[Humans. Earth. It exists in the Milky Way Galaxy. Seemingly, one planet amidst innumerable others in its own galaxy and surrounding galaxies. Earth seems to be the only apparent planet that is hospitable to human & Earth like life forms. What sense is it to have a multitude of universes & planets and only one that bears life? What if Earths’ Milky way Galaxy was just a tiny galaxy on the outskirts of the universe, the boondocks, so to speak. What if closer to the centre of the Universe, we’ll call it the Megaverse, there were hundreds of thousands of planets with hundreds of thousands of life forms and humanoid life forms. Thinking, speaking, living, breathing life forms that are technologically light years ahead of modern day humans. What if…these “Advanced humanoids”, we’ll call them “Neo-Humans”, unlocked the door for creating life? Now what if one of these “Neo-Humans”, even more advanced than the others, decided to go to the “backyard” of the Megaverse, the hidden village, the outskirts of the universe, our little milky way galaxy, and saw what might be a fertile planet, “Earth”, and planted some cells on this planet to observe the evolution of life, maybe in hopes of finding the answer to that timeless question: “Where did we come from?” Maybe , by understanding us, it could understand itself. Maybe this Neo-Human planted a few cells on Earth and watched as those few cells evolved into the billions of different life forms that we know today. Maybe humans are the result of…a science experiment…[Now even if this is true, it doesn’t lessen ones own value or meaning. All of us have value and meaning, life and purpose.] It’s just something I was thinking about one day…Which thus takes us to our new story…[Human]. Please enjoy. -Xanadu

Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related to the discourses of being, dwelling, and homelessness.

In 2005, Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, was published to wide acclaim, and in 2007, Ethan and Joel Coen brought their adaptation of McCarthy's novel to the screen. The film earned praise from critics worldwide and was honored with four Academy Awards', including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. In No Country for Old Men: From Novel to Film, scholars offer varied approaches to both the novel and the award-winning film. Beginning with several essays dedicated entirely to the novel and its place within the McCarthy canon, the anthology offers subsequent essays focusing on the film, the adaptation process, and the Coen Brothers more broadly. The book also features an interview with the Coen brothers' long-time cinematographer Roger Deakins. This entertaining and enriching book for readers interested in the Coen Brothers' films and in McCarthy's fiction is an important contribution to both literature and film studies.

The Arc and the machine is a timely and original defence of narrative in an age of information. Stressing interpretation and experience alongside affect and sensation it convincingly argues that narrative is key to contemporary forms of cultural production and to the practice of contemporary life. Re-appraising the prospects for narrative in the digital age, it insists on the centrality of narrative to informational culture and provokes a critical re-appraisal of how innovations in information technology as a material cultural form can be understood and assessed. The book offers a careful exploration of narrative theory, a sophisticated critique of techno-cultural writing, and a series of tightly focused case studies. All of which point the way to a restoration of a critical - rather than celebratory approaches - to new media. The scope and range of this book is broad, its argumentation careful and exacting, and its conclusions exciting.

The dawning era of nanotechnology promises to transform life as we know it. Visionary scientists are engineering materials and devices at the molecular scale that will forever alter the way we think about our technologies, our societies, our bodies, and even reality itself. Colin Milburn argues that the rise of nanotechnology involves a way of seeing that he calls “nanovision.” Trekking across the technoscapes and the dreamscapes of nanotechnology, he elaborates a theory of nanovision, demonstrating that nanotechnology has depended throughout its history on a symbiotic relationship with science fiction. Nanotechnology’s scientific theories, laboratory instruments, and research programs are inextricable from speculative visions, hyperbolic rhetoric, and fictional narratives. Milburn illuminates the practices of nanotechnology by examining an enormous range of cultural artifacts, including scientific research articles, engineering textbooks, laboratory images, popular science writings, novels, comic books, and blockbuster films. In so doing, he reveals connections between the technologies of visualization that have helped inaugurate nano research, such as the scanning tunneling microscope, and the prescient writings of Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish, and Theodore Sturgeon. He delves into fictive and scientific representations of “gray goo,” the nightmare scenario in which autonomous nanobots rise up in rebellion and wreak havoc on the world. He shows that nanoscience and “splatterpunk” novels share a violent aesthetic of disintegration: the biological body is breached and torn asunder only to be refabricated as an assemblage of self-organizing machines. Whether in high-tech laboratories or science fiction stories, nanovision deconstructs the human subject and galvanizes the invention of a posthuman future.

A tantalizing collection of classic essays from one of the most gifted writers of his generation. • "The brainy, sarcastic, tender intelligence at the center of these pieces can make you laugh out loud: they can also move you to tears." —People Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London's darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw. Throughout, he offers razor-sharp takes on such subjects as: American politics: "If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, then the Reagan era can be seen as an eight-year blackout. Numb, pale, unhealthily dreamless: eight years of Do Not Disturb." Chess: "Nowhere in sport, perhaps in human activity, is the gap between the tryer and the expert so astronomical.... My chances of a chess brilliancy are the 'chances' of a lab chimp and a type writer producing King Lear." "His fascination with the observable world is utterly promiscuous: he will address a cathedral and a toilet seat with the same peeled-eyeball intensity." —John Updike