It all starts in a school playground, and then it moves to a classroom, where Larcenet's superb graphic camera zooms in on two ten-year-old kids: Gildas and Martina. The pair of them are ever so slightly obsessed with Sci-fi. To the extent they think they're surrounded by robots and aliens. As far as they're concerned, their entire world is made up of false appearances, and they're soon to be the victims of a huge intergalactic plot! You read, you smile, you snigger. But then suddenly, it's all turned on its head...

After an adventurous first chapter, Gildas and Martina now know they're not just normal kids living in a normal neighborhood. No: they're in fact clones! Years ago, a spaceship from Earth crashed on the planet Mawis. And the locals kindly put the victims back together using their DNA, and built around them a city exactly like theirs on Earth! But as it turns out, knowing the truth about their past isn't much help to Gildas and Martina as they go about their daily life, between school problems and family crises. Not to mention the imminent arrival of a vessel full of space vampires...

This is the first ever English-language anthology collecting texts and documents from the still little-known Scandinavian part of the Situationist movement. The book covers over three decades of writing, gravitating around the year 1962 when the Situationist movement went through its most dynamic and critical moments, and the disagreements about the relationship between art and politics came to a culmination, resulting in exclusions and the split of the Situationist International.

Ranging from a gritty near-future Earth to a distant alien world, Ken MacLeod's Cosmonaut Keep is contemporary science fiction at its highest level.A visionary epic filled with daring individuals seeking a place for themselves in a vast, complex, and enigmatic universe. Matt Cairns is a 21st-century outlaw Programmer who takes on the shady jobs no one else will touch. Against his better judgment, he accepts an assignment to crack the Marshall Titov, a top-secret orbital station operated by the European Space Agency. But what Matt will discover there will propel him on an extraordinary and quite unexpected journey. Gregor Cairns is an exobiology student and descendant of one of Terra Nova's first families. Hopelessly infatuated with a lovely young trader's daughter, he is unaware that his research partner, Elizabeth, has fallen in love with him. Together, Gregor and Elizabeth confront the great work his family began three centuries earlier-to rediscover the secret of interstellar travel. Cosmonaut Keep is a 2002 Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

There is no competition since this is the first book in the English language on cosmonaut selection and training Offers a unique and original discussion on how Russia prepares its cosmonauts for spaceflight. Contains original interviews and photographs with first-hand information obtained by the authors on visits to Star City Provides an insight to the role of cosmonauts in the global space programme of the future. Reviews the training both of Russian cosmonauts in other countries and of foreign cosmonauts in Star City

Using interviews with and writings by astronauts and cosmonauts, discusses how viewing the Earth from space and from the moon affect space explorers' perceptions of the world and humanity, and how those changes are likewise felt in contemporary society. The author views space exploration and eventual colonization as an inevitable step in the evolution of human society and consciousness, one which offers new perspectives on the problems facing us down here on Earth. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) retires the Space Shuttle and shifts involvement in International Space Station (ISS) operations, changes in the role and requirements of NASA's Astronaut Corps will take place. At the request of NASA, the National Research Council (NRC) addressed three main questions about these changes: what should be the role and size of Johnson Space Center's (JSC) Flight Crew Operations Directorate (FCOD); what will be the requirements of astronaut training facilities; and is the Astronaut Corps' fleet of training aircraft a cost-effective means of preparing astronauts for NASA's spaceflight program? This report presents an assessment of several issues driven by these questions. This report does not address explicitly the future of human spaceflight.

How the public image of the Soviet cosmonaut was designed and reimagined over time In this book, Cathleen Lewis discusses how the public image of the Soviet cosmonaut developed beginning in the 1950s and the ways this icon has been reinterpreted throughout the years and in contemporary Russia. Compiling material and cultural representations of the cosmonaut program, Lewis provides a new perspective on the story of Soviet spaceflight, highlighting how the government has celebrated figures such as Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova through newspapers, radio, parades, monuments, museums, films, and even postage stamps and lapel pins. Lewis’s analysis shows that during the Space Race, Nikita Khrushchev mobilized cosmonaut stories and images to symbolize the forward-looking Soviet state and distract from the costs of the Cold War. Public perceptions shifted after the first Soviet spaceflight fatality and failure to reach the Moon, yet cosmonaut imagery was still effective propaganda, evolving through the USSR’s collapse in 1991 and seen today in Vladimir Putin’s government cooperation for a film on the 1985 rescue of the Salyut 7 space station. Looking closely at the process through which Russians continue to reexamine their past, Lewis argues that the cultural memory of spaceflight remains especially potent among other collective Soviet memories.

The Universe is full of stars, and each star has at least one planet, the astrophysicists seek water and life in the cosmos. Long periods spent in the cosmos do not have the tempo of life, they are monotonous. The human brain and sensory systems are adapted to the categories of time and space in which they live normally. The philosophical categories of space and time do not exist in the cosmos, they are unique, because contraria sunt complementa. In Karl Jaspers’ view, the Existing is not in fact located in time and space, simply there is; being: da sein. The temporal planes are intertwined to lose their characteristic of continuity. In the long term, the cosmic climate produces a sense of fatigue, apathy and mood disorders, with manifestations of “dark mood”. The next step is anxiety and depression, dangerous not only for those who suffer from them, but also for the entire crew. Only the willingness to make that key contribution to the objective of scientific research can provide the motivation to endure the many hardships. The dysfunction, whether of people or things, risks compromising the mission. Harmony becomes a key element for success. He or she who exists in the cosmos must establish an equivalence between the energy of his/her mind, determined by the strength of the will, compared to the mass of a physical system that does not belong to him/her, but that is real. It is a rare human ability to know how to control the emotions, to know how to communicate effectively and to remain calm in extreme situations. Awareness for space travellers means having the consciousness that life on Earth is an illusion with regard to the cosmic reality, and intelligence is the ability to adapt. Human life in space stations and the future extraterrestrial human colonization will open up a new era for the anthropology sciences.

The recent 50th anniversaries of the first human spaceflights by the Soviet Union and the United States, and the 30th anniversary of the launching of the first U.S. Space Shuttle mission, have again brought to mind the pioneering accomplishments of the first quarter century of humans in space. Historians, political scientists and others have extensively examined the technical, programmatic and political history of human spaceflight from the 1960s to the 1980s, but work is only beginning on the social and cultural history of the pioneering era. One rapidly developing area of recent scholarship is the examination of the images of spacefarers in the media, government propaganda and popular culture. How was space travel imagined in the visual media on the cusp of human spaceflights? How were astronauts and cosmonauts represented in official and quasi-official media portraits? And how were those images reproduced and transformed by in the imagination of film-makers, movie producers, popular writers, and novelists? Spacefarers addresses these questions with nine contributions from scholars in the field of aerospace history, Russian and American history, and English literature. These essays are preceded by an introduction by the editor, who discusses their place in the historiography of spaceflight and social and cultural history. The book will have potential appeal to a wide variety of scholars in history, literature and the social sciences and will include a number of striking visual images.