On a world of organic glass, slowly crumbling at the edges, young Skantriftic's life is shattered when their village is destroyed in a preventable catastrophe. Alongside their twin, they embark on a perilous journey to uncover the truth behind their community's fate and the secrets of their dying world. As they navigate through a landscape of darkness and light, Skantriftic faces ruthless officials, military brutality, and a government shrouded in lies. Their quest for answers leads them into the heart of a rebellion, where they must confront the true nature of power and the lengths some will go to maintain it. With the world literally breaking apart around them, Skantriftic must decide how far they're willing to go to expose the truth and save what remains of their home. This gripping tale explores resilience, imagination, and the cost of challenging oppression in a world on the brink of collapse. Perfect for fans of thought-provoking science fiction like The Dispossessed and dystopian adventures like The Hunger Games, this thrilling novel will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.
HE LOVES ME, HE LOVES ME NOT. Sylvie is sure Carl loves her, so why hasn't he kissed her? Sylvie and Carl have always been best friends, and Sylvie's always dreamed that they'd get married someday. But when she begins to realize that Carl may be more interested in boys than girls, Sylvie struggles to hold on to the pieces of her shattered dreams. With her trademark blend of honesty, sensitivity, and humor, bestselling author Jacqueline Wilson delivers a novel for teens about first love, first heartbreak, and the power of a kiss.
A mind-shaking glimpse into the future of the earth: a brilliantly imagined, horrifyingly plausible glimpse into a world where the social elite, the Uppers, live in absolute luxury, boosting themselves with 'Joy Juice'. The 'Joy Juice' is the vital life fluid extracted from the workers, the second class citizens whose life is a constant search for and movement from one trip, one hallucination to the next. It is only when the workers are tripping that the Uppers can extract the 'Joy Juice'. But what happens when the good trips turn into bad ones? When pleasant dreams become nightmares?
Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye. In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution. Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.
When they emerge from Hell, Merle, her friend Junipa who has mirrors for eyes, and Vermithrax the flying stone lion find themselves in Egypt. Of course the Flowing Queen is with them as well, since Merle swallowed her back in Venice. There is something very wrong in Egypt--it is freezing cold, and everything is covered in snow. Winter is here, looking for his lost love, Summer. And another creature is here as well--Seth, the highest of the Horus priests. Betrayed by the pharaoh and his sphinx henchmen, Seth is seeking revenge. Together they travel to the Iron Eye, the vast fortress of the sphinxes.But what does the Flowing Queen want Merle to do there? Meanwhile Serafin, the master thief, the beautiful sphinx Lalapeya, and Eft, the mermaid, are also headed for Egypt. They are traveling underwater, in a submarine piloted by pirates. Serafin is not sure what they can do to the fight the pharaoh, but he knows surrender is not an option. Egypt has captured and enslaved his beloved Venice, and he and the others must fight the empire no matter what the cost. But the final battle will not be one that Serafin has even imagined--and the cost will be high indeed.
Twelve years after he wrote 'Alice in wonderland' Carroll penned this sequel to the story. By that time the first story had been acclaimed worldwide. In this second adventure, where Alice passes through a looking glass, Carroll invents another weird world where he can play around with the idea of mirror images and time going backwards.
Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period. The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions. First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modern philosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings. Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known. A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.
Smoke fills the city air, choking the street, curling up and around the tower. Kattar Bassis hits the ground and crawls blindly through the chaos. A light shines out in the black, leading him to the entranceway of his building. So begins his ascent and search for the ever elusive EXIT.
Into the Looking Glass, an analytical guide for Fringe viewers and science fiction fans in general, explores the influence of these traditions on Fringe. It also reveals how the show reflects - and sometimes critiques - the society from which it emerges. Along with many other post-9/11 television shows, Fringe has demonstrated the West's collective paranoia about foreign invaders and domestic corruption. It also lays bare the spread of radical advances in technology and urges its viewers to ponder the ethical limitations of science.
These five monologues stage the unknown narrator's unending, private dialogue with the Other and the Self. In turns both comic and serious, fiction verges into philosophy and philosophy into fiction, order into disorder and disorder into order.
