Editorial notes: Shai was always fascinated with cartoon characters and, at least as his written coverage is concerned, mostly with Superman. Between March 2011 and December 2014, Shai writes nine articles dedicated to this superhero and in November 2014 he starts a blog dedicated to reviewing Superman novels. Superman came first, anyone else came later. It all started with...
World of Warcraft (WoW) has the population and GDP of a small country, and yet for all that, it’s just another niche community. Some two billion people all around the globe have access to the internet, and while they may have a few inducible portals in common – google, facebook, Wikipedia – there are countless virtual spaces that are known to most only by name or reputation, if...
The Ancient Greeks who presaged our philosophies, political systems, and arts emerged in a land that had already been settled by mankind for tens of thousands of years. Despite what some of them believed the Greeks were not been born out of the Earth, but rather from the ashes of earlier societies. In Greece’s prehistory – the time before writing – entire societies, including...
Gibson and hipster consumerism in Zero History Successful as he’s been, William Gibson has always been something of a misfit. Gibson is best known for his first novel and cyberpunk classic Neuromancer. But the extent to which Gibson is a cyberpunk author is debatable. Sometimes it feels like the intersection between Gibson and cyberpunk is incidental. There’s no doubt that Gibson has...
The mythology and history shared by many of Alastair Reynolds’ books has been called the Revelation Space Universe (RSU). The world gets its name from the first book to feature it, namely Revelation Space. RSU and space opera: Reynolds writes space opera, which to me means stories that contrast the heroic individuality of the protagonist against the enormity of space. That “enormity...
Plutarch was a priest, magistrate, ambassador, and essayist born in Chaeronea in Greece around 46CE (d. 120CE). The Greek states had already been part of the Roman Empire for two centuries by the time of his birth, and it is no surprise that at some point Plutarch became a citizen of Rome, changing his name to Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus. Plutarch (or Lucy, as I’m sure his friends called...
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction is a book written by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, a professor of English at DePauw University and published in 2008. I wanted to have a bird’s eye view; I ended up in outer space. (Preface) There’s something inexpressible about SF[1]. This inexpressible something, the author suggests, reflects the role of SF in helping us parse and express the role...
Taking a Fresh Look at Antiochus’ Criterion of Certainty Introduction to Antiochus With Antiochus of Ascalon (c.125-88 BCE), Platonism took a dive back to its roots – or at least, it claimed to do so. Antiochus’ teacher was Philo of Larissa, who was the last of the Academics who were associated with the actual Academy of Plato. Antiochus is considered to be the first major philosopher of...
This is not an introduction to chemistry or even to atomic theories. It’s an introduction to what atoms are with the aim of providing enough background to be useful for understanding molecular biology. Introduction “Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.” (Democritus c. 400 BCE) Atoms are the building blocks of the world. There are different...
The Stars at Noon is the third novel by American author Denis Johnson, published in 1986. We follow a nameless woman in Nicaragua. She’s from the United States. It is possible that she was once a journalist; it’s possible that she still is. That’s all irrelevant except insofar as it informs the present: she earns money prostituting, she’s resigned to the state-of-affairs...
