Given the recent popularity of post-apocalyptic narratives, it seems a good time to pick up Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon. Frank’s portrait of a small Florida community coping with nuclear fallout is an early contribution to the genre, one that demonstrates considerable cleverness and technical merit. Sadly, this story of Cold War-era anxiety and ingenuity has […]
“‘Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity.’ ‘People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days […]
“A society that chiefly esteems order, that finds growth painful and change disturbing, inevitably seeks for a fixed body of superior truths upon which it may depend. It looks backward, to something already in existence, for the source and sanction of truth. It falls back upon what is antecedent, prior, original, a priori, for assurance. […]
“‘To understand the present you must know the past, yet it is only part of the answer and I will never discover it all. I have not the years.’” ––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 236 “Knowing, for the experimental sciences, means a certain kind of intelligently conducted doing; it ceases to be contemplative […]
“Reason is experimental intelligence, conceived after the pattern of science, and used in the creation of social arts; it has something to do. It liberates man from the bondage of the past, due to ignorance and accident hardened into custom. It projects a better future and assists man in its realization. And its operation is […]
“The exhausted swimmer, struggling to reach shore, isn’t worried about starving to death afterwards.” ––Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank, pg. 135 “To respect matter means to respect the conditions of achievement; conditions which hinder and obstruct and which have to be changed, conditions which help and further and which can be used to modify […]
I’d never heard of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) until a friend suggested I read this book. As someone interested in the intersection between gaming and narrative, I think the ARG world is full of promise. Dave Szulborski has written a fine introduction to this embryonic genre; his tripartite offering is a conceptual manifesto, brief history, […]
“The mind of man spontaneously assumes greater simplicity, uniformity and unity among phenomena than actually exists. It follows superficial analogies and jumps to conclusions; it overlooks the variety of details and the existence of exceptions. Thus it weaves a web of purely internal origin which it imposes upon nature. What had been termed science in […]
“If this lecture succeeds in leaving in your minds as a reasonable hypothesis the idea that philosophy originated not out of intellectual material, but out of social and emotional material, it will also succeed in leaving with you a changed attitude toward traditional philosophies. They will be viewed from a new angle and placed in […]
“Just as this separation of some things as ends-in-themselves from other things as means-in-themselves, by their very nature, is a heritage of an age in which only those activities were called ‘useful’ which served living physiologically rather than morally, and which were carried on by slaves or serfs to serve men who were free in […]