Bøger af Steve Beard

Tells the story of a contemporary Ojibwa household and the woman and her children who are at its core. As their lives unfold, we understand how traditional beliefs help Rachel's family cope as they encounter racism in rural Michigan.

Part novel and part memoire, Not Far Away recounts the life of a female Ojibwe schoolteacher in northern Michigan as she endures the most caustic forms of racism.

Voodoo Science Park started life as a poetic film about the science of accident investigation practised by the Health and Safety Laboratory in the Peak District of England. In the book of the film, Victoria Halford and Steve Beard reveal the thinking that went into the preparation of the script. The Health and Safety Lab is the place where large-scale accidents such as tunnel collapses, fires and rail crashes are recreated to examine their destructive pathways. Halford and Beard explore the connections with imitative magic, drawing on the secret histories of dissident religious sects, miners and shamans as well as the prophecies of William Blake. They rethink the lab's industrial safety rigs as monstrous emblems of the state, as theorised by Thomas Hobbes, and retrace the steps of a journey the political philosopher took through the hollow lands of the Peak in 1626. Testimony from highwaymen, ramblers and urban explorers is collected along the way. The book is composed in a fragmentary style, which weaves together philosophy, travelogue, history of science, sociology and religious study.

A navigational aid to the apocalypse.Steve Beard's Six Concepts for the End of the World mixes scientific research with experimental fiction to produce a manual for the apocalypse. The author examines six disciplines—technology, sociology, geography, psychology, theology and narratology—and for each one creates a fictional scenario that both reflects and energizes the research, all under the guiding light of the philosopher Paul Virilio's theories. This approach allows Beard to create one surprising idea after another: Hollywood viewed as a research and development lab for the end times, a first-person account of a UFO abduction, a blog on the disappearance of the Malaysian Airlines flight 370, a voice-over for an imaginary film by a doomsday cult member. Highly original in both form and content, the book surprises and delights in its scope. The approach is multidisciplinary and multidirectional, and Beard's exploration ranges over many areas and themes, always bringing distinctive insights to bear. Six Concepts for the End of the World is an expertly guided tour through the author's imagination, and toward the end of the world.