This is a highly practical guide for budding artists who want to create their own extreme sci-fi worlds. Core elements of sci-fi art are taught through ingenious exercises and eleven detailed step by step projects. Subjects covered include aliens, robots, space ships, weapons, space stations and strange planets.

Global megatrends for the next 20 years and how they will affect the United States. This is the fifth installment in the National Intelligence Council’s series aimed at providing a framework for thinking about possible futures and their implications. The report is intended to stimulate strategic thinking about the rapid and vast geopolitical changes characterizing the world today and possible global trajectories during the next 15-20 years by identifying critical trends and potential discontinuities. The authors distinguish between megatrends, those factors that will likely occur under any scenario, and game-changers, critical variables whose trajectories are far less certain. NIC 2012-001. Appropriate for anyone, from business to banks, government to start-ups, technology to teachers and more, this publication hellps anticipate where the world will be socially, politically, technically and culturally over the next few decades. Several innovations are included in Global Trends 2030, including: a review of the four previous Global Trends reports, input from academic and other experts around the world, coverage of disruptive technologies, and a chapter on the potential trajectories for the US role in the international system and the possible the impact on future international relations.

WELCOME TO BEDLAM!Take a trip back to the Iron Age of comics and visit Bedlam City. It's the smaller, dirtier and more dangerous town next door to your superhero campaign's shining metropolis, presented here in lavish detail. Stalk its alleys, punch out its supervillains, expose its horrible secrets--and have no fear, there are always plenty more where they came from.Weighing in at a whopping 394 pages, this book is crammed with dozens of NPCs, neighborhoods, adventure seeds and locations, with enough back-stories and plot arcs to keep your PCs playing for years.Fully compatible with the Super Powers Companion Bedlam City is fast, fun and ferocious, with no new rules to learn or systems to memorize. If you own a copy of the Super Powers Companion you can pick up Bedlam City and start playing it right now.So what are you waiting for? Bedlam is calling. There's a shadowy rooftop out there just waiting for you to start lurking on it...

To predict our future, we must look to the extremes. So argues the economist Richard Davies, who takes readers to the margins of the modern economy and beyond. These extreme economies illustrate the forces that test human resilience, drive societies to failure, and promise to shape our collective future. Reviving a foundational idea from the medical sciences, Extreme Economies turns the logic of modern economics on its head by arguing that these outlier societies can teach us more about our own than we might imagine. By adapting to circumstances unimaginable to most of us, the people in these societies are pioneering the economic infrastructure of the future.

This book is a pioneering investigation of the tourism practices in the world's other, cold water, islands. Located in extreme latitudes and subject to extreme weather conditions, these islands have been developing their tourism appeal in manners that appear sustainable. They present themselves in images that speak to the pristine, unique and superlative aspects of their natural environment, history and culture. Limited seasonality, difficulty of access, restricted infrastructure, harsh climates and water too cold to swim in, are integral features of the tourism industry, often welcomed as appropriate filters to the slide to the mass market. The collection contains 13 island case studies. A set of seven hail from Northern latitudes: Baffin (Nunavut, Canada), Banks (Northwest Territories, Canada), Greenland/ Kaalaalit Nunaat, Iceland, Luleå (Sweden), Nunivak (Alaska), Solovetsky (Russia) and Svalbard (Norway). A second set of four cover the Southerly islands of Chatham (New Zealand), Falklands, Macquarie (Australia) and Stewart (New Zealand). Two other chapters discuss islands from the particular vantage points of cruise ship tourism, one for the Arctic region and one for the Antarctic. Additionally, five conceptual chapters provide insights into key tourism management issues, as they apply to cold water island experiences: (a) human resources; (b) environment; (c) promotion; (d) seasonality; and (e) access.

A ground-breaking look at the paradox of technology to both liberate and enslave our current culture by noted scholar William Sims Bainbridge

In this Journey to Microbial Worlds we present the diversity of microorganisms, from the state of fossil microbes in Archaean age rocks to the possibilities of extraterrestrial life. This volume discusses the extremophiles living in harsh environments (from our anthropocentric point) and describes them in considerable detail. Some chapters also review topics such as symbiosis, bacterial luminescence, methanogens, and petroleum-grown cells. The final chapters of this book shed new light on astrobiology and speculate on extremophiles as candidates for extraterrestrial life. All chapters are updated to the latest research level.