We have made huge progress in understanding the biology of mental illnesses, but comparatively little in interpreting them at the psychological level. The eminent philosopher Jonathan Glover believes that there is real hope of progress in the human interpretation of disordered minds. The challenge is that the inner worlds of people with psychiatric disorders can seem strange, like alien landscapes, and this strangeness can deter attempts at understanding. Do people with disorders share enough psychology with other people to make interpretation possible? To explore this question, Glover tackles the hard cases—the inner worlds of hospitalized violent criminals, of people with delusions, and of those diagnosed with autism or schizophrenia. Their first-person accounts offer glimpses of inner worlds behind apparently bizarre psychiatric conditions and allow us to begin to learn the “language” used to express psychiatric disturbance. Art by psychiatric patients, or by such complex figures as van Gogh and William Blake, give insight when interpreted from Glover’s unique perspective. He also draws on dark chapters in psychiatry’s past to show the importance of not medicalizing behavior that merely transgresses social norms. And finally, Glover suggests values, especially those linked with agency and identity, to guide how the boundaries of psychiatry should be drawn. Seamlessly blending philosophy, science, literature, and art, Alien Landscapes? is both a sustained defense of humanistic psychological interpretation and a compelling example of the rich and generous approach to mental life for which it argues.

The wild imaginings of ten science fiction authors are brought to life through color illustrations of artificial worlds, alien earths, planetary cities, and mysterious civilizations

Award-winning artist Whelan has illustrated the work of almost every major author in speculative fiction. Here are featured all the artist's major recent paintings, as well as a series of 25 never-before-seen works produced especially for this book. Over 100 full-color reproductions.

Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western. • "Jonathan Lethem's imagination [is]...marvelously fertile." --Newsday The heroine is young Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders. Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale.

The UFO and crop circle enigmas have been interpreted as extraterrestrial or hoaxes, but there are subtle answers to genuine reports (not hoaxes) which have never been explored. Andrew Collins, best-selling British author, puts forth the idea that ground-based energy forms, with an intelligence, are responsibe for these phenomena. Collins' experiments at crop circle locations are described along with photographs and data reported initially in 1994.

The Art of Space is the most comprehensive celebration of space art ever to be published, profiling the development of space-based art in a variety of media. In The Art of Space, award-winning artist and best-selling author Ron Miller presents over 350 high-quality and often photorealistic images that chart how artists throughout history, working with the knowledge and research available during their time, have endeavored to construct realistic images of visions throughout the universe. Beginning with depictions of space ships, unmanned probes, and space stations, Miller moves through collections that also illustrate the planets, moons, galaxies, and stars; cities, colonies, and space habitats; and possible alien life. The artwork presented here has been created in a variety of media, from the woodcuts and oil paintings of the Victorian and Edwardian eras to the digitally enhanced work of contemporary artists. Each chapter also includes two special features: one profile of an artist or group of artists of particular influence and one sidebar discussion of general cultural topics, such as the use of space art for propaganda purposes during the Cold War or the impact of the digital revolution on the resources available to artists. A fascinating study on the intersection of science and the artistic imagination, The Art of Space shows how astronomy and space travel has been reflected in popular art and public perception over the past two centuries. With forewords from Carolyn Porco and Dan Durda, this book is the ultimate resource for space art fans.

Come explore an incredible LEGO® universe in LEGO Space: Building the Future. Spaceships, orbital outposts, and new worlds come to life in this unique vision of the future, built completely from LEGO bricks. A selection of step-by-step building instructions will have you constructing your own cosmic creations to play with at home. Marvel at interstellar battlecruisers, space pirates, charming robots, and other stunning builds from an amazing future!

With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.

In 2358 Wayne Douglas Barlowe joined the first manned flight to Darwin IV, a newly discovered world beyond our solar system. Here he provides naturalistic paintings that vividly capture the alien creatures he encountered. Illustrations, full-color paintings, and maps.

National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson returns to future Earth in a sharply wrought satire of art and truth in the midst of colonization. When the vuvv first landed, it came as a surprise to aspiring artist Adam and the rest of planet Earth — but not necessarily an unwelcome one. Can it really be called an invasion when the vuvv generously offered free advanced technology and cures for every illness imaginable? As it turns out, yes. With his parents’ jobs replaced by alien tech and no money for food, clean water, or the vuvv’s miraculous medicine, Adam and his girlfriend, Chloe, have to get creative to survive. And since the vuvv crave anything they deem classic Earth culture (doo-wop music, still life paintings of fruit, true love), recording 1950s-style dates for the vuvv to watch in a pay-per-minute format seems like a brilliant idea. But it’s hard for Adam and Chloe to sell true love when they hate each other more with every passing episode. Soon enough, Adam must decide how far he’s willing to go — and what he’s willing to sacrifice — to give the vuvv what they want.