Snow Crash

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson Snow Crash weaves virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age. In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse.

Cyberculture, Cyborgs and Science Fiction: Consciousness and the Posthuman Addressing a key issue related to human nature, this book argues that the first-person experience of pure consciousness may soon be under threat from posthuman biotechnology. In exploiting the mind's capacity for instrumental behavior, posthumanists seek to extend human experience by physically projecting the mind outward through the continuity of thought and the material world, as through telepresence and other forms of prosthetic enhancements. Posthumanism envisions a biology/machine symbiosis that will promote this extension, arguably at the expense of the natural tendency of the mind to move toward pure consciousness. As each chapter of this book contends, by forcibly overextending and thus jeopardizing the neurophysiology of consciousness, the posthuman condition could in the long term undermine human nature, defined as the effortless capacity for transcending the mind's conceptual content.Presented here for the first time, the essential argument of this book is more than a warning; it gives a direction: far better to practice patience and develop pure consciousness and evolve into a higher human being than to fall prey to the Faustian temptations of biotechnological power. As argued throughout the book, each person must choose for him or herself between the technological extension of physical experience through mind, body and world on the one hand, and the natural powers of human consciousness on the other as a means to realize their ultimate vision.

Disability, Literature, Genre: Representation and Affect in Contemporary Fiction: CHAPTER THREE Wondrous Texts: Science Fiction Examining the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s,Disability, Literature, Genre is a major contribution to both cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies.

Literary Wonderlands : A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created

Navigating Cybercultures: Chapter 3: Snow Crash: An Analysis of Postmodern Identities in Cyberpunk The papers collected here address the questions about posthumanism, hybridity, humanity, subjectivity, and aesthetics that echo through all of our daily attempts to navigate our rapidly shifting cybercultures.

Worlds Gone Awry : Essays on Dystopian Fiction The Creation of the Future from Remnants of the Past: Order from Disorder in William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash