Life itself is like a brushstroke in the History of the Universe. If we keep the last moments of the existence, we can compare it to the last and intimate contact of the brush with the canvas, which is almost imperceptible. But when referring to LIFE, the last sigh turns into something supreme, selfish, dissenting, painful, emotional, and even magical, I dare say. This is why there is always a place for doubt, for fair, for surprise or even for distrustful confidence, slackening tension or demoralised moral.
On a planet where men are contained in ghettoised isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia -- until a boy escapes and a young woman's perception of the world is violently interupted. Two old friends enjoy cocktails on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems. A bickering couple emigrate to a world that has worked out an innovative way to side-step the need for war, only to bring their quarrels (and something far more destructive) with them. And in the title story, Suzuki offers readers a tragic and warped mirroring of her own final days as the tyranny of enforced screen-time and the mechanistion of labour bring about a shattering psychic collapse. At turns nonchalantly hip and charmingly deranged, Suzuki's singular slant on speculative fiction would be echoed in countless later works, from Margaret Atwood and Harumi Murakami, to Black Mirror and Ex Machina. In these darkly playful and punky stories, the fantastical elements are always earthed by the universal pettiness of strife between the sexes, and the gritty reality of life on the lower rungs, whatever planet that ladder might be on.
The army marine field is a little known part of the army by both the civilians and the many soldiers. People think of the combat arms (infantry, armor, and artillery) and while they are the heart of the army, there are other branches without which the combat arms would cease to be an effective fighting force. Arguably, the most important element ensuring that the combat arms have beans and bullets is the Transportation Corps. The motto of the Transportation Corps is Spearhead of Logistics because Nothing happens until something moves. In my years as an army mariner, I have had many interesting and sometimes humorous experiences. My experiences are nothing compared with those of other army mariners. This book is not just about my experiences, but of other sea-going sailors as well. Some of the stories are hilarious, and I believe all are interesting. The book is divided into three elements. The heart of the book is the Sea Tales, but Mr. Richard Killblane, the Army Transportation Corps historian graciously provided me with many fascinating interviews of army mariners conducted by personnel in his office. The histories of many army watercraft companies are the final elements of the book and provides the reader with the differences of watercraft units and their missions. I have found my own experience to be very interesting and rewarding. I recall one day working on the engine room logbook, sitting at the galley table and glancing out of the door at the water in Skiffs Creek and thinking of how fortunate I was to be sitting there and not working in an office. I have had a wide variety of duties in my twenty-two year career, but nothing compares with working on the water. I can relate to what Samuel Clemmons wrote in his book, Life on the Mississippi, For I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since. I feel that says it all. I am now retired, but I have the memories of my experiences.
Tokharian Tales is a collection of post-futuristic seemingly science-fictional short stories set on an Earth that is being abandoned, including a love story about a scientist who falls in love with a ghost ... a romance that goes horribly wrong on the floating bridge between Hawaii and Viva-Mexico ... a story set in the Outzone, the dark underbelly of the internet ... a retro-futuristic novella about a quixotic social anarchist who dreams of spaceships during her datura trances ... storybook-tales for 67th century children about robots and replicants, osterlings and Oospheroids ... and the adventure of Shridmar Joe, Hovercipher Pro, in the most dangerous dance of a strangeous game you've ever played! Thousand years ago, the Tokharians lived in a lush oasis with orchards and vineyards where they grew gourds and peaches, melons and grapes. They had iron-smelting furnaces and Buddhist stupas. Merchants rested under mulberry trees, and in the marketplace they sold Chinese brides, Kashmir wool, Bactrian rubies and lapis-lazuli. Gone now, desert now: the oasis has dried up, and a desert wind blows sand over the shattered stupas, the stumps of mulberry trees. The Tokharians either departed or they died in the desert which overtook them. But distance yourself: the same thing is happening again as we dismantle the Earth to fly to the stars. The same desert wind blows over America, over the ruins of Santa Fe and New York City. The wats and shrines of Thailand have been unbricked, removed, and re-assembled in orbit around distant stars. Likewise, the massive Mesoamerican suntemples of Viva-Mexico have been transplanted to the jungle greens and desert sandstonewhites of other planets aroundindigo-orange stars.... About the author: Jason Murk is an existential anarchist from New Mexico who flies through the summer skies in sadhoo-tripsterly tradition in his own hovercipher. What's a hovercipher? You might as well ask what's existential anarchism - open this book and find out!
Conceived in the 1960s, Walt Disney’s original plans for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) outlined a utopian laboratory for domestic technology, where families would live, work, and play in an integrated environment. Like many of his contemporaries, Disney imagined homes that would attend to their inhabitants’ every need, and he regarded the home as a site of unending technological progress. This fixation on “space-age” technology, with its promise of domestic bliss, marked an important mid-twentieth-century shift in understandings of the American home. In A Small World, Davin Heckman considers how domestic technologies that free people to enjoy leisure time in the home have come to be understood as necessary parts of everyday life. Heckman’s narrative stretches from the early-twentieth-century introduction into the home of electric appliances and industrial time-management techniques, through the postwar advent of television and the space-age “house of tomorrow,” to the contemporary automated, networked “smart home.” He considers all these developments in relation to lifestyle and consumer narratives. Building on the tension between agency and control within the walls of homes designed to anticipate and fulfill desires, Heckman engages debates about lifestyle, posthumanism, and rights under the destabilizing influences of consumer technologies, and he considers the utopian and dystopian potential of new media forms. Heckman argues that the achievement of an environment completely attuned to its inhabitants’ specific wants and needs—what he calls the “Perfect Day”—institutionalizes everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice.
This comprehensive volume explores human genetic engineering its pre-clinical and clinical applications, current developments, and as treatment for hereditary diseases. It presents and evaluates the most recent advances in the understanding of mammalian host DNA repair mechanisms, such as double-strand break induced gene targeting and mutagenesis, the development of zinc-finger nucleases, genome editing for neuromuscular diseases, phase integrases, triplex forming oligonucleotides and peptide nucleic acids, aptamer-guided gene targeting, AAV gene editing via DSB repair, engineered nucleases and trinucleotide repeat diseases, and creation of HIV-resistant cells. The expertly authored chapters contextualize current developments within the history of genome editing while also discussing the current and potential safety concerns of this rapidly growing field. Genome Editing: The Next Step in Gene Therapy, the latest volume in the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy series, deftly illuminates the potential of genetic engineering technology to eradicate today’s deadliest and most prolific diseases. It is ideal reading for clinicians and researchers in genetics and immunology.
The purpose of this rich and innovatively presented ethnography is to explore mobility, sense of place and time on the British Columbia coast. On the basis of almost 400 interviews with ferry passengers and over 250 ferry journeys, the author narrates and reflects on the performance of travel and on the consequences of ferry-dependence on island and coastal communities. Ferry Tales inaugurates a new series entitled Innovative Ethnographies for Routledge (innovativeethnographies.net). The purpose of this hypermedia book series is to use digital technologies to capture a richer, multimodal view of social life than was otherwise done in the classic, print-based tradition of ethnography, while maintaining the traditional strengths of classic, ethnographic analysis. Visit the book's website at ferrytales.innovativeethnographies.net
In the Los Angeles ghetto of Necroville, the yearly celebration of the Night of the Dead - where the dead are resurrected through the miracle of nanotechnology and live their second lives as non-citizens - becomes a journey of discovery and revelation for five individuals on the run from their pasts. With his customary flair for making the bizarre both credible and fascinating, McDonald tosses aside the line of demarcation between living and dead in a story that confronts the central quandary of human existence: the essence of non-being.
When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales.
