Hal S Legacy

How science fiction's most famous computer has influenced the research and design of intelligent machines.

This book is a collection of texts that explore the analogy between organizing and narrating, between action and text. The raw material of everyday organizational life consists of disconnected fragments, physical and verbal actions that do not make sense when reported with simple chronology. Narrating is organizing this raw and fragmented material with the help of such devices as plot and characters. Simultaneously, organizing makes narration possible, because it orders people, things and events in time and place. The collection, written by organization researchers from many different countries, explores this analogy in both directions, reporting studies that show how narratives are made in situ, and applying narrative analysis (structuralist and poststructuralist) to stories already in existence. Barbara Czarniawska is Skandia Professor of Management Studies at GRI, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University, Sweden. Pasquale Gagliardi is Professor of Sociology of Organization at the Catholic University of Milan, and Managing Director of ISTUD- Istituto Studi Direzionali, Milan-Stresa, Italy.

A respected journalist explores the fields of science that try to explain the mysteries of the human mind, arguing that science has done little to plumb the depths of our minds and cannot ever rationally explain all of human behavior.

Electric Dreams turns to the past to trace the cultural history of computers. Ted Friedman charts the struggles to define the meanings of these powerful machines over more than a century, from the failure of Charles Babbage’s “difference engine” in the nineteenth century to contemporary struggles over file swapping, open source software, and the future of online journalism. To reveal the hopes and fears inspired by computers, Electric Dreams examines a wide range of texts, including films, advertisements, novels, magazines, computer games, blogs, and even operating systems. Electric Dreams argues that the debates over computers are critically important because they are how Americans talk about the future. In a society that in so many ways has given up on imagining anything better than multinational capitalism, cyberculture offers room to dream of different kinds of tomorrow.

Almost all students have seen 2001, but virtually none understand its inheritance, its complexities, and certainly not its ironies. The essays in this collection, commissioned from a wide variety of scholars, examine in detail various possible readings of the film and its historical context. They also examine the film as a genre piece--as the summa of science fiction that simultaneously looks back on the science fiction conventions of the past (Kubrick began thinking of making a science fiction film during the genre's heyday in the fifties), rethinks the convention in light of the time of the film's creation, and in turn changes the look and meaning of the genre that it revived--which now remains as prominent as it was almost four decades ago. Constructed out of its director's particular intellectual curiosity, his visual style, and his particular notions of the place of human agency in the world and, in this case, the universe, 2001 is, like all of his films, more than it appears, and it keeps revealing more the more it is seen. Though their backgrounds and disciplines differ, the authors of this essay collection are united by a talent for vigorous yet incisive writing that cleaves closely to the text--to the film itself, with its contextual and intrinsic complexities--granting readers privileged access to Kubrick's formidable, intricate classic work of science fiction.

"Fearless and strong-willed, he served the Green Lantern Corps for years. Jordan was also the Green Lantern Corps' ultimate downfall. In a failed attempt to save his home, Hal Jordan destroyed the Corps and betrayed everything they stood for. Now, it falls to Tom Kalmaku, Hal's best friend and confidant, to try to repair the damage done. Left only with a note with the words 'Fix it' and the mysterious appearance of Hal Jordan's never-before-seen son, Tom must try to piece together the wreckage of Jordan's life, as well as the personal wasteland of his own. But there are a lot of people who don't want to see Hal Jordan's past come back to haunt them. Standing in Tom's way are the JLA, former Green Lanterns, and a dark warrior from the stars who has pledged to destroy all reminders of Hal Jordan's legacy."--Publisher description.

Tombs in Shakespearean Drama explores the rhetorical deployment of tombs and monuments on the early modern stage, demonstrating their historiographic power and mythmaking potential. By analyzing references to tombs in plays by Shakespeare and others in conjunction with extant monuments, this volume demonstrates how these references function in two overlapping ways in period drama: monuments act as repositories of information about the past, and they allow the living to construct and preserve fictive narratives. The stage exposes the flimsy materiality of paper, placing less value on the written word than period poetry. In this way, critics have perhaps oversold as universal Shakespeare’s poetic praise of stone. Tombs within plays act as a powerful historical and narrative medium, raising the stakes to provide the stage with the illusion of permanency. Playwrights use tombs to anchor the stage action, giving a sense of lasting importance to dramatic events and combatting the ephemeral nature of the playhouse. In drama, Shakespeare and others drew on the persona preserved on tombs; this volume widens our view of how these representations interacted in the commemorative economy of early modern England. Within the playhouse, it was the tomb, not the tome, that stood as a symbol of permanence.