Capturing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science fiction, this unique autobiography by Robert Silverberg shows how famous stories in this genre were conceived and written. Chronicling his career as one of the most important American science fiction writers of the 20th century, this account reveals how he rose to prominence as the pulp era was ending-and the genre was beginning to take on a more sophisticated tone-to eventually be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, who died in 1990 at the age of 75, is widely recognized as one of the most important theatre artists of this century. Critics have ranked him with such influential directors as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Grotowski. Known in the United States primarily for his visually stunning productions, he is also highly regarded throughout Europe for his theoretically adventurous writings. Michal Kobialka, whom Kantor authorized to translate his work, provides us with the first collection of Kantor's essays in English, together with his analysis of the corpus of Kantor's work, both written and staged.

The heightened environmental awareness that defines our contemporary urban age is both a challenge and an opportunity for urban planners and designers. In order to acquire perspective, context and leverage, city-makers must access the intangible realms of meaning to investigate the nature of social life and its relationship to space. In response to provocative spatial discourse from Lefebvre, Foucault and the Situationists International, Other Spaces, plural narratives of place in Berlin’s SO36, explores the application of theory in today’s broad and increasingly interdisciplinary planning and design practice. Deeply rooted in the philosophy of space, the concept of otherness is presented as a distinctive critical element and promising tool for contemporary urban analysis. As a source of spatial knowledge, otherness raises issues of relativity and reveals the layered, multi-dimensional reality of the urban environment. Both physical and symbolic, it complements conventional research methodologies with a qualitative, creative and proactive element. Unlocking a place-based imagination may be an instrumental tool for more responsible and creative urbanism. The SO36 case study suggests an alternative research approach that focuses on the observational, the experiential, and the intuitive as the fundamental basis for knowledge creation. An initial assessment of the built environment evolved to reveal abstract and subjective, but nevertheless complimentary dimensions of space. Alternative techniques of urban exploration and mapping were deployed, using otherness as a guiding principle to comparatively dissect urban morphologies and architectural typologies. Bridging the gap between professionals and citizens, this approach selectively explores urban themes and associations that reflect physical and symbolic otherness. The outcomes indicate a relationship between form and meaning, which is based and strongly supported by the community's distinctive personal and collective spatial imagination. Ultimately, what is revealed are conflicting social realities that exist simultaneously in symbiosis and define the neighborhood as a kaleidoscope of place. Das gesteigerte Umweltbewusstsein unseres zeitgenössischen, urbanen Zeitalters ist für Stadtplaner und Designer sowohl eine Herausforderung als auch eine Chance. Um bessere Sichtweisen, Zusammenhänge und Einfluss zu erlangen, müssen städtische Entscheidungsträger auf den vagen Bereich der Bedeutung zurück greifen, um das Wesen von Sozialleben und dessen Verhältnis zu Raum zu untersuchen. Als Antwort auf den provokativen Raumdiskurs von Lefebvre, Foucault und der Situationistischen Internationalen, untersucht Other Spaces, plural narratives of place in Berlin´s SO36 die Anwendung von Theorie in der weiten und zunehmend interdisziplinären Planungs- und Designpraxis der Gegenwart. Das Konzept der Andersheit ist tief verwurzelt in der Philosophie des Raumes. Es stellt sowohl einen charakteristischen, kritischen Faktor sowie ein vielversprechendes Mittel einer Analyse der zeitgenössischen Urbanität dar. Andersheit als eine Quelle des räumlichen Wissens wirft Themen der Relativität auf, gleichzeitig offenbart es die vielschichtige, multidimensionale Gegebenheit der städtischen Umwelt. Konventionelle Forschungsmethoden werden sowohl materiell als auch symbolisch mit einem qualitativen, kreativen und initiativen Faktor ergänzt. Das Freilegen einer ortsbezogenen Idee kann ein hilfreiches Mittel für mehr Verantwortung und kreativere Stadtplanung sein. Die Fallstudie SO36 zeigt einen alternativen Forschungsansatz auf, der sich auf die Beobachtung, die Empirie und die Intuition als die wesentlichen Bestandteile für die Generierung von Wissen konzentriert. Eine anfängliche Einschätzung der bebauten Umwelt weicht der Freilegung abstrakterer und subjektiverer, aber nichtsdestotrotz ergänzender Raumdimensionen. Alternative Techniken der Stadtforschung und Kartographie wurden eingesetzt, die Andersheit als ein Leitprinzip anwenden, um urbane Strukturen und architektonische Typologien aufzugliedern. Dieser Ansatz erforscht gezielt urbane Bezugspunkte und Gemeinschaften, die eine äußerliche und symbolische Andersheit widerspiegeln, und überbrückt so die Kluft zwischen Experten und Einwohnern. Die Resultate deuten eine Verbindung zwischen Gestalt und Bedeutung an, die auf der unverkennbaren, persönlichen wie kollektiven räumlichen Vorstellungskraft der Gemeinschaft beruht, und von dieser auch unterstützt wird. Letztlich werden widersprüchliche, soziale Realitäten frei gelegt, die in einer gleichzeitigen Symbiose existieren und Nachbarschaft als ein Kaleidoskop von Orten definieren.

This book by the late Fred Kersten—known to many as the translator of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas I—takes up the challenge of Husserl’s phenomenology as the “will to return to the matters themselves,” providing extensive methodological reflections before proceeding to a series of painstaking phenomenological analyses based on a number of evocative examples such as the indeterminate mass of the hillside that looms up before me as I walk toward it in the dark.

The Other Space Race is a unique look at the early U.S. space program and how it both shaped and was shaped by politics during the Cold War. Eisenhower’s “New Look” expanded the role of the Air Force in national security, and ultimately allowed ambitious aerospace projects, namely the “Dyna-Soar,” a bomber equipped with nuclear weapons that would operate in space. Eisenhower’s space policy was purely practical, creating a strong deterrent against the use of nuclear arms against the United States. With the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the political climate changed, and space travel became part of the United States’ national discourse. Sambaluk explores what followed, including the scuttling of the “Dyna-Soar” program and the transition from Eisenhower’s space policy to John Kennedy’s. This well-argued, well-researched book gives much needed perspective on the Cold War’s influence on space travel and it’s relation to the formation of public policy.

This selection of non-fictional work from the author of Life, a User's Manual, demonstrates Georges Perec's characteristic lightness of touch, wry humour and accessibility.

This important study upsets the popular assumption that human relations in small-scale societies are based on shared experience. In a theoretically innovative account of the lives of the Korowai of West Papua, Indonesia, Rupert Stasch shows that in this society, people organize their connections to each another around otherness. Analyzing the Korowai people's famous "tree house" dwellings, their patterns of living far apart, and their practices of kinship, marriage, and childbearing and rearing, Stasch argues that the Korowai actively make relations not out of what they have in common, but out of what divides them. Society of Others, the first anthropological book about the Korowai, offers a picture of Korowai lives sharply at odds with stereotypes of "tribal" societies.

"Given the historical orientation of philosophy, is it unreasonable to suggest a wider cast of the net into the deep waters of magic? By encountering magical thought as theory, we come to a new understanding of a thought that looks back at us from a funhouse mirror."-from The Occult Mind Divination, like many critical modes, involves reading signs, and magic, more generally, can be seen as a kind of criticism that takes the universe-seen and unseen, known and unknowable-as its text. In The Occult Mind, Christopher I. Lehrich explores the history of magic in Western thought, suggesting a bold new understanding of the claims made about the power of various belief systems. In closely interlinked essays on such disparate topics as ley lines, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and ritual in magical practice, and early attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, Lehrich treats magic and its parts as an intellectual object that requires interpretive zeal on the part of readers/observers. Drawing illuminating parallels between the practice of magic and more recent interpretive systems-structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics-Lehrich deftly suggests that the specter of magic haunts all such attempts to grasp the character of knowledge. Offering a radical new approach to the nature and value of occult thought, Lehrich's brilliantly conceived and executed book posits magic as a mode of theory that is intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of reason and truth. In elucidating the deep parallels between occult thought and academic discourse, Lehrich demonstrates that sixteenth-century occult philosophy often touched on issues that have become central to philosophical discourse only in the past fifty years.

This book examines the ways in which our ideas about language and identity which used to be framed in national and political terms as a matter of rights and citizenship are increasingly recast in economic terms as a matter of added value. It argues that this discursive shift is connected to specific characteristics of the globalized new economy in what can be thought of as "late capitalism". Through ten ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the complex ways in which older nationalist ideologies which invest language with value as a source of pride get bound up with newer neoliberal ideologies which invest language with value as a source of profit. The complex interaction between these modes of mobilizing linguistic resources challenges some of our ideas about globalization, hinting that we are in a period of intensification of modernity, in which the limits of the nation-State are stretched, but not (yet) undone. At the same time, this book argues, this intensification also calls into question modernist ways of looking at language and identity, requiring a more serious engagement with capitalism and how it constitutes symbolic (including linguistic) as well as material markets.

Heterotopia, literally meaning ‘other place’, is a rich concept in urban design that describes a space that is on the margins of ordered or civil society, and one that possesses multiple, fragmented or even incompatible meanings. The term has had an impact on architectural and urban theory since it was coined by Foucault in the late 1960s but it has remained a source of confusion and debate since. Heterotopia and the City seeks to clarify this concept and investigates the heterotopias which exist throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels and festival markets. With theoretical contributions on the concept of heterotopia, including a new translation of Foucault’s influential 1967 text, Of Other Space and essays by well-known scholars, the book comprises a series of critical case studies, from Beaubourg to Bilbao, which probe a range of (post)urban transformations and which redirect the debate on the privatization of public space. Wastelands and terrains vagues are studied in detail in a section on urban activism and transgression and the reader gets a glimpse of the extremes of our dualized, postcivil condition through case studies on Jakarta, Dubai, and Kinshasa. Heterotopia and the City provides a collective effort to reposition heterotopia as a crucial concept for contemporary urban theory. The book will be of interest to all those wishing to understand the city in the emerging postcivil society and post-historical era. Planners, architects, cultural theorists, urbanists and academics will find this a valuable contribution to current critical argument.