MachineMachine /stream

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Tom McCarthy's rise from an obscure art-house author has been quite spectacular, culminating in C, his third novel, being shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. In something that can…

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There are many stories Tom McCarthy chooses not to tell in “C,” his tour de force new novel encompassing the short life of one Serge Carrefax, born at the turn…

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In this in-depth analysis, Daniel Johnson discusses games, language and sociology with regard to Valve's Portal - please note that the article contains story spoilers for the game. In 1959…

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In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the…

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Over the next 10 years, scientific experts will be dealing with "extreme weather." No one knows how weird and dangerous it will get. Moscow already faces Bahrain-like temperatures. Downpours swamp…

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In the beginning, before there was such a thing as a Gutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg laid out his rows of metal type and brushed them with ink and, using the…

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Now available for free online: The Mind's I: Fantasies and reflections on self and soul (ISBN 0-553-34584-2) is a 1981 book composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel…

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It seems to me part of the problem is that the term "postmodernism" was always so muddy and abstract. To different people, it meant (at least) two different things. First…

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Books have long been the object of desire, a desire that in intensity (among the susceptible) is stronger than for sex. Bibliomania, the obsession to possess books, was first recognised…

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It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an…

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Much of your life is now spent traveling along the American Northeast, from Baltimore to Boston. Like many who’ve plowed back and forth along this route, you’ve grown overly familiar…

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Who Goes There? is a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. under the pen name Don A. Stuart, published August 1938 in Astounding Stories. In 1973, the story…

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by John Cayley Digital utopianism is still with us. It is with us despite having been tempered by network logistics and an all-too-reasonable demand for 'content.' Admittedly, New Media has…

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In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones.…

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One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical…

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Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger.…

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When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee,…

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Science fiction dates as quickly as any genre, and Bradbury is not entirely immune to this. The futuristic rocket ships he wrote about in 1950 look a lot like the…

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These are fighting words. But can the scientific model really be applied to literature? Some of the scholars I talked to regard science’s push into the humanities as an intrusion,…

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The Exegesis, much anticipated by fans of the writer, will come out in autumn 2011, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt revealed. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53,…

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Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we…

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...we all make use of paradigms in our work, but do we really know what a paradigm is, and what does it mean to use a paradigm in philosophy, in…

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The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized…

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When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams – for example, the I.Q. test – but most know a…

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This layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking — of mind reading — is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill. Why human beings…

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Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing…

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In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe…

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People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of…

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Q: I’ve heard there are only 7 (or 5, 20, 36…) basic plots (or themes) in all of literature. What are they? A: People often say that there are only…