Author: Alistair Brown
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Ryan, Marie-Laure, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) 291pp. $34.95 Pb. ISBN: 978-1-4241-1797-4 Narrative as Virtual Reality was first published in 2001, the same year as the original Xbox console, three years before Facebook, and well before the Oculus Rift finally…
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Liu, Lydia H., The Freudian Robot
Lydia H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 302pp. £15.50 pb. ISBN 978-0-226-48683-3. What is the most powerful and widespread language in the world today? Is it English? Mandarin? Lydia Liu would probably argue that it is not one specific tongue, but the…
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Yi, Dongshin, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic
Dongshin Yi, A Genealogy of Cyborgothic: Aesthetics and Ethics in the Age of Posthumanism(Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 164pp. Hb £55.00. ISBN 978-1-4094-0039-4. (BSLS members receive a discount on all Ashgate titles) Fearing the advent of cyborgs and genetically crafted organisms, opponents of technoscience typically shift their objections from rational bases to aesthetic ones: computers may one…
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Brake, Mark L. and Neil Hook, Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Mark L. Brake and Neil Hook, Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science (Macmillan, 2008), 265pp. £16.99 hb. ISBN 978-0-230-01980-5. When Mark Brake and Neil Hook claim, in Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, that Johannes Kepler’s Somnium had “grasped the bond between life forms and habitat” two centuries before…