Bøger af Greg Chase

When a dangerous interplanetary power play destroys his world, Samuel Adamson must once again leave the idyllic planet of Chariklo. Mankind should have left Sam in peace because now all hell is about to break loose. With nowhere else to go, Sam and his village board a rescue ship and set out to integrate their utopian society with the people back on Earth, most of whom are still devoted to doctrines of repression. Tensions run high as Sam resumes his role as the god of the Tobes and owner of Rendition, the most powerful corporation in the universe. But events boil over when a radical church devoted to restrictive ideas about sexuality kidnaps his daughter... and the Tobes' response unleashes a techno-human hybrid with godlike powers even greater than Sam's.

Sam Adamson would do anything to leave the climate-ravaged wastelands of Earth... even if it means working for pirates. So when he's offered a job repairing a derelict spaceship's computer, he jumps at the chance to head to the Kuiper Belt, an area at the edge of the solar system reviled for its lawlessness and tenuous ability to sustain life. But the repair proves difficult, and the pirates who hired Sam leave him to die in the computer's core. Fortunately, the inhabitants of a utopian village rescue him and show him that human relationships can be more open and connected once Earth habits have been broken. He's content to live the rest of his days away from Earth until he learns his work on the spaceship inadvertently created a new, all-knowing-but misguided-technology-based species. And their mistakes threaten to tear the very fabric of human interaction. Forced to leave his Garden of Eden on the terraformed planet, he takes his wife, Jess-his link to all he holds dear-and goes back to Earth to face his responsibilities. Before Sam and Jess can ever hope to return to their village, they have to teach the next generation of the new species how to change the direction of mankind for the better.

Having killed their god, the Tobes of Jupiter are left with a void only Sam's wife and daughters can fill. The technologically advanced beings don't know what havoc these women intend to release across the solar system. Jess dreams of retribution for the destruction of her homeworld, but she and her daughters face a bigger problem-the potential end of life on Earth. Turning pirate could be the only way to entice the space renegades to her cause. But while the outlaw adventurers are the only force capable of confronting the Moons of Jupiter, they aren't very trustworthy. Jess isn't the only one who's cagey with her plans. For too long, those who love Sara have kept a watchful eye on her. Freed at last, Sara must face what her father long resisted: the temptation to take ultimate power over another species. Alone back on Earth, Emily inherits the chaos of a dying planet. As the reluctant president of Rendition, she feels the weight of the world on her tender, young shoulders. If the three women can't find a way to unite their secret agendas, humanity may not survive its Armageddon.

Samuel Adamson-God of the Tobes-has neglected his progeny for too long. With no one to shepherd them, his technological offspring are easy prey for the tyrannical Moons of Jupiter corporations. The highly evolved beings must act as slave drivers and prostitutes under the leashes of their corporate masters-and propel the human work force toward its annihilation. But the despotism of the Moons is only part of Sam's problem. If he can't find a way to unite the Tobes, Earth will face almost certain destruction. Sam doesn't give up easily, and things are about to change.

Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment shows how early twentieth-century economic and social upheaval prompted new ways of conceptualizing the purposes and powers of language. Scholars have long held that formally experimental novels written in the early twentieth century reflect how the period's material crises-from world wars to the spread of industrial capitalism-call into question the capacity of language to picture the world accurately. This book argues that this standard scholarly narrative tells only a partial story. Even as signal modernist works by Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and others move away from a view of language as a means of gaining knowledge, they also underscore its capacity to grant acknowledgment. They show how language might matter less as a medium for representing reality than as a tool for recognizing others. The book develops this claim by engaging with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Writing in 1945, in the preface to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein laments, "e;It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another-but, of course, it is not likely."e; Worrying that "e;the darkness"e; of this historical moment renders his words unintelligible, Wittgenstein echoes the linguistic skepticism that scholars have found in literary modernism. But the Investigations ultimately pushes back against such skeptical doubts by offering a vision of language as a set of shared human practices. Even when it comes to a word like "e;pain,"e; which seemingly gestures toward something absolutely private and individual, Wittgenstein indicates that we learn what "e;pain"e; means by familiarizing ourselves with the contexts in which people use the term. In his pioneering reading of the Investigations as a "e;modernist"e; work, Stanley Cavell argues that Wittgenstein's distinctive response to the problem of skepticism consists in the view that "e;other minds [are] not to be known, but acknowledged."e;The book argues that this concept of acknowledgment, as articulated implicitly by Wittgenstein and explicitly by Cavell, enables a broader reconceptualization of modernist fiction's stance toward the referential capacities of language, and it bears out this claim by reading a series of modernist novels through the lens of Wittgenstein's philosophy. From the residence halls of Cambridge to the farmsteads of rural Mississippians, the early decades of the twentieth century sowed serious doubts about the ability of individuals to find shared criteria for the meanings of words: the greater convenience of travel led to increased cross-cultural misunderstandings; technological developments facilitated new modes of race-, class-, and gender-based oppression, and two world wars irrevocably shattered an earlier generation's optimism about the inevitability of political and moral progress. In this light, Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction contends that modernist representations of consciousness strive to capture the inner lives of socially marginalized figures, seeking to facilitate new forms of intimacy and community amongst those who have survived crushing losses and been subject to deeply isolating social forces.