Not to be confused with fantasy or the supernatural, the fantastic is in actuality its own beast and perhaps the most deeply frightening of all narrative modes. From Dracula and Nightmare on Elm Street, to Carrie and Them, the fantastic has become an ideal vehicle to denounce deep cultural dysfunctions that affect not only the way we understand reality, but also how we construct it. This work studies the various dimensions of the fantastic mode, examining the influences of iconic authors such as H.P. Lovecraft and Jean Ray, and addressing key narrations such as Guy de Maupasasant's The Horla and Jordan Peele's Get Out. It explains why the fantastic is not about ghosts or monsters, but about the incomprehensible sides of our own reality, and the terrifying unknown.

Go on an adventure with Alphatron, a super powered hero from a parallel world called Ardurus, who suffers memory loss from a great cataclysmic event that sends him hurdling through the multiverse. Now as a reluctant inter-dimensional traveler, Alphatron faces impossible circumstances to find out who he really is and where he came from. He eventually lands in a new world called OrZenbu where he encounters awesome life-forms, some friend, some foe.

A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality. For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe? In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham’s number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré Recurrence—resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom—in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe. Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper understanding of reality, Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the key to understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant—that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict one another. Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is a combination of popular and cutting-edge science—and a lively, entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental truths about the universe.

The fantastic reality that is modern physics is open for your exploration, guided by one of its primary architects and interpreters, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek. Some jokes, some poems, and extracts from wife Betsy Devine's sparkling chronicle of what it's like to live through a Nobel Prize provide easy entertainment. There's also some history, some philosophy, some exposition of frontier science, and some frontier science, for your lasting edification. 49 pieces, including many from Wilczek's award-winning Reference Frame columns in Physics Today, and some never before published, are gathered by style and subject into a dozen chapters, each with a revealing, witty introduction. Profound ideas, presented with style: What could be better? Enjoy.

Arising from the philosophical conviction that our sense of space plays a direct role in our apprehension and construction of reality (both factual and fictional), this book investigates how conceptions of postmodern space have transformed the history of the impossible in literature. Deeply influenced by the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of fantastic texts in which the impossible is bound to space — space not as scene of action but as impossible element performing a fantastic transgression within the storyworld. This book conceptualizes and contextualizes this postmodern, fantastic use of space that disrupts the reader’s comfortable notion of space as objective reality in favor of the concept of space as socially mediated, constructed, and conventional. In an illustration of the transnational nature of this phenomenon, García analyzes a varied corpus of the Fantastic in the past four decades from different cultures and languages, merging literary analysis with classical questions of space related to the fields of philosophy, urban studies, and anthropology. Texts include authors such as Julio Cortázar (Argentina), John Barth (USA), J.G. Ballard (UK), Jacques Sternberg (Belgium), Fernando Iwasaki (Perú), Juan José Millás (Spain,) and Éric Faye (France). This book contributes to Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the areas of the Fantastic, narratology, and Geocriticism and informs the continuing interdisciplinary debate on how human beings make sense of space.

IAIN BANKS was one of the finest writers of his generation. The Wasp Factory appeared in 1984, to great and gratifying controversy (one reviewer helpfully described it as "e;a work of unparalleled depravity"e;). There were a further 27 works of fiction from the prolific Banks before his untimely death in June 2013 at the age of 59, his customary method being to alternate between contemporary fiction and science fiction - the latter genre published under the name of Iain M. Banks. In 2008 The Times named Banks in their list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. This book by Moira Martingale is the first full-length comprehensive analysis of Banks's oeuvre and the thematic - and very Gothic - interests which preoccupied him. These interests include human monstrosity, religious belief, the fluidity of identity, the evolution of humankind and the technological adaptations which may order our future. At the outer limits of time and space can be found Banks's Utopian space civilization, The Culture. With its emphasis on the distant and unearthly - and the opening of the mind to imaginative possibilities - science fiction shares common ground with Gothic fiction of former centuries, and the Gothic is inherent to all Banks's fiction, dealing as it does with the ambiguities which wriggle uncomfortably and uncannily around the boundaries between good and evil, life and death, victim and villain, past and present, civilization and primitive barbarity, organic and machine or artificial technology. In most of Banks's work, conventions of the Gothic boil or simmer, whether it be the barbarities of the past entering the present, the ambivalent literary device of the Doppelganger or the blurred boundaries between the life of the dreaming unconscious and "e;real"e; life. Banks incorporates the fantastic, the mythological and the psychological to re-sculpt the Gothic's early fictional motifs and ethical concerns for our own time, and then he projects them star-wards, enabling him to elaborate a futuristic myth of socio-political salvation through technological expertise. With reference to many other writers, including J. G. Ballard, Stephen King, Doris Lessing, Mary Shelley and Banks's fellow-Scot Alasdair Gray, this book, rather in the style of the Gothic itself, straddles the boundary dividing the scholastic from popular writing. The style is clear and accessible and should appeal to both the academic and the general intelligent reader of Banks's work. MOIRA MARTINGALE is a journalist, author and former columnist for national and regional newspapers. Her previous books were published in the UK by Robert Hale and internationally by various publishers. She has a doctorate in Gothic Literature.

After a freak accident aboard a test flight bombards them with radiation, permanently altering their genetic structures, four adventurers use their incredible powers for the good of mankind and to protect the world from the forces of evil…despite their very real problems, worries and arguments. But soon they must face the diabolical and destructive plans of their ultimate enemy: Dr Doom, a brilliant man hungry for forbidden knowledge and thirsty in his obsessive pursuit of profit and revenge…

This volume presents an overview of the social history of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latino art. This collection of thirty-three essays focuses on Latin American artists throughout Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the United States. The author provides a chronology of modern Latin American art; a history of "social art history" in the United States; and synopses of recent theoretical and historical writings by major scholars from Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Chile, and the United States. In her essays, she discusses a vast array of topics including: the influence of the Mexican muralists on the American continent; the political and artistic significance of poster art and printmaking in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and among Chicanos; the role of women artists such as Guatemalan painter Isabel Ruiz; and the increasingly important role of politics and multinational businesses in the art world of the 1970s and 1980s. She explores the reception of Latin American and Latino art in the United States, focusing on major historical exhibits as well as on exhibits by artists such as Chilean Alfredo Jaar and Argentinean Leandro Katz. Finally, she examines the significance of nationalist and ethnic themes in Latin American and Latino art.

By revealing the facts behind the fiction of some of the finest films in the sci-fi genre, "Fantastic Voyages" offers a novel approach to teaching science: using scenes from science fiction films to illustrate fundamental concepts of physics, astronomy, and biology.

The action of the book takes place in 2056. The life of the main character – a famous Professor of mathematics changes as soon as he visits his homeland. The book is permeated with the thoughts of the hero, which reveal his personal life, the process of mental research and discoveries. The unification of all Sciences into a single science is on the agenda. Symmetry is the cornerstone of this great union. The quantum revolution is in full swing.