiction and postmodernist literature, the parameters and components of the cyberpunk canon, and the movement's future course. Some essays are theoretical, but all are grounded in works familiar to serious science-fiction readers: Neuromancer, Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart, Islands in the Net, Great Sky River, the Mirrorshades anthology, and others; cyberpunk TV and cinema like the Max Headroom programs, Blade Runner, and Tron; and precursory literature, including Frankenstein, Le Roman de l'avenir, Ralph I24C 41 +, and A Clockwork Orange. Useful for its views on a volatile science-fiction subgenre, Fiction 2000 is also valuable for what it tells us about the fate of mainstream literature.

Download or read book Empire of the Senseless written by Kathy Acker and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot and part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. "An elegy for the world of our fathers," as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

Download or read book Ready Player One written by Ernest Cline and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-08-16 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Now a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg. “Enchanting . . . Willy Wonka meets The Matrix.”—USA Today • “As one adventure leads expertly to the next, time simply evaporates.”—Entertainment Weekly A world at stake. A quest for the ultimate prize. Are you ready? In the year 2045, reality is an ugly place. The only time Wade Watts really feels alive is when he’s jacked into the OASIS, a vast virtual world where most of humanity spends their days. When the eccentric creator of the OASIS dies, he leaves behind a series of fiendish puzzles, based on his obsession with the pop culture of decades past. Whoever is first to solve them will inherit his vast fortune—and control of the OASIS itself. Then Wade cracks the first clue. Suddenly he’s beset by rivals who’ll kill to take this prize. The race is on—and the only way to survive is to win. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • San Francisco Chronicle • Village Voice • Chicago Sun-Times • iO9 • The AV Club “Delightful . . . the grown-up’s Harry Potter.”—HuffPost “An addictive read . . . part intergalactic scavenger hunt, part romance, and all heart.”—CNN “A most excellent ride . . . Cline stuffs his novel with a cornucopia of pop culture, as if to wink to the reader.”—Boston Globe “Ridiculously fun and large-hearted . . . Cline is that rare writer who can translate his own dorky enthusiasms into prose that’s both hilarious and compassionate.”—NPR “[A] fantastic page-turner . . . starts out like a simple bit of fun and winds up feeling like a rich and plausible picture of future friendships in a world not too distant from our own.”—iO9

Download or read book Avant pop written by Larry McCaffery and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avant-Pop is innovative fiction, comic book art, unique graphics, and various unclassifiable texts written by the most radical, subversive literary talents of the postmodern new wave. They include cult figures in the pop underground (Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker, Tim Ferret, Derek Pell, Harold Jaffe), important new writers who have gained prominence since the late eighties (Mark Leyner, Eurudice, William T. Vollmann), and the most promising new kids on the block ("rap fiction" master Ricardo Cortez Cruz--winner of the 1992 Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction--and Doug Rice, whose obscenely obsessive, Faulkner-meets-Acker prose is showcased here for the first time). Avant-Pop will send a collective wake-up call to all those readers who have spent the last decade nodding off, along with the rest of America's daydream nation. Avant-Pop will actually reverse the numbing effects of years of exposure to the harmful emissions of television, movies, glossy magazines, and commercial bestsellers. Readers who decry the absence of a liberating radicalized art and have had it with our bland B-movie society of the spectacle will hop with the hip in Avant-Pop.

Download or read book William S Burroughs The Revised Boy Scout Manual written by William S. Burroughs and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive version of William Burroughs' political satire masterpiece, published for the first time in its entirety.

Download or read book My Descent Into Death written by Howard Storm and published by Harmony. This book was released on 2005-02-15 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not since Betty Eadie’s Embraced by the Light has a personal account of a Near-Death Experience (NDE) been so utterly different from most others—or nearly as compelling. "This is a book you devour from cover to cover, and pass on to others. This is a book you will quote in your daily conversation. Storm was meant to write it and we were meant to read it." —from the foreword by Anne Rice In the thirty years since Raymond Moody’s Life After Life appeared, a familiar pattern of NDEs has emerged: suddenly floating over one’s own body, usually in a hospital setting, then a sudden hurtling through a tunnel of light toward a presence of love. Not so in Howard Storm’s case. Storm, an avowed atheist, was awaiting emergency surgery when he realized that he was at death’s door. Storm found himself out of his own body, looking down on the hospital room scene below. Next, rather than going “toward the light,” he found himself being torturously dragged to excruciating realms of darkness and death, where he was physically assaulted by monstrous beings of evil. His description of his pure terror and torture is unnerving in its utter originality and convincing detail. Finally, drawn away from death and transported to the realm of heaven, Storm met angelic beings as well as the God of Creation. In this fascinating account, Storm tells of his “life review,” his conversation with God, even answers to age-old questions such as why the Holocaust was allowed to take place. Storm was sent back to his body with a new knowledge of the purpose of life here on earth. This book is his message of hope.

Download or read book The Anomaly written by Hervé Le Tellier and published by Other Press, LLC. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller and a "Best Thriller of the Year" Winner of the Goncourt Prize and now an international phenomenon, this dizzying, whip-smart novel blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight. Who would we be if we had made different choices? Told that secret, left that relationship, written that book? We all wonder—the passengers of Air France 006 will find out. In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane: Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer. Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he’s gay. Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys’ game to succeed with her Big Pharma client. Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame. About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, The Anomaly takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar. In Hervé Le Tellier’s most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from “chick lit” to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.

Download or read book Suffering Is Never for Nothing written by Elisabeth Elliot and published by B&H Publishing Group. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hard times come for all in life, with no real explanation. When we walk through suffering, it has the potential to devastate and destroy, or to be the gateway to gratitude and joy. Elisabeth Elliot was no stranger to suffering. Her first husband, Jim, was murdered by the Waoroni people in Ecuador moments after he arrived in hopes of sharing the gospel. Her second husband was lost to cancer. Yet, it was in her deepest suffering that she learned the deepest lessons about God. Why doesn’t God do something about suffering? He has, He did, He is, and He will. Suffering and love are inexplicably linked, as God’s love for His people is evidenced in His sending Jesus to carry our sins, griefs, and sufferings on the cross, sacrificially taking what was not His on Himself so that we would not be required to carry it. He has walked the ultimate path of suffering, and He has won victory on our behalf. This truth led Elisabeth to say, “Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I’m willing to take it because I trust Him.” Because suffering is never for nothing.

Download or read book The Souls of Yellow Folk Essays written by Wesley Yang and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fierce and refreshing.”— Carlos Lozada, Washington Post Named a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post, and one of the best books of the year by Spectator and Publishers Weekly, The Souls of Yellow Folk is the powerful debut from one of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation. Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the polite lies that bore us all.

Download or read book The Place of Dead Roads written by William S. Burroughs and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom. Fantastical and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues William Burroughs' exploration of society's controlling forces - the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs - with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.

Download or read book The Reality of Everything written by Rebecca Yarros and published by Entangled: Amara. This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two years after the man she loved was killed in Afghanistan, Morgan Bartley is trying to put the pieces of her life back together. Renovating her dilapidated beach house in the Outer Banks might be just the distraction she needs to manage her debilitating anxiety attacks and begin to heal. That is, if she can ignore the ridiculously handsome guy next door... Jackson Montgomery’s life revolves around his five-year-old daughter and his job as a Coast Guard Search and Rescue pilot. But while his gorgeous new neighbor is clearly in distress, he’s pretty sure she’s no damsel. Morgan is stubborn with more defenses than the Hope Diamond, and the dog tags hanging from her rearview mirror give him a pretty good clue as to why. Morgan swore she’d never fall for another pilot, let alone a military man—and Jackson is heartbreak waiting to happen. But love never plays by the rules...especially when you try to play it safe. The Flight & Glory series is best enjoyed in order. Reading Order: Book #1 Full Measures Book #2 Eyes Turned Skyward Book #3 Beyond What is Given Book #4 Hallowed Ground Book #5 The Reality of Everything

Download or read book He She and It written by Marge Piercy and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A triumph of the imagination. Rich, complex, impossible to put down."—Alice Hoffman In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up. There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions—and the ability to kill. . . . From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow.

Download or read book The Soft Machine written by William S. Burroughs and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-02-24 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.