THE MANGA MAN - A NOVEL OF NEUROFUTURE


Book Description

I’m here to participate in the live study of an electromagnetically-induced earthquake. This one registered at a whopping 13.2 points on the Tesla Scale. That’s never happened before. An E-’Quake is the perfect super-weapon. Who would ever suspect it? It’s both invisible and untraceable. Oh, nature has been manipulated for reasons of state before. Take the ‘Great Gobi Sandstorm’ of 2032, for example. Hundreds of thousands of rebel Muslims were buried alive in China’s Far West Xinjiang Province. That was a beta-test for a certain type of military operation. But that event occurred almost thirty years ago when the science was still primitive. It was messy. Too messy. How do you explain all that real-time sand turning into mud? The Manga Man – the new novel by Alexander Besher (born in China in 1951), author of the RIM trilogy (nominated for the 1994 Philip K. Dick Award; illustrated by German artist Christian Dörge.




Postsingular


Book Description

The Singularity has happened, and life afterward proves to be more bizarre than we thought. "SF book of the year" (Interzone).




Rim


Book Description

It's 2027. Tokyo has survived the Mega-Quake of the Millennium and Satori Corporation, the owner of a virtual reality entertainment empire, is embroiled in cut-throat corporate warfare to preserve its market share and, incidentally, save the lives of thousands of users trapped inside its virtual worlds. All of this seems far away to Professor Frank Gobi as he strolls across the placid Berkley, California, campus - until he gets home to find his perpetually on-line ten-year-old son stuck inside Satori's virtual Gametime and literally fighting for his life.




The Ware Tetralogy


Book Description

World-class mathematician and two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, Rudy Rucker is best known for his groundbreaking Ware series ["Software, Wetware, Freeware," and "Realware"], all collected in this new anthology with an Introduction by William Gibson, author of "Neuromancer."




Mir


Book Description

A mind-controlling virus escapes from its owner in Paris, bonding with the tattoo of an American woman tourist. At that, the woman becomes the target of gangsters who want the virus. The story is set in a Europe dominated by Germany's Fourth Reich.




Spaceland


Book Description

Joe Cube is a Silicon Valley hotshot--well, a would-be hotshot anyway--hoping that the 3-D TV project he's managing will lead to the big money IPO he's always dreamed of. On New Year's Eve, hoping to impress his wife, he sneaks home the prototype. It brings no new warmth to their cooling relationship, but it does attract someone else's attention. When Joe sees a set of lips talking to him (floating in midair) and feels the poke of a disembodied finger (inside him), it's not because of the champagne he's drunk. He has just met Momo, a woman from the All, a world of four spatial dimensions for whom our narrow world, which she calls Spaceland, is something like a rug, but one filled with motion and life. Momo has a business proposition for Joe, an offer she won't let him refuse. The upside potential becomes much clearer to him once she helps him grow a new eye (on a stalk) that can see in the fourth-dimensional directions, and he agrees. After that it's a wild ride through a million-dollar night in Las Vegas, a budding addiction to tasty purple 4-D food, a failing marriage, eye-popping excursions into the All, and encounters with Momo's foes, rubbery red critters who steal money, offer sage advice and sometimes messily explode. Joe is having the time of his life, until Momo's scheme turns out to have angles he couldn't have imagined. Suddenly the fate of all life here in Spaceland is at stake. Rudy Rucker is a past master at turning mathematical concepts into rollicking science fiction adventure, from Spacetime Donuts and White Light to The Hacker and the Ants. In the tradition of Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel, Flatland, Rucker gives us a tour of higher mathematics and visionary realities. Spaceland is Flatland on hyperdrive! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




The Collapse of the Conventional


Book Description

"Bringing together many of the most important scholars of German film, this hugely significant collection offers a fascinating and subtle account of the contours of the political in the post-Wall cinematic landscape."---Paul Cooke, professor of German cultural studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds --Book Jacket.




The War on Welfare


Book Description

Why did the War on Poverty give way to the war on welfare? Many in the United States saw the welfare reforms of 1996 as the inevitable result of twelve years of conservative retrenchment in American social policy, but there is evidence that the seeds of this change were sown long before the Reagan Revolution—and not necessarily by the Right. The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America traces what Bill Clinton famously called "the end of welfare as we know it" to the grassroots of the War on Poverty thirty years earlier. Marshaling a broad variety of sources, historian Marisa Chappell provides a fresh look at the national debate about poverty, welfare, and economic rights from the 1960s through the mid-1990s. In Chappell's telling, we experience the debate over welfare from multiple perspectives, including those of conservatives of several types, liberal antipoverty experts, national liberal organizations, labor, government officials, feminists of various persuasions, and poor women themselves. During the Johnson and Nixon administrations, deindustrialization, stagnating wages, and widening economic inequality pushed growing numbers of wives and mothers into the workforce. Yet labor unions, antipoverty activists, and moderate liberal groups fought to extend the fading promise of the family wage to poor African Americans families through massive federal investment in full employment and income support for male breadwinners. In doing so, however, these organizations condemned programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for supposedly discouraging marriage and breaking up families. Ironically their arguments paved the way for increasingly successful right-wing attacks on both "welfare" and the War on Poverty itself.




Hold On to the Sun


Book Description

The Israeli author’s poetry, essays, and stories on the haunting legacy of WWII “swirl mystically out of history and into dazzling floods of wonder” (Don DeLillo, author of White Noise). In this portrait of the artist as a young woman, one of Israel’s most acclaimed contemporary writers weaves together a kaleidoscope of fiction, poetry, and essays. Populated by both fictional and real people, each tale is in some way a search for meaning in a post-Holocaust world. Reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, characters irrationally and humanely find reason for hope in a world that offers little. Essays describe Govrin’s visits to Poland as a young adult, where her mother had survived a death camp, but had lost her husband and their child, Govrin’s half-brother. Capturing the depths of denial and the exuberance of youth in a multiplicity of voices, this haunting collection “joins the few serious books that try through artistic means to face the unspeakable” (Aharon Appelfield, author of Badenheim 1939).




World Wide Research


Book Description

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines. Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly powerful and versatile computer-based and networked systems promises to change research activity as profoundly as the mobile phone, the Internet, and email have changed everyday life. This book offers a comprehensive and accessible view of the use of these new approaches—called “e-Research”—and their ethical, legal, and institutional implications. The contributors, leading scholars from a range of disciplines, focus on how e-Research is reshaping not only how research is done but also, and more important, its outcomes. By anchoring their discussion in specific examples and case studies, they identify and analyze a promising set of practical developments and results associated with e-Research innovations. The contributors, who include Geoffrey Bowker, Christine Borgman, Paul Edwards, Tim Berners-Lee, and Hal Abelson, explain why and how e-Research activity can reconfigure access to networks of information, expertise, and experience, changing what researchers observe, with whom they collaborate, how they share information, what methods they use to report their findings, and what knowledge is required to do this. They discuss both the means of e-Research (new research-centered computational networks) and its purpose (to improve the quality of world-wide research).