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Unrivaled in the history of artillery and unsurpassed in its ability to reason, Bolo replaced man in that most human of endeavors: war. In these scintillating tales of the ever-advancing Dinochrome Brigade, the most effective weapons ever devised ell their own story in action-packed chronicles of extra-terrestrial adventure. Bolo: fighting in proud combat as monster saviors of their human creators.
The author continues the history of the Bolo--gigantic robot tanks controlled by tireless electronic brains programmed to admit no possibility of defeat--in four short novels, one of them published here for the first time.
From "An Abbreviated History of the Bolo": The first completely automated Bolo, designed to operate normally without a man on board, was the landmark XV Model M. This model, first commissioned in the twenty-fifty century, was widely used throughout the Eastern Arm during the Era of Expansion and remained in service on remote worlds for over two centuries, acquiring many improvements in detail while remaining basically unchanged, through increasing sophistication of circuitry and weapons vastly upgraded its effectiveness. The always-present, through perhaps unlikely, possibility of capture and use of a Bolo by an enemy was a constant source of anxiety to military leaders and, in time, gave rise to the next and final major advance in Bolo technology: the self-directing (and, quite incidentally, self-aware) Mark XX Model B Bolo Tremendous. The Mark XX was greeted with little enthusiasm by the High Command, who now professed to believe that an unguided-by-operator Bolo would potentially be capable of running amok...
This book defends the common sense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. It then creates an argument against fictional realism by finding the faults and problems with the fictional realism argument.
Haroun's father is the greatest of all storyletters. His magical stories bring laughter to the sad city of Alifbay. But one day something goes wrong and his father runs out of stories to tell. Haroun is determined to return the storyteller's gift to his father. So he flies off on the back of the Hoopie bird to the Sea of Stories - and a fantastic adventure begins.
For public and school libraries, this resource reflects recent changes in Library of Congress subject headings and authority files, and provides bilingual information essential to reference librarians and catalogers serving Spanish speakers. Libraries must provide better access to their collections for all users, including Spanish-language materials. The American Library Association has recognized this increasing need. Subject Headings for School and Public Libraries: Bilingual Fourth Edition is the only resource available that provides both authorized and reference entries in English and Spanish. A first-check source for the most frequently used headings needed in school and public librarie...
This volume provides a unique interface between the material and linguistic aspects of communication, education and language use, and cuts across traditional disciplinary boundaries, drawing on fields as varied as applied linguistics, ethnology, sociology, history and philosophy. Taking texts, images and objects as their starting points, the authors discuss how cultural context is envisioned in particular materialities and in a variety of contexts and localities. The volume, divided into three sections, aims to deal with material culture not only in the daily language practices of the past and the present, but also language teaching in a number of settings. The main thrust of the volume, then, is the exposure of natural ties between language, cognition, identity and the material world. Aimed at undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars in fields as varied as education, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, semiotics and other related disciplines, this volume documents and analyses a wide range of case studies. It provides a unique take on multilingualism and expands our understanding of how materialities permit us new and unexpected insights into multilingual practices.
What is postmodern literary subjectivity? How to talk about it without falling in the trap of negative hyper-essentialism or being seduced by exuberant lit speak? One way out of this dilemma, as this book suggests, is via a redefinition of the concept in the context of Emmanuel Levinas and his radical ethics. By defining subjectivity as an ethically charged act of language, Levinas provides a fresh perspective on the often trivialized aspects of postmodern poetics such as referentiality and affect construction strategies. The foregrounding of the ethical dimension of those poetic elements has far-reaching consequences for how we read postmodern texts and understand postmodernism in general. Thus, to prove the benefits of the Levinasian approach, the author applies it to the work of the canonical American postmodernist, Donald Barthelme, and explains the distinctly ethical character of his apparently surfictional experiments.
Across North America, flocks of birds hurl themselves into airplanes, causing at least a dozen to crash. Thousands of people die. Fearing terrorism, the United States government grounds all flights, and millions of travelers are stranded. Among them are Reese and her debate team partner and longtime crush David, who are in Arizona when the disaster occurs. On their drive home to San Francisco, along a stretch of empty highway in the middle of the Nevada night, a bird flies into their headlights. The car flips over. When they wake up in a military hospital, the doctor won't tell them what happened, where they are--or how they've been miraculously healed. Things become even stranger when Reese...