Metal And Flesh

A poetic exploration of the new world created by the collision of the biological body with technology and culture. For more than 3,000 years, humans have explored uncharted geographic and spiritual realms. Present-day explorers face new territories born from the coupling of living tissue and metal, strange lifeforms that are intelligent but unconscious, neither completely alive nor dead. Our bodies are now made of machines, images, and information. We are becoming cultural bodies in a world inhabited by cyborgs, clones, genetically modified animals, and innumerable species of human/information symbionts. Ollivier Dyens's Metal and Flesh is about two closely related phenomena: the technologically induced transformation of our perceptions of the world and the emergence of a cultural biology. Culture, according to Dyens, is taking control of the biosphere. Focusing on the twentieth century—which will be remembered as the century in which the living body was blurred, molded, and transformed by technology and culture—Dyens ruminates on the undeniable and irreversible human/machine entanglement that is changing the very nature of our lives.

"That science-fiction future in which technology would make everything very good—or very bad—has not yet arrived. From our vantage point at least, no age appears to have had a deeper faith in the inevitability and imminence of such a total technological transformation than the early twentieth century. Russia was no exception."—from the introduction In the Soviet Union, it seems, armoring oneself against the world did not suffice—it was best to become metal itself. In his engaging and accessible book, Rolf Hellebust explores the aesthetic and ideological function of the metallization of the revolutionary body as revealed in Soviet literature, art, and politics. His book shows how the significance of this modern myth goes far beyond the immediate issue of the enthusiasm with which the Bolsheviks welcomed such a symbolic transfiguration and that of our own uneasy attraction to the images of metal flesh and machine-men. Hellebust's literary examples range from the famous (Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago) to the forgotten (early Soviet proletarian poets). To these he adds a mix of non-Russian references, from creation myths to comic book superheroes, medieval alchemy to Moby-Dick. He includes readings of posters, sculpture, and political discourse as well as cross-cultural comparisons to revolutionary France, industrial-age America, and Nazi Germany. The result is a fascinating portrait of the ultimate symbols of dehumanizing modernity, as refracted through the prism of utopian humanism.

She must obey a stranger's orders, or the androids will attack again… Despite Lena's fears about the dangers of the Model One androids, CyberCorp has shipped them to customers. They work perfectly—except around Lena. When an android attacks one of her best friends, she insists the robots are fatally flawed. Desperate to keep this situation from spiraling out of control, like it did last time, Lena casts suspicion on everyone she knows. This time, she won't trust anyone. When she gets a threatening note from someone claiming to be controlling the androids, she'll obey—but only to stall for time. Can she find whoever's responsible, before someone else she loves dies?

"In a not too distant future, cyborgs rule the earth in a society filled with vice, corruption and murder, the powerful few exploiting the masses of humans. Knowing which is which is not easy, however, and the seduction of the perfect dream bodies of the humanoid robots is very strong indeed. Man vs. machine in a sex showdown!"--Cover.

Shadowrunners cannot be limited by what their bodies canor cannotdo. They have to do more, stretch farther, surpass any limits, and accomplish the impossible. Some runners can rely on magic; for everyone else, there are augmentations. From shiny chrome that makes your body into a humanoid semitruck to genetech that alters you at the most fundamental level to drugs and chemicals that give you a quick and dirty boost, Chrome Flesh provides dozens of new ways to alter Shadowrun characters and make them better, stronger, faster, and altogether readier to kick ass and take names on the streets. Along with the gear and a compiled table of all cyberware, bioware, genetech, and nanotech currently available in Shadowrun, Fifth Edition, Chrome Flesh covers how runners break down and what resources can help fix them up, and where augmentation tech might go in the future. It's paydata every shadowrunner needs if they want to overcome everything the Sixth World is going to throw at them.

For sixteen-year-old Jane, life is a mystery she despairs of ever mastering. She and her friends are the idle, pampered children of the privileged class, living in luxury on an Earth remade by natural disaster. Until Jane's life is changed forever by a chance encounter with a robot minstrel with auburn hair and silver skin, whose songs ignite in her a desperate and inexplicable passion. Jane is certain that Silver is more than just a machine built to please. And she will give up everything to prove it. So she escapes into the city's violent, decaying slums to embrace a love bordering on madness. Or is it something more? Has Jane glimpsed in Silver something no one else has dared to see - not even the robot or his creators? A love so perfect it must be destroyed, for no human could ever compete?

This book tells about metals, both about such well-known metals as iron, copper and aluminum, and about those whose name is not familiar to everyone, such as cerium, gadolinium, tantalum.You will read about the magic properties of titanium, the young rival of iron, about uranium, a new fuel for power plants, about tungsten, the strongest and most refractory member of the metal family, and, in general, about all the eighty metals existing in nature.At the same time this book is about man, his great power over metals, and his ability to transform rusty stones and ores into metal articles.

Formed in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy, the Flesh Tearers, veterans of the Blood Angels Legion now cast adrift, gather behind their leader, Chapter Master Amit, and set out to forge their own destiny. None of the scions of Sanguinius are as bloody or wrathful as the Flesh Tearers. The fury of this Chapter, scorned by the Blood Angels and many of their successors, is legendary. Within them, the Black Rage is made manifest, a curse on the Imperium and its enemies. In the uncertain years following the end of the Great Heresy, it fell to Amit to lead this benighted Chapter. Upon his shoulders lay a heavy burden, for to prevent their own self-annihilation, the Flesh Tearers must not only fight their many foes but their very nature itself.