Science fiction has its immortals - authors whose impact was so tremendous that they belong in a class by themselves. Olaf Stapledon extended the boundaries of science fiction to the infinite, and there are few of the major authors who do not directly or indirectly owe him a great debt. This volume of his short science fiction and fantasy includes in addition to the five stories, an uncollected radio script from which this volume takes its title and an uncollected 1948 address to the British Interplanetary Society.
Collection of five hard science fiction novellas, all set at least ten thousand years in the future that confront the issues of cosmology, astronomy, evolution, and biology.
Science fiction has its immortals - authors whose impact was so tremendous that they belong in a class by themselves. Olaf Stapledon extended the boundaries of science fiction to the infinite, and there are few of the major authors who do not directly or indirectly owe him a great debt. This volume of his short science fiction and fantasy includes in addition to the five stories, an uncollected radio script from which this volume takes its title and an uncollected 1948 address to the British Interplanetary Society.
While others gamble for their lives, Jason Jouval is gambling his away... In a far future dystopian world where the chips are heavy and the House always wins, citizens of the Mid-Eastern Cone roll the dice for their very lives. Honing his skills in order to extend his lackluster life, Jason hits big and becomes famous overnight as the longest living man in history. But what does a man with no passion for life do with all of that time? What is the point of the chips when they neither have value nor meaning? For one wayward, lost soul, the gambling floor becomes a stage on which his altered state of being plays out for the world to see. Under the watchful eyes of the shadowy soldiers of the Patriarchy government, Jason retraces the missteps of a man who's quite unsure if he's ready to fold. Can a man ever truly win when the cards are stacked against him? Is there any way to escape from the glittering lights of the gambling floor? With a hot hand and an eye for Lady Luck, Jason Jouval doubles down on the bet of a lifetime. Orrin Jason Bradford's stories have been compared to the early works of Michael Crichton and Dean Koontz. Pick up your copy of this Sci-Fi thriller today and enter a world where nothing is as it seems.
A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION If you ask, she must answer. A steerswoman's knowledge is shared with any who request it; no steerswoman may refuse a question, and no steerswoman may answer with anything but the truth.And if she asks, you must answer. It is the other side of tradition's contract -- and if you refuse the question, or lie, no steerswoman will ever again answer even your most casual question.And so, the steerswomen - always seeking, always investigating - have gathered more and more knowledge about the world they travel, and they share that knowledge freelyUntil the day that the steerswoman Rowan begins asking innocent questions about one small, lovely, inexplicable object...Her discoveries grow stranger and deeper, and more dangerous, until suddenly she finds she must flee or fight for her life. Or worse -- lie.Because one kind of knowledge has always been denied the the steerswomen: Magic."If you haven't read Kirstein's Steerswoman books I envy you the chance to read them now for the first time.... I think they have a very good claim to be my favorite thing still being written. [...] If you like science, and if you like watching someone work out mysteries, and if you like detailed weird alien worlds and human cultures, if really good prose appeals... you're really in luck." - Jo Walton, Hugo and Nebula Awards winner, author of Among Others and Farthing."[Kirstein] walks the tightrope between fantasy and science fiction with precision and grace... [her] compassion for even minor characters is evident on every page, and her prose is measured and alluring without being overworked." -- Damien Broderick & Paul Di Filippo, in Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010
For students, scholars, readers' advisors, and curious SF readers and fans, this guide provides an easy-to-use launch pad for researching and learning more about science fiction writers and their work. Emphasizing the best popular and contemporary authors, this book covers 100 SF writers, providing for each: • a brief biographical sketch, including a quote from theauthor, awards, etc. • a list of the author's major works (including editions and other writings) • research sources-biographies, criticism, research guides, and web sites • In addition, you'll find read-alike lists for selected authors. For anyone wanting to find information on popular SF authors, this should be the first stop.
Whereas modernist writers lauded the consecrated realm of subjective interiority, mid-century writers were engrossed by the materialization of the collective mind. An obsession with group thinking was fuelled by the establishment of academic sociology and the ubiquitous infiltration of public opinion research into a bevy of cultural and governmental institutions. As authors witnessed the materialization of the once-opaque realm of public consciousness for the first time, their writings imagined the potentialities of such technologies for the body politic. Polling opened new horizons for mass politics. Public Opinion Polling in Mid-Century British Literature traces this most crucial period of group psychology's evolution—the mid-century—when "psychography," a term originating in Victorian spiritualism, transformed into a scientific praxis. The imbrication of British writers within a growing institutionalized public opinion infrastructure bolstered an aesthetic turn towards collectivity and an interest in the political ramifications of meta-psychological discourse. Examining works by H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh, Val Gielgud, Olaf Stapledon, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, Celia Fremlin, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Elizabeth Bowen, this book utilizes extensive archival research to trace the embeddedness of writers within public opinion institutions, providing a fresh explanation for the new "material" turn so often associated with interwar writing.
In the past decade philosophers and political theorists have increasingly pondered the role of religion in a modern secular society, and of the possible value of religion as a resource for contemporary thinking. The global resurgence of a new religious politics – graphically symbolised by 9/11 - has added a new urgency to this project; how is religion to be integrated, and if necessary contested, in such a time? As this study shows, the desire to integrate religion into a ‘progressive’ politics is not new. Providing a comprehensive analysis of the Common Wealth movement, this work seeks to bring together for the first time the religious and political commitments of four of the leading thinkers in the movement, bringing to light the significance of the relationships between them. This study examines at four interwar British radicals – the philosopher John Macmurray, the novelist and sexual theorist Kenneth Ingram, the Science Fiction writer Olaf Stapledon, and the Liberal M.P. Richard Acland – and examines their attempts to develop a socialism that whilst defending the achievements of the secular age was also sensitive to the virtues of religious traditions. Thus it considers Macmurray’s attempt to draw on the seemingly antagonistic traditions of Marxism and Christianity, Ingram’s long struggle to develop a Christian response to ‘deviant’ sexual behaviour, Stapledon’s exploration of a non-Christian religious spirit, and Acland’s journey from liberal atheist to Christian socialist. It then follows the activities of all four in the radical political movement founded by Acland in the midst of the Second World War, Common Wealth, particularly focusing on the positions they took in the serious battles over the function of religion that convulsed the leadership of this body. This work will be of great interest to scholars of political theory, religious studies, social and political thought.
William Olaf Stapledon is best remembered for the extraordinary works of speculative fiction he published between 1930 and 1950. As a novelist, he was known as the spokesman for the Age of Einstein and has influenced writers as diverse as Virginia Woolf, Arthur C. Clarke, and Doris Lessing. This biography is the first to draw on a vast body of unpublished and private documents—interviews, correspondence, archival material, and papers in private hands—to reveal fully the internal struggles that shaped Stapledon's life and reclaim for public attention a distinctive voice of the modern era. Late in his life in an unpublished "letter to the future" Stapledon unwittingly provided the rationale for his biography: "It is just possible that my very obscurity may fit me to speak more faithfully for my period than any of its great unique personalities. A pacifist in World War I, an advocate of European unity and world government, one of the first teachers in the Workers' Educational Association, and an early protestor against apartheid, Stapledon turned utopian beliefs into practical politics. With roots in the shipping worlds of Devon, Liverpool, and the Suez Canal, he was transformed from a self-described provincial on the margins of English literary and political life into a visionary idealist who attracted the attention of scientists, journalists, and novelists, and, given his left-wing political affiliations, even the F.B.I. Stapledon's novels—Last and First Men, Star Maker, Odd John, and Sirius—have gathered a passionate following, and they have seldom been out of print in the last twenty-five years. But the personal experiences and political commitments that shaped this creative work have, until now, barely been known. Robert Crossley's work reveals how, in public and in private, in his social activism as in his fiction, Olaf Stapledon embodied many of the modern era's anxieties and hopes that allow his works to continue to speak to and for the future.
