Four new Lower Barremian amber outcrops from Northern Lebanon

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 333-339
Author(s):  
SIBELLE MAKSOUD ◽  
KHALED TALEB ◽  
DANY AZAR
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Composition ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Plant Resin ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Science

Amber is a fossilized plant resin that is preserved and modified throughout geological time (Langenheim, 1969). The complexity of the chemical composition of amber makes it unique considering the preservation of biological inclusions in their 3D pristine and minute details (Langenheim, 2003). Its age ranges between a few millions and 320 million years (mid-Carboniferous) (Sargent Bray & Anderson, 2009). During the past two to three decades, the discoveries worldwide of new amber outcrops have increased. There is no doubt that Jurassic Park in 1993, the famous American science fiction adventure thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton, played a noticeable role in making amber more popular. Before this date, interest in amber was mainly restricted to Baltic and Caribbean countries, though amber occurrence was known from several localities worldwide.

In search of possible causes of mass extinctions

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Hallam
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Mass Extinctions ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Geological Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Cretaceous Period ◽  
Land Vertebrates

When the subject of extinctions in the geological past comes up, nearly everyone’s thoughts turn to dinosaurs. It may well be true that these long-extinct beasts mean more to most children than the vast majority of living creatures. One could even go so far as to paraphrase Voltaire and maintain that if dinosaurs had never existed it would have been necessary to invent them, if only as a metaphor for obsolescence. To refer to a particular machine as a dinosaur would certainly do nothing for its market value. The irony is that the metaphor is now itself obsolete. The modern scientific view of dinosaurs differs immensely from the old one of lumbering, inefficient creatures tottering to their final decline. Their success as dominant land vertebrates through 165 million years of the Earth’s history is, indeed, now mainly regarded with wonder and even admiration. If, as is generally thought, the dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous, that is something for which no organism could possibly have been prepared by normal Darwinian natural selection. The final demise of the dinosaurs would then have been the result, not of bad genes, but of bad luck, to use the laconic words of Dave Raup. In contemplating the history of the dinosaurs it is necessary to rectify one widespread misconception. Outside scientific circles the view is widely held that the dinosaurs lived for a huge slice of geological time little disturbed by their environment until the final apocalypse. This is a serious misconception. The dinosaurs suffered quite a high evolutionary turnover rate, and this implies a high rate of extinction throughout their history. Jurassic dinosaurs, dominated by giant sauropods, stegosaurs, and the top carnivore Allosaurus, are quite different from those of the Cretaceous period, which are characterized by diverse hadrosaurs, ceratopsians, and Tyrannosaurus. Michael Crichton’s science-fiction novel Jurassic Park, made famous by the Steven Spielberg movies, features dinosaurs that are mainly from the Cretaceous, probably because velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus could provide more drama.

scholarly journals Two crossbows and a carbine: Out of the commentary on A.N. and B.N. Strugatsky’s novel “Hard to be a God”

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-58
Author(s):  
Irina N. Arzamastseva ◽  
Alexander V. Kuznetsov
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sea Monster ◽  
Intertextual Connections

The article is devoted to the study of the functions of the characters’ weapons in A.N. and B.N. Strugatsky’s novel “Hard to be a God”. It is important for writing a commentary on the prologue of the novel. The authors used the historical-typological and mythopoetic research methods. As the result of reviewing the history of words-concepts, as it made by A.N. Veselovsky, the authors managed to study the intertextual connections of “Hard to be a God” with V.T. Shalamov’s poem “Crossbow” and his story “May”, as well as N.S. Gumilev’s poem “Just looks through the cliffs...” and E. Hemingway’s play “The fifth column”. Through these connections, the image of weapons is formed in the work of science fiction writers. It is necessary to destruct the mythological enemy – the sea monster, which symbolizes the social evil within the novel framework. As we have found out, the reason for such an intricate symbolism lies in the peculiarities of the age: the image of the sea monster standing for public evil is due to historical reasons. And since the elimination of social problems by such radical methods, according to the authors, is impossible, the movement towards a bright future should be only gradual and peaceful. As in reality, weapons are fundamentally unable to perform their task. Moreover, the weapon is dangerous for its owner, which indicates the ambivalence of the image. In addition, the comparison, important for the novel “Hard to be God”, of the past and future appears the first in the comparison of crossbows and carbines, further developing by other means. Weapons are involved in creating a number of important motives: doom, the danger of using force, and interference in the course of history.

scholarly journals “The End of Human Exceptionality”: The Shift of the Anthropological Dominant in Science Fiction

2021 ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Dan Paranyuk
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Previous Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Human Culture ◽  
American Science

Based on the methodological proposals of literary anthropology, in particular on the conceptual ideas of C. Levi-Strauss (structural anthropology), J. Ortega y Gasset (“dehumanization of arts”), J.-M. Schaeffer (“the end of human exceptionality”), M. Foucault (the fall of a human being from the humanistic pedestal of culture), the article under studies emphasizes the violation of the anthropological dominant in science fiction, which is very typical of the fantasy genre. Consequently, there arise new principles of constructing personosphere of a literary text. On the example of the novel “City” (1953) by an American science fiction writer Clifford Simak, the article traces the way a human being shifts from the center of personosphere to the “outskirts” of narration, whereas its image acquires fictional parameters. This all happens due to the phenomenon of “anthropocene” (the term by G. Canavan), which implies the harmful consequences of the human reigning over the nature. In addition, the author of the article introduces the notion of “phantasoid’ – a character of the fictional world of fantasy (outlined by the narrator) that functions exceptionally in the imagination of a certain fantastic character and is somehow related to his previous experience. The novel by C. Simak outlines a gradual shift of the anthropological vector: the heterogeneous image of a human turns into a counter-image, whereby particular significance is attached to the change in the attitude towards mankind. In the text, human culture is perceived as something alien, while Simak’s image of a human being ruins the so called imagological stereotype, along with the reader’s receptive expectations. The role of the attractor in the novel is assigned to “antromorphized” and “humanized” creatures (plants, animals, objects, robots, mutants), which indicates the drastic breach with the previous genre tradition, as well as higlights a peculiar polemic connection with classical literary science fiction. This all proves the metamorphic nature of science fiction and its transition into the hyperreal dimensions of fantasy, where different artificial forms of life and mentality can peacefully coexist with each other.

Who Really Shaped American Science Fiction?

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Eric S. Rabkin ◽  
James B. Mitchell ◽  
Carl P. Simon
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Peer Review ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Letters To The Editor ◽  
The Past ◽  
American Science ◽  
History Of

Treating science fiction, critics have taught us to understand that the field shrugged itself out of the swamp of its pulp origins in two great evolutionary metamorphoses, each associated with a uniquely visionary magazine editor: Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell Jr. Paul Carter, to cite one critic among many, makes a case that Hugo Gernsback's magazines were the first to suggest thatscience fiction was not only legitimate extrapolation… [but] might even become a positive incentive to discovery, inspiring some engineer or inventor to develop in the laboratory an idea he had first read about in one of the stories. (5)Another, critic and author Isaac Asimov, argues that science fiction's fabledGolden Age began in 1938, when John Campbell became editor of Astounding Stories and remolded it, and the whole field, into something closer to his heart's desire. During the Golden Age, he and the magazine he edited so dominated science fiction that to read Astounding was to know the field entire. (Before the Golden Age, xii)Critics arrive at such understandings not only by surveying the field but also — perhaps more importantly — by studying, accepting, modifying, or even occasionally rejecting the work of other critics. This indirect and many-voiced conversation is usually seen as a self-correcting process, an informal yet public peer review. Such interested scrutiny has driven science fiction (SF) criticism to evolve from the letters to the editor and editorials and mimeographed essays of the past to the nuanced literary history of today, just as, this literary history states, those firm-minded editors helped SF literature evolve from the primordial fictions of Edgar Rice Burroughs into the sophisticated constructs of William S. Burroughs.

scholarly journals Fabelvejen mod nord

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (82) ◽  
pp. 67-84
Author(s):  
Morten Auklend
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
Mainstream Science

Merethe Lindstrøm’s novel Nord [North] (2017) deals with end time-themes. The novel formally departs from mainstream science fiction and apocalyptic fiction by providing flashes of the past and the present in concentrated lyrical images that are repeated throughout the novel. Through poetic rituals and ceremonies, and in metaphorical patterns of personification wherein a devastated nature comes ‘alive’, a world is reborn rhetorically and the reader is forced to ponder the abilities and qualities embedded in an overwhelmingly poetical language. By focusing on the demarcation of literal and figurative language and the transcendence of poetic images of nature, the novel becomes a contemplation of individuals coping with questions concerning identity and remembrance in an inhuman world. The article demonstrates how devices and perspectives provided by science fiction can provide strong thought for hard times.

scholarly journals The Last Day and Brexit: Delusions of Future Past

Porównania ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Justyna Jajszczok
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ideological Background

The paper aims to show how the traditions of science fiction and, above all, invasion literature provide the ideological background for reading Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Last Day as a novel about Brexit. As it draws on anxious visions of the future, in which the enemy lurks around every corner, and the only salvation is complete isolation from the world, Murray’s work is read here as a Brexit dream come true, in which Britain is once again great, independent and uncontaminated by foreign elements. By evoking the myths that focus only on glory and conveniently “forget” the dark sides of the empire, the novel demonstrates that the fantasies of the past are as distant as the fantasies of the future; the loss of the world that never was is reworked in The Last Day into the loss of ecologically viable planet.

scholarly journals Strategies of Cognitive Estrangement in Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-121
Author(s):  
Michał Klata
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Creative Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
The Past ◽  
Unusual Position

Abstract This paper seeks to analyse the strategies of cognitive estrangement employed by the science fiction writer and literary scholar Kim Stanley Robinson in his New York 2140 (2017). I argue that the novel was written as a call to action to mitigate the effects of climate change, and rather than being merely a description of a particular vision of the future, provides a comment on the current ecological crisis, mechanisms of history, and human agency. Robinson’s unusual position at the intersection of the field of literary production and literature studies allowed him to apply the ideas developed for the analysis of the genre of science fiction in his creative work. The three main thematic areas in the novel are ecology, politics, and history. In each of these, allusions to the present, the past, and literary tradition, characterisation, and narrative structure are used as a means to convey the author’s message and sensitise the reader to issues connected with ecology and social justice, painting a realistic, yet hopeful vision where human civilisation carries on despite the consequences of global warming.

scholarly journals Augmented Reality and Life in the Cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
Md. Shafiqul Islam
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Story Line ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
The Relationship

This paper attempts a cybercritical reading of William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) to explore the genesis of cyborgs in the novel, address issues pertaining to cyberpunks and scrutinize the portrayal of a cyberculture set in the futuristic dystopian city of Chiba. The relationship between humans and machines has gone through multiple phases of changes in the recent past. That is why instead of satirizing machinized-humans, science fiction writers have embraced different dimensions of man-machine relationships during the past few decades. ‘Cyborg’ is no longer represented as the ‘mutation of human capabilities’, but as ‘machines with Artificial Intelligence’. Gibson’s Neuromancer, a landmark piece of literary work in the sphere of Sci-Fi literature, specifically predicts a new height of man-machine relationship by employing both human and cyborg characters at the center of his story line. This paper shows how Gibson accurately prophesizes the matrix of machine-human relationship in his novel. It also explores Gibson’s depiction of female characters through the lens of cyberfeminist theories. In view of that, this paper uses contemporary critical and cultural theories including Donna Haraway’s idea of cyberfeminism, Baudrillard’s simulation and simulacra, Foucauldian discourse analysis, Jeremy Bentham’s concept of tabula rasa and other relevant theoretical ideas to examine and evaluate the transformative changes.

scholarly journals The unsustainable Makers

2010 ◽  
Vol 09 (01) ◽  
pp. R01
Author(s):  
Adam Arvidsson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Silicon Valley ◽  
High Tech ◽  
New Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Capitalist Economy ◽  
American Science ◽  
Present Trend ◽  
Maker Culture ◽  
Mode Of Production

The Makers is the latest novel of the American science fiction writer, blogger and Silicon Valley intellectual Cory Doctorow. Set in the 2010s, the novel describes the possible impact of the present trend towards the migration of modes of production and organization that have emerged online into the sphere of material production. Called New Work, this movement is indebted to a new maker culture that attracts people into a kind of neo-artisan, high tech mode of production. The question is: can a corporate-funded New Work movement be sustainable? Doctorow seems to suggest that a capitalist economy of abundance is unsustainable because it tends to restrict the reach of its value flows to a privileged managerial elite.

scholarly journals ELEMENTS OF ANTI-UTOPIA IN THE NOVEL "RADIO NIGHT" BY YU. ANDRUKHOVYCH

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
L. Pecherskyh
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Path Dependence ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Negative Image ◽  
Social Thinking ◽  
The Past ◽  
Utopian Thinking ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Micro Elements

The article deals with the relevance of anti-utopian discourse in the twentieth century, which is considered a time of anti-utopian social thinking in view of historical reality. The study outlines the problems of transformation of the genre of anti-utopia in the postmodern era on the basis of the most notable research on the material of modern Ukrainian prose. It is emphasized that anti-utopia in the XXI century expands the boundaries of its existence as a literary genre, becoming a socio-cultural phenomenon of perception of reality. The list of characteristic features of the genre of literary anti-utopia is given. Based on the analysis of the novel "Radio Night" by Yu. Andrukhovych, the author finds out that this text contains features of both utopia and anti-utopia. The utopian thinking embodied in the work is based on an optimistic perception of the past, anti-utopianism is rooted in the area of doubt, which emphasizes the negative aspects of society and social consciousness as a result of the effect of dependence on previous development ("path dependence") or the effect of track, social inertia, when the negative attitudes that have been developed over the decades make positive progress impossible. It is noted in the article that the anti-utopian nature of the novel by Yu. Andrukhovych is manifested in the reflection of despair in the possibility of embodying the ideals of the Revolution of Dignity, illusory human freedom, the theme of confrontation to the digital sphere, determinism of human destiny, the modality of constant movement, the idea of an artificial man, the creation of a collective negative image of the state. It is stated that the fate of the hero is in the center of the plot, the attention is focused on the consequences of resistance to the system for the privacy of the average person. The article points out that the genre variety of the novel "Radio Night" testifies to the process of genre diffusion in the dynamics of genre transformations: elements of utopia evolve into elements of anti-utopia, micro-elements of science fiction genre are involved, which can be classified as included genre. The synthetic nature of the genre of the text by Yu. Andrukhovych is stated, a conclusion is made about the unfolding of a genre variety of escapic metautopia or postutopia in the novel.

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