Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event—an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures. Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.

Thomas Gordon's life in the city was going just fine. He had a decent job, a nice condo, and was generally content with life. One day, however, his boss was in a particularly foul mood, and a chain of inexplicable mishaps resulted in Thomas getting fired. Fed up with the world, he begins to search for an escape to a better life. While sitting at the Realtor's office, he stumbles upon a flyer on a bulletin board that asks a simple question: "Fed Up?" After calling the number on the pull tab, he meets a group of scientists with an interesting proposition: human cryogenic preservation... Thomas and his companions Vera and Doug emerge into the strange future of the twenty-third century: a world full of amazing technological advances and equally amazing people. Upon digging a little further below the surface, though, they quickly discover that this future isn't exactly the "better world" that everyone thought it would be...

People are disappearing off of the streets. The city doesn't know who is involved in these disappearances. Blue Blaze is asked by the authorities to look into it, against their better judgement. Can Blaze figure out what's going on before another disappearance. THIS IS THE SECOND BOOK IN THE BLUE BLAZE SCIENCE FICTION SERIES

This edited volume addresses the 2007/2009 financial crisis as the occasion to engage critically with the corpus of Susan Strange's work, in order to consider what changes (if any) this crisis portends for the structural organization of the global political economy. The contributors use Strange's rich conceptual framework to explore the financial crisis and its aftermath, and reflect critically on the broader contributions which her work has made to the discipline of IPE. The volume makes three valuable contributions for scholars and students. First, it raises the profile of Susan Strange, a unique and powerful contributor to the field of IPE whose ideas matter to our current circumstance and can provide deep and enduring insights into important questions and issues. Secondly, each contributor to this volume combines her work and ideas with that of other traditions or individual theorists in ways that extend and/or deepen Strange's own efforts. Finally, this volume leaves us with a judicious optimism about the future of both IPE and the world as it actually is, on the ground. This book will be of interest to scholars and students who are interested in the dynamics shaping contemporary and future developments in the global political economy, as well as those who are interested in the theoretical debates about how to study IPE.

A groundbreaking examination of the implications of synthetic biology for biodiversity conservation Nature almost everywhere survives on human terms. The distinction between what is natural and what is human-made, which has informed conservation for centuries, has become blurred. When scientists can reshape genes more or less at will, what does it mean to conserve nature? The tools of synthetic biology are changing the way we answer that question. Gene editing technology is already transforming the agriculture and biotechnology industries. What happens if synthetic biology is also used in conservation to control invasive species, fight wildlife disease, or even bring extinct species back from the dead? Conservation scientist Kent Redford and geographer Bill Adams turn to synthetic biology, ecological restoration, political ecology, and de-extinction studies and propose a thoroughly innovative vision for protecting nature.

After the events of the DEATH OF HAWKMAN miniseries, Adam Strange is blasted through multiple dimensions only to land on Earth! There, instead of super-powered beings and legendary crime fighters, he encounters a boy adventurer and his scientist father-and they’re the only ones who can help him return home. Jonny Quest, Hadji, Dr. Quest and Race Bannon have a plan, but it’s going to involve a dangerous trek through Dino Boy’s Lost Valley of prehistoric threats! And in the backup feature starring Top Cat, breaking out of prison is challenging enough for a cat, but sometimes it means stumbling through a cosmic portal to planet Earth…and right into the hands of Batman!

When inexplicable events begin to occur, Los Angeles native Alex Mata uses his special ability of time travel to save the world from alien invasion in this captivating debut novel that weaves sci-fi and contemporary fiction.