Download or read book Science Fiction and the Prediction of the Future written by Gary Westfahl and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction has always challenged readers with depictions of the future. Can the genre actually provide glimpses of the world of tomorrow? This collection of fifteen international and interdisciplinary essays examines the genre's predictions and breaks new ground by considering the prophetic functions of science fiction films as well as SF literature. Among the texts and topics examined are classic stories by Murray Leinster, C. L. Moore, and Cordwainer Smith; 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequels, Japanese anime and Hong Kong cinema; and electronic fiction.

Download or read book The Ministry for the Future written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green

Download or read book Autonomous written by Annalee Newitz and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When anything can be owned, how can we be free? Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, a pharmaceutical Robin Hood traversing the world in a submarine, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can't otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack leaves a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, repeating job tasks until they become insane. Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his partner, Paladin, a young indentured robot. As they race to stop information about the hacked drugs at their source, they form an uncommonly close relationship that neither of them fully understands, and Paladin begins to question their connection - and a society that profits from indentured robots" --

Download or read book Science Fiction Prototyping written by Brian David Johnson and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2011-02-02 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science fiction is the playground of the imagination. If you are interested in science or fascinated with the future then science fiction is where you explore new ideas and let your dreams and nightmares duke it out on the safety of the page or screen. But what if we could use science fiction to do more than that? What if we could use science fiction based on science fact to not only imagine our future but develop new technologies and products? What if we could use stories, movies and comics as a kind of tool to explore the real world implications and uses of future technologies today? Science Fiction Prototyping is a practical guide to using fiction as a way to imagine our future in a whole new way. Filled with history, real world examples and conversations with experts like best selling science fiction author Cory Doctorow, senior editor at Dark Horse Comics Chris Warner and Hollywood science expert Sidney Perkowitz, Science Fiction Prototyping will give you the tools you need to begin designing the future with science fiction. The future is Brian David Johnson’s business. As a futurist at Intel Corporation, his charter is to develop an actionable vision for computing in 2021. His work is called “future casting”—using ethnographic field studies, technology research, trend data, and even science fiction to create a pragmatic vision of consumers and computing. Johnson has been pioneering development in artificial intelligence, robotics, and reinventing TV. He speaks and writes extensively about future technologies in articles and scientific papers as well as science fiction short stories and novels (Fake Plastic Love and Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing and the Devices We Love). He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter. Table of Contents: Preface / Foreword / Epilogue / Dedication / Acknowledgments / 1. The Future Is in Your Hands / 2. Religious Robots and Runaway Were-Tigers: A Brief Overview of the Science and the Fiction that Went Into Two SF Prototypes / 3. How to Build Your Own SF Prototype in Five Steps or Less / 4. I, Robot: From Asimov to Doctorow: Exploring Short Fiction as an SF Prototype and a Conversation With Cory Doctorow / 5. The Men in the Moon: Exploring Movies as an SF Prototype and a Conversation with Sidney Perkowitz / 6. Science in the Gutters: Exploring Comics as an SF Prototype and a Conversation With Chris Warner / 7. Making the Future: Now that You Have Developed Your SF Prototype, What’s Next? / 8. Einstein’s Thought Experiments and Asimov’s Second Dream / Appendix A: The SF Prototypes / Notes / Author Biography

Download or read book Accessing the Future written by Djibril al-Ayad and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface / JoSelle Vanderhooft -- Introduction / Kathryn Allan & Djibril al-Ayad -- Pirate songs / Nicolette Barischoff -- Pay attention / Sarah Pinsker -- Invisible people / Margaret Killjoy -- The lessons of the moon / Joyce Chng -- Screens / Samantha Rich -- A sense all its own / Sara Patterson -- -- Pay attention-- Better to have loved / Kate O'Connor -- Morphic resonance / Toby MacNutt -- Losing touch / Louise Hughes -- Into the waters I rode down / Jack Hollis Marr -- Playa song / Petra Kuppers -- Puppetry / A.C. Buchanan -- Lyric / A.F. Sanchez -- Courting the silent sun / Rachael K. Jones -- In open air / David Jon Fuller.

Download or read book Envisioning the Future written by Marleen S. Barr and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers speculate on the future and the role of science fiction.

Download or read book Future Humans in Fiction and Film written by Louisa MacKay Demerjian and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will appeal to everyone who reads science fiction or thinks about science and its impact on our lives. It raises profound economic, ethical, political, sociological, and psychological questions. It explores our fears and fantasies as it examines a range of fictions, films, and TV programs that speculate about the possibilities of humans in the future. The contributions here ask central questions that have provoked the creators and readers of science fiction since Mary Shelley inaugurated the genre with her novel Frankenstein. What are the aims and limits of science and technology? What are our responsibilities toward the products of our advancing science and technology? What kinds of creatures will we produce or encounter in the future? What rights will we grant to these creatures or – more worryingly – will they grant to us? Do science and technology make us more civilized or more barbaric? How should we treat each other? Ultimately, what does it mean to be human?

Download or read book A New History of the Future in 100 Objects written by Adrian Hon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagining the history of the twenty-first century through its artifacts, from silent messaging systems to artificial worlds on asteroids. In the year 2082, a curator looks back at the twenty-first century, offering a history of the era through a series of objects and artifacts. He reminisces about the power of connectivity, which was reinforced by such technologies as silent messaging—wearable computers that relay subvocal communication; recalls the Fourth Great Awakening, when a regimen of pills could make someone virtuous; and notes disapprovingly the use of locked interrogation, which delivers “enhanced interrogation” simulations via virtual reality. The unnamed curator quotes from a self-help guide to making friends with “posthumans,” describes the establishment of artificial worlds on asteroids, and recounts pro-democracy movements in epistocratic states. In A New History of the Future in 100 Objects, Adrian Hon constructs a possible future by imagining the things it might leave in its wake. Many of these things are just an update or two away: improved ankle monitors, for example, and deliverbots. Others may be the logical conclusions of current trends—“downvote” networks that identify and erase undesirables, and Glyphish, an emoticon-based language that supersedes the written word. More benign are Braid Collective, which provides financial support for artists, and Rechartered Cities, which invites immigrants to revitalize urban areas hollowed out by changing demographics. With this engaging and ingenious work, Hon leads the way into an imagined future while offering readers a new perspective on the present.

Download or read book Plum Rains written by Andromeda Romano-Lax and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a tour-de-force tapestry of science fiction and historical fiction, Andromeda Romano-Lax presents a story set in Japan and Taiwan that spans a century of empire, conquest, progress, and destruction. 2029: In Japan, a historically mono-cultural nation, childbirth rates are at an all-time low and the elderly are living increasingly longer lives. This population crisis has precipitated the mass immigration of foreign medical workers from all over Asia, as well as the development of finely tuned artificial intelligence to step in where humans fall short. In Tokyo, Angelica Navarro, a Filipina nurse who has been in Japan for the last five years, works as caretaker for Sayoko Itou, a moody, secretive woman about to turn 100 years old. One day, Sayoko receives a present: a cutting-edge robot “friend” that will teach itself to anticipate Sayoko’s every need. Angelica wonders if she is about to be forced out of her much-needed job by an inanimate object—one with a preternatural ability to uncover the most deeply buried secrets of the humans around it. Meanwhile, Sayoko becomes attached to the machine. The old woman has been hiding secrets of her own for almost a century—and she’s too old to want to keep them anymore. What she reveals is a hundred-year saga of forbidden love, hidden identities, and the horrific legacy of WWII and Japanese colonialism—a confession that will tear apart her own life and Angelica’s. Is the helper robot the worst thing that could have happened to the two women—or is it forcing the changes they both desperately needed?

Download or read book The Future of Another Timeline written by Annalee Newitz and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A revolution is happening in speculative fiction, and Annalee Newitz is leading the vanguard."--Wil Wheaton From Annalee Newitz, founding editor of io9, comes a story of time travel, murder, and the lengths we'll go to protect the ones we love. 1992: After a confrontation at a riot grrl concert, seventeen-year-old Beth finds herself in a car with her friend's abusive boyfriend dead in the backseat, agreeing to help her friends hide the body. This murder sets Beth and her friends on a path of escalating violence and vengeance as they realize many other young women in the world need protecting too. 2022: Determined to use time travel to create a safer future, Tess has dedicated her life to visiting key moments in history and fighting for change. But rewriting the timeline isn’t as simple as editing one person or event. And just when Tess believes she's found a way to make an edit that actually sticks, she encounters a group of dangerous travelers bent on stopping her at any cost. Tess and Beth’s lives intertwine as war breaks out across the timeline--a war that threatens to destroy time travel and leave only a small group of elites with the power to shape the past, present, and future. Against the vast and intricate forces of history and humanity, is it possible for a single person’s actions to echo throughout the timeline? Praise for The Future of Another Timeline: "An intelligent, gut-wrenching glimpse of how tiny actions, both courageous and venal, can have large consequences. Smart and profound on every level.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) "You close the book reeling with questions about your own life and your part in changing the future."—Amy Acker, actress (Angel and Person of Interest) At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Saturday written by Ian McEwan and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dazzling. . . . Profound and urgent" —Observer "A book of great maturity, beautifully alive to the fragility of happiness and all forms of violence. . . . Everyone should read Saturday" —Financial Times Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon, stands at his bedroom window before dawn and watches a plane—ablaze with fire like a meteor—arcing across the London sky. Over the course of the following day, unease gathers about Perowne, as he moves among hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors who’ve taken to the streets in the aftermath of 9/11. A minor car accident brings him into confrontation with Baxter, a fidgety, aggressive man, who to Perowne’s professional eye appears to be profoundly unwell. But it is not until Baxter makes a sudden appearance at the Perowne family home that Henry’s earlier fears seem about to be realized. . .

Download or read book The Half God of Rainfall written by Inua Ellams and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning poet and playwright behind Barber Shop Chronicles, The Half-God of Rainfall is an epic story and a lyrical exploration of pride, power and female revenge.

Download or read book The Ego Tunnel written by Thomas Metzinger and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-05-21 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain - an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is ''a virtual self in a virtual reality.'' But if the self is not ''real,'' why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.

Download or read book Agency written by William Gibson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it. *The Boston Globe

Download or read book A World of Fiction written by Katherine Bode and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes a new basis for data-rich literary history

Download or read book Origins of Futuristic Fiction written by Paul K. Alkon and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-08-01 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age. Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, Epigone marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, The Year 2440, The Last Man, and The World As It Will Be. Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction. Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists.

Download or read book Edging Into the Future written by Veronica Hollinger and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2002-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The savvy critical essays in this provocative collection investigate the interface between science fiction and postmodern culture. . . . Highly recommended for readers at all levels."—Choice