Quantum Cannibals
Quantum Cannibals

Author: Nathan Elberg

Publisher: Taiku

Published: 2020-08-19

Total Pages: 488

ISBN-13: 9781777284404

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"A terrific story, told by a gifted story-teller. Do not miss..." --Amazon review The widow Osnat is a revered quantum scientist, religious scholar, protector of her people, ravishing beauty, and occasionally a genocidal brute. From the Bronze-Age to a dystopian post-modern era she struggles to stop the destruction of her family and tribe. In the Arctic cannibals feast on her husband. In a high-tech city, demons try to prevent her birth. In Mesopotamia a local assassin helps a zealot who promises the destruction of all non-believers. As in Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, nested stories are woven into an astonishing whole. A hi-tech detective fights alongside her Bronze Age great, great... grandmother. A Bronze Age Mesopotamian shaman protects his teacher in the Stone Age Arctic. A Stone Age Arctic scientist is the savior of a post-modern city-state. Quantum Cannibals draws on the author's studies of folklore, cannibalism, shamanism, Kabbalah, primitive art and communications, as well as his years of experience working for and with Native Americans. "Set over a large span of time: from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to a Post-Modern city-state, this debut of Nathan Elberg is a dazzling expedition into a treacherous past... Elberg's outstanding fluency when writing in various characters' voices, who are born in different time periods is instantly absorbing, and he is brilliant when it comes to developing the mythologies of different cultures and societies. He proficiently balances time travel and magic with precise historical research, complex plot, intricate worldbuilding, and top-of-the-line characterization." --Prairies Book Review "The author pulls it all together, however, in admirable fashion through solid characterization; the sweeping mix of science, mythology, history; and precise, yet metaphor-filled writing"." --Kirkus Reviews

Citizens & Cannibals
Citizens & Cannibals

Author: Eli Sagan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 652

ISBN-13: 9780742508316

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What transformed moral citizens into guillotine cannibals during the French Revolution and the Great Reign of Terror? The answer, argues Eli Sagan, is the exact same force which has killed millions of people in the twentieth century--ideological terror. Citizens and Cannibals offers readers the most comprehensive and incisive explanation of the gruesome Terror, its causes, and its consequences for the modern world.

In the Face of Adversity
In the Face of Adversity

Author: Thomas Nolden

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2023-02-20

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1800083696

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In the Face of Adversity explores the dynamics of translating texts that articulate particular notions of adverse circumstances. The chapters illustrate how literary records of often painful experiences and dissenting voices are at risk of being stripped of their authenticity when not carefully handled by the translator; how cultural moments in which the translation of a text that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion instead gave rise to a translator who enabled its preservation while ultimately coming into their own as an author as a result; and how the difficulties the translator faces in intercultural or transnational constellations in which prejudice plays a role endangers projects meant to facilitate mutual understanding. The authors address translation as a project of making available and preserving a corpus of texts that would otherwise be in danger of becoming censored, misperceived or ignored. They look at translation and adaptation as a project of curating textual models of personal, communal or collective perseverance, and they offer insights into the dynamics of cultural inclusion and exclusion through a series of theoretical frameworks, as well as through a set of concrete case studies drawn from different cultural and historical contexts. The collection also explores some of the venues that artists have pursued by transferring artistic expressions from one medium into another in order to preserve and disseminate important experiences in different cultural settings, media and arts.

The Physics of Immortality
The Physics of Immortality

Author: Frank J. Tipler

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 1997-09-18

Total Pages: 562

ISBN-13: 0385467990

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Is there a higher power in the universe? What happens to us when we die? Leading physicist Frank J. Tipler tackles these questions and more in an astonishing and profoundly important book that scientifically proves the existence of God and the physical resurrection of the dead.

We Are All Cannibals
We Are All Cannibals

Author: Claude Lévi-Strauss

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 173

ISBN-13: 0231541260

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On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Lévi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context. These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female circumcision to medically assisted reproduction, and mythic thought to scientific thought. They explore practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought. Lévi-Strauss measures the short distance between "complex" and "primitive" societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom. Yet he also locates a pure and persistent ethics that connects the center of Western civilization to far-flung societies and forces a reckoning with outmoded ideas of morality and reason.

Media Disrupted
Media Disrupted

Author: Amanda D. Lotz

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0262366673

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How the internet disrupted the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries and what this tells us about surviving technological disruption. Much of what we think we know about how the internet "disrupted" media industries is wrong. Piracy did not wreck the recording industry, Netflix isn't killing Hollywood movies, and information does not want to be free. In Media Disrupted, Amanda Lotz looks at what really happened when the recorded music, newspaper, film, and television industries were the ground zero of digital disruption. It's not that digital technologies introduced "new media," Lotz explains; rather, they offered existing media new tools for reaching people. For example, the MP3 unbundled recorded music; as the internet enabled new ways for people to experience and pay for music, the primary source of revenue for the recorded music industry shifted from selling music to licensing it. Cable television providers, written off as predigital dinosaurs, became the dominant internet service providers. News organizations struggled to remake businesses in the face of steep declines in advertiser spending, while the film industry split its business among movies that compelled people to go to theaters and others that are better suited for streaming. Lotz looks in detail at how and why internet distribution disrupted each industry. The stories of business transformation she tells offer lessons for surviving and even thriving in the face of epoch-making technological change.

Fear of Seeing
Fear of Seeing

Author: Mingwei Song

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2023-10-03

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 0231555539

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Winner, 2023 SFRA Book Award, Science Fiction Research Association A new wave of cutting-edge, risk-taking science fiction has energized twenty-first-century Chinese literature. These works capture the anticipation and anxieties of China’s new era, speaking to a future filled with uncertainties. Deeply entangled with the politics and culture of a changing China, contemporary science fiction has also attracted a growing global readership. Fear of Seeing traces the new wave’s origin and development over the past three decades, exploring the core concerns and literary strategies that make it so distinctive and vital. Mingwei Song argues that recent Chinese science fiction is united by a capacity to illuminate what had been invisible—what society had chosen not to see; what conventional literature had failed to represent. Its poetics of the invisible opens up new literary possibilities and inspires new ways of telling stories about China and the world. Reading the works of major writers such as Liu Cixin and Han Song as well as lesser-known figures, Song explores how science fiction has spurred larger changes in contemporary literature and culture. He analyzes key topics: variations of utopia and dystopia, cyborgs and the posthuman, and nonbinary perspectives on gender and genre, among many more. A compelling and authoritative account of the politics and poetics of contemporary Chinese science fiction, Fear of Seeing is an important book for all readers interested in the genre’s significance for twenty-first-century literature.

Developmental Instability: Its Origins and Evolutionary Implications
Developmental Instability: Its Origins and Evolutionary Implications

Author: T.A. Markow

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 430

ISBN-13: 9401108307

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Developmental Instability: Its Origins and Evolutionary Implications is a collection of papers and transcribed discussions from a conference held in Tempe, Arizona in June 1993. The papers represent a wide range of contributions, from the empirical to the theoretical, and include methods for measuring developmental instability across a variety of taxa and traits. This volume presents contrasting views on how to assess developmental instability as well as on the relationship of instability to genotypic factors, environmental factors and the action of natural and sexual selection. Readers will derive a working knowledge of the best way to assess developmental instability and will be able to design future work in an authoritative way.