The End Of The City

In the beginning, there is nothing. In the end, the same. This is a place. It is in the middle, and that's all. Ben Moor is haunted by a villainous alter ego. Since his father's death shortly after the fall of the twin towers, the boy believes he is impervious to any physical and emotional pain. Struggling with his father's absence and looming adulthood, Ben rejects his obsessions with comic books, video games, sports, and dreams of super heroism. He feels isolated even among those closest to him: his little brother, Bobby Jihad, and an artistic, bass-playing girl named Kitty. After killing his partner, the assassin runs from once-trusted colleagues and the boy who stalks him in dreams. Both killer and boy find their confidence challenged as they wander among the ruins of buildings and lives transformed by hostility and violence. Aware of each other and trying to make sense of the tragedies in their separate lives, they navigate the memories of the living and dead, cope with the burden of survival, and hope for redemption at The End of the City.

Do you dream of a city at the end of time? In a time like the present, on a world that may or may not be our own, three young people - Ginny, Jack, and Daniel - dream of a fabulous, decadent city in the distant future: the Kalpa. The dreams of Ginny and Jack overtake them without warning, leaving their bodies behind while carrying their consciousnesses forward, into the minds of two inhabitants of the Kalpa - a would-be warrior, Jebrassy, and an inquisitive explorer, Tiadba - who have been genetically retroengineered to possess qualities of ancient humanity. In turn, the dreams of Tiadba and Jebrassy carry them back, into the minds of Jack and Ginny. As for Daniel: he dreams of an empty darkness - all his future holds. But more than dreams link Ginny, Jack, and Daniel. They are fate-shifters, born with the ability to skip like stones across the surface of the fifth dimension, inhabiting alternate versions of themselves. And they are each guardians of an object whose origins and purpose are unknown, a gnarled, stony artifact called a sum-runner that persists unchanged through all versions of time. They can save the future, but they are being hunted down.

How does Europe’s economic crisis affect the ways in which industry and entrepreneurship are experienced on a grassroots level? The book offers an answer to this question by exploring the Italian jewellery town of Valenza and the downturn of its principal industry. Through the experiences of its inhabitants, the study investigates the social role that jewellery production had in Valenza and provides an ethnographic account of the crisis the city endures. This analysis delves into the relationship between a community and its industry in order to understand the social and cultural challenges Italy and Europe will face in the future.

From nineteenth-century paintings of fires raging through New York City to scenes of Manhattan engulfed by a gigantic wave in the 1998 movie Deep Impact, images of the city’s end have been prolific and diverse. Why have Americans repeatedly imagined New York’s destruction? What do the fantasies of annihilation played out in virtually every form of literature and art mean? This book is the first to investigate two centuries of imagined cataclysms visited upon New York, and to provide a critical historical perspective to our understanding of the events of September 11, 2001. Max Page examines the destruction fantasies created by American writers and imagemakers at various stages of New York’s development. Seen in every medium from newspapers and films to novels, paintings, and computer software, such images, though disturbing, have been continuously popular. Page demonstrates with vivid examples and illustrations how each era’s destruction genre has reflected the city’s economic, political, racial, or physical tensions, and he also shows how the images have become forces in their own right, shaping Americans’ perceptions of New York and of cities in general.

This book tells the story of visionary urban experiments, shedding light on the theories that preceded their development and on the monsters that followed and might be the end of our cities. The narrative is threefold and delves first into the eco-city, second the smart city and third the autonomous city intended as a place where existing smart technologies are evolving into artificial intelligences that are taking the management of the city out of the hands of humans. The book empirically explores Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong to provide a critical analysis of eco and smart city experiments and their sustainability, and it draws on numerous real-life examples to illustrate the rise of urban artificial intelligences across different geographical spaces and scales. Theoretically, the book traverses philosophy, urban studies and planning theory to explain the passage from eco and smart cities to the autonomous city, and to reflect on the meaning and purpose of cities in a time when human and non-biological intelligences are irreversibly colliding in the built environment. Iconoclastic and prophetic, Frankenstein Urbanism is both an examination of the evolution of urban experimentation through the lens of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and a warning about an urbanism whose product resembles Frankenstein’s monster: a fragmented entity which escapes human control and human understanding. Academics, students and practitioners will find in this book the knowledge that is necessary to comprehend and engage with the many urban experiments that are now alive, ready to leave the laboratory and enter our cities.

In one split second they were hurled across time into a world one million years away.A surprise nuclear war may cause the End of the World, but not the way anyone could have imagined. A classic science fiction tale originally published in Galaxy Magazine.The pleasant little American city of Middletown is the first target in an atomic war - but instead of blowing Middletown to smithereens, the super-hydrogen bomb blows it right off the map - to somewhere else! First there is the new thin coldness of the air, the blazing corona and dullness of the sun, the visibility of the stars in high daylight. Then comes the inhabitant's terrifying discovery that Middletown is a twentieth-century oasis of paved streets and houses in a desolate brown world without trees, without water, apparently without life, in the unimaginably far-distant future.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities. BONUS: This edition contains a The City & The City discussion guide and excerpts from China Miéville's Kraken and Embassytown.

Familiar to New Mexicans through the columns and articles he has written for various periodicals, Price presents his philosophy of what makes Albuquerque, New Mexico such an attractive place to live, and explains how to keep it that way. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.