The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049


Book Description

Embargoed to 5th October Officer K (Ryan Gosling), a new blade runner for the Los Angeles Police Department, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what's left of society into chaos. His discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former blade runner who's been missing for 30 years The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049 goes behind the scenes and reveals how this epic production was brought to the screen. Featuring incredible concept art and on-set photography, this deluxe book is a rare treat for fans as key cast and crew tell the story of how Blade Runner was revived and was given a whole new lease of life. See the trailer here




Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?


Book Description

By 2021, the Terminus War had driven mankind off-planet and entire species into extinction. Now only the rich can afford living creatures; others may buy amazingly realistic simulacrae: horses, cats, sheep ... Even humans. These artificial people are so advanced it's impossible to tell them from true men and women--except for their lack of empathy. Without empathy, androids can--and do--kill their owners and blend into society, so they're illegal on Earth. It's Rick Deckard's job to find these rogues and "retire" them. But "andys" tend to fight back--with deadly results.




Blade Runner 2049


Book Description

Widely acclaimed upon its release as a future classic, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is visually stunning, philosophically profound, and a provocative extension of the story in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, this fascinating collection explores philosophical questions that abound in Blade Runner 2049, including: What distinguishes the authentically "human" person? How might natality condition one’s experience of being-in-the-world? How might shared memories feature in the constitution of personal identities? What happens when created beings transcend the limits intended in their design? What (if anything) is it like to be a hologram? Can artificial beings participate in genuinely romantic relationships? How might developing artificial economics impact our behaviour as prosumers? What are the implications of techno-human enhancement in an era of surveillance capitalism? Including a foreword by Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, film studies, philosophy of mind, psychology, gender studies, and conceptual issues in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.







Pale Fire


Book Description

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.




China 2049


Book Description

How will China reform its economy as it aspires to become the next economic superpower? It's clear that China is the world's next economic superpower. But what isn't so clear is how China will get there by the middle of this century. It now faces tremendous challenges such as fostering innovation, dealing with ageing problem and coping with a less accommodative global environment. In this book, economists from China's leading university and America's best-known think tank offer in depth analyses of these challenges. Does China have enough talent and right policy and institutional mix to transit from input-driven to innovation-driven economy? What does ageing mean, in terms of labor supply, consumption demand and social welfare expenditure? Can China contain the environmental and climate change risks? How should the financial system be transformed in order to continuously support economic growth and keep financial risks under control? What fiscal reforms are required in order to balance between economic efficiency and social harmony? What roles should the state-owned enterprises play in the future Chinese economy? In addition, how will technological competition between the United States and China affect each country's development? Will the Chinese yuan emerge as a major reserve currency, and would this destabilize the international financial system? What will be China's role in the international economic institutions? And will the United States and other established powers accept a growing role for China and the rest of the developing world in the governance of global institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, or will the world devolve into competing blocs? This book provides unique insights into independent analyses and policy recommendations by a group of top Chinese and American scholars. Whether China succeeds or fails in economic reform will have a large impact, not just on China's development, but also on stability and prosperity for the whole world.




Lacanian Perspectives on Blade Runner 2049


Book Description

This book provides a collection of Lacanian responses to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 from leading theorists in the field. Like Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner film, its sequel is now poised to provoke philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments, and to provide illustrations and inspiration for questions of being and the self, for belief and knowledge, the human and the post-human, amongst others. This volume forms the vanguard of responses from a Lacanian perspective, satisfying the hunger to extend the theoretical considerations of the first film in the various new directions the second film invites. Here, the contributors revisit the implications of the human-replicant relationship but move beyond this to consider issues of ideology, politics, and spectatorship. This exciting collection will appeal to an educated film going public, in addition to students and scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, film theory, philosophy and applied psychoanalysis.







Medical and Health Related Sciences Thesaurus


Book Description

Indexing terms used in CRISP (Computer Retrieval of Information on Scientific Projects) and in Research grants index. Alphabetical arrangement. Cross references under terms.




Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy


Book Description

Blade Runner 2049 is a 2017 sequel to the 1982 movie Blade Runner, about a world in which some human-looking replicants have become dangerous, so that other human-looking replicants, as well as humans, have the job of hunting down the dangerous models and “retiring” (destroying) them. Both films have been widely hailed as among the greatest science-fiction movies of all time, and Ridley Scott, director of the original Blade Runner, has announced that there will be a third Blade Runner movie. Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy is a collection of entertaining articles on both Blade Runner movies (and on the spin-off short films and Blade Runner novels) by twenty philosophers representing diverse backgrounds and philosophical perspectives. Among the issues addressed in the book: What does Blade Runner 2049 tell us about the interactions of state power and corporate power? Can machines ever become truly conscious, or will they always lack some essential human qualities? The most popular theory of personhood says that a person is defined by their memories, so what happens when memories can be manufactured and inserted at will? We already interact with non-human decision-makers via the Internet. When embodied AI becomes reality, how can we know what is human and what is simulation? Does it matter? Do AI-endowed human-looking replicants have civil and political rights, or can they be destroyed whenever “real” humans decide they are inconvenient? The blade runner Deckard (Harrison Ford) appears in both movies, and is generally assumed to be human, but some claim he may be a replicant. What’s the evidence on both sides? Is Niander Wallace (the-mad-scientist-cum-evil-corporate-CEO in Blade Runner 2049) himself a replicant? What motivates him? What are the impacts of decision-making AI entities on the world of business? Both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 have been praised for their hauntingly beautiful depictions of a bleak future, but the two futures are very different (and the 2019 future imagined in the original Blade Runner is considerably different from the actual world of 2019). How have our expectations and visions of the future changed between the two movies? The “dream maker” character Ana Stelline in Blade Runner 2049 has a small but pivotal role. What are the implications of a person whose dedicated mission and task is to invent and install false memories? What are the social and psychological implications of human-AI sexual relations?