- Endorsed by Independent School Examination Board (ISEB) - Links to the National Curriculum and ISEB curriculum are referenced in each chapter - Answer guidance encourages independent learning and a greater understanding of the English language - Enables efficient assessment of pupils' strengths and weaknesses Please note that as a PDF download, this product is non-refundable.
Wanted: Dead or Alive! (Or smashed into little bits and delivered in boxes.) The Steampunk Pirates are lured back to England by the promise of gold. But when their inventor Mr Richmond Swift appears on the scene, sparks begin to fly! There’s a new group of robots in town, and the atmosphere’s electric. Have the Steampunk Pirates finally met their match? This hilarious new series from Gareth P. Jones, author of Ninja Meerkats, is sure to delight young readers with its madcap humour and larger-than-life robot pirate crew. Perfect for fans of Jonny Duddle’s The Ghostly Galleon and the Space Pirates books, looking for more swashbuckling action!
In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and constant social upheavals, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable. Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays-on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself. Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us.
Endless ideas at your fingertips, and at the turn of a page... Need an idea for a short story or novel? Look no further than The Writer's Idea Thesaurus. It's far more than a collection of simple writing prompts. You'll find a vast treasury of story ideas inside, organized by subject, theme, and situation categories, and listed alphabetically for easy reference. Author and award-winning writing instructor Fred White shows you how to build out and customize these ideas to create unique plots that reflect your personal storytelling sensibilities, making The Writer's Idea Thesaurus an invaluable tool for generating creative ideas and vanquishing writer's block--for good. Inside you'll find: • 2,000 unique and dynamic story ideas perfect for novels and short stories of any genre or writing style • Twenty major idea categories, such as The Invasion of X, The Transformation of X into Y, Escape from X, The Curse of X, and more • Multiple situations that further refine the major categories, such as The Creation of Artificial Life, The Descent Into Madness, Love in the Workplace, The Journey to a Forgotten Realm, and more • Invaluable advice on how to customize each idea. The Writer's Idea Thesaurus is an interactive story generator that opens the door to thousands of new story arcs and plotlines.
From "a major new talent" (George R. R. Martin) comes an epic speculative novel of revolution, adventure, and the struggle for free will set in a world that might have been, of mechanical men and alchemical dreams. My name is Jax. That is the name granted to me by my human masters. I am a slave. But I shall be free.
In the aftermath of a devastating war, swarms of ancient black robots built by the lost insectoid Klikiss race continue their depredations on helpless worlds with stolen and heavily armed Earth battleships. Among the humans, the Hansa's brutal Chairman struggles to crush any resistance even as King Peter breaks away to form his own new Confederation among the colonies who have declared their independence. And meanwhile, the original, voracious Klikiss race, long thought to be extinct, has returned, intent on conquering their former worlds and willing to annihilate anyone in the way. Praise for the Saga of Seven Suns? "A soaring epic? A space opera to rival the best the field has ever seen." -- Science Fiction Chronicle "Kevin Anderson has created a fully independent and richly conceived venue for his personal brand of space opera, a venue that nonetheless raises fruitful resonances with Frank Herbert's classic Dune series." -- Scifi.com
Within and among nations, rising levels of social inequality threaten our collective future. Currently, upwards of 80% of people’s life chances are determined by factors over which they have absolutely no control. Social inequality threatens the democratic project because it destroys the trust on which governments depend, and it gives rise to corrupt political and economic institutions. How can we get out of the traps we have created for ourselves? We need to reboot capitalism. Drawing on diverse examples from a range of countries, McNall explains the social, economic, and ecological traps we have set for ourselves and develops a set of rules of resilience that are necessary conditions for the creation and maintenance of democratic societies, and a set of rules essential for creating a sustainable future.
For many years we've known about Six Degrees of Separation: the idea that every person on the planet can be linked by a chain of just six individuals. Now, former Scotland Yard criminal intelligence officer Stevyn Colgan has designed a paper-based wireless device to do the same thing with facts – a kind of Six Degrees of Information. Called the Connectoscope, it will teach you, among many other things, what humans taste like to robots, why there were bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover, how a tree became the New York Stock Exchange, why Bob the Builder has more fingers In Japan than in the UK, who the patron saint of medical records is, and how to make Superman gay. Colgan sets out to prove that everything can be connected. As this dizzyingly fact-filled book shows, the fun lies in figuring out how.
