Category: Reviews
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Kendal, Evie, Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs
Evie Kendal, Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs (London: Bloomsbury, 2025) 240 pp. £76.50 Hb. ISBN: 9781350542976 Ectogenesis, the name given to technologies that allow gestation external to the human body through artificial wombs, is one of the most important current fields of study in biotechnology and reproductive science. The ethical discussions of…
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Parashar, Kunjana, They Gather Around Me, The Animals
Kunjana Parashar, They Gather Around Me, The Animals (NFSPS Press, 2025) 88 pp. £13.99 Pb. ISBN: 979-8-9929766-0-1 This debut poetry collection begins with a dedication like no other—non-human, ecocentric, spanning species, substances, phenomena and processes, Parashar’s deceptively humble lexicon brings immediate reverence to members and mechanisms of an ecosystem sometimes evoking twenty-nine images within fourteen…
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Ahlberg, Sofia, Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis
Sofia Ahlberg, Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) 147 pp. £81.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781350401143 Sofia Ahlberg’s Magic, Literature and Climate Pedagogy in a Time of Ecological Crisis is a reimagination of the typical classroom as a launchpad (literally – her concluding chapter imagines the students and teachers viewing…
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Jay, Mike, Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science
Mike Jay, Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) 382 pp. + 27 bw illustrations, $22.00 PB, ISBN: 9780300282610. Mike Jay’s Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science purports to be a ‘revised and updated edition’ of…
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Price, Elfed Huw, William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind: The Theology, Medicine and Politics of the Brain
Elfed Huw Price, William Lawrence and the Organ of Mind: The Theology, Medicine and Politics of the Brain (London: UCL Press, 2025) 240 pp. £20.29 Pb. ISBN: 9781787357907 Today, the assertion that ‘the brain is the organ of mind’ is treated as an almost self-evident scientific truth. Yet, as Elfed Huw Price demonstrates in his…
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Heffernan, Conor, Emma Tonkin, Linda Flores Ohlson (eds), Zombies in Contemporary Culture: Journeys, Bodies, Pandemics and Politics
Conor Heffernan, Emma Tonkin and Linda Flores Ohlson (eds), Zombies in Contemporary Culture: Journeys, Bodies, Pandemics and Politics (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2025) 256 pp. £75.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781837723034 Zombies in Contemporary Culture: Journeys, Bodies, Pandemics and Politics, edited by Conor Heffernan, Emma Tonkin and Linda Flores Ohlson, is a timely contribution to the…
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MacNeill Miller, John, The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science
John MacNeill Miller, The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science (University of Virginia Press, 2024) 228 pp. $110 Hb. $32.50 Pb. ISBN: 9780813951775 John MacNeill Miller’s The Ecological Plot (2024) offers an ambitious contribution to the intellectual history of ecology by tracing the narrative forms through which ecological thinking first became imaginable.…
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Armstrong, Patrick, Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction: Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett
Patrick Armstrong, Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction: Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) 256 pp. £85.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-3504-2018-2 Patrick Armstrong’s Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction: Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett joins a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on modernism’s engagements with science, foregrounding the cultural and aesthetic consequences of microscopic vision. Focusing on what Armstrong…
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Epstein, Hugh, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses
Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020) 312 pp. £27.99 Ebook ISBN: 9781474449885 Hugh Epstein’s book offers a persuasive and deftly managed reconsideration of Hardy and Conrad, through which they emerge as ‘compatible’ writers and as particularly eminent figures in late-Victorian culture more broadly (18). Indeed, Hardy, Conrad and the…
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Gupta, Suman and Peter H. Tu, The Practical Philosophy of AI-Assistants: An Engineering-Humanities Conversation
Suman Gupta and Peter H. Tu, The Practical Philosophy of AI-Assistants: An Engineering-Humanities Conversation (World Scientific, 2024) 280 pp. $30. Pb. ISBN 978-1-80061-421-5. The Practical Philosophy of AI-Assistants is an insightful and oft-playful exploration of the various conundrums that arise when envisioning the ultimate AI assistant. The apparent intention of the text is not to…
