The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2010-07-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307398927

From the Booker Prize–winning author of Oryx and Crake, the first book in the MaddAddam Trilogy, and The Handmaid’s Tale. Internationally acclaimed as ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR by, amongst others, the Globe and Mail, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Village Voice In a world driven by shadowy, corrupt corporations and the uncontrolled development of new, gene-spliced life forms, a man-made pandemic occurs, obliterating human life. Two people find they have unexpectedly survived: Ren, a young dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails (the cleanest dirty girls in town), and Toby, solitary and determined, who has barricaded herself inside a luxurious spa, watching and waiting. The women have to decide on their next move—they can’t stay hidden forever. But is anyone else out there?

God's Gardeners

God's Gardeners
Author: Melissa Ong
Publisher: Graceworks
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2020-01-17
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9811436630

This collection of stories marks Singapore’s first book on creation care. Each story captures how ordinary Christians from different walks of life have humbly put their faith into radical action, and integrated the biblical ethos of creation care into the everyday. The writers reflect on creation care as an organic part of the path of discipleship and missional living, rather than an imposed or burdensome duty. The book presents a refreshing local perspective on the distinctiveness of Christian environmental ethics, seeks to encourage fellow Christians on this creation care journey, and inspire those who have yet to begin. Ultimately, it is an invitation to followers of Christ to care for God’s marvellous creation as an act of worship and love.

Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2010-07-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307400840

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize. Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again. The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter.

The Gardeners of God

The Gardeners of God
Author: Colette Gouvion
Publisher: One World (UK)
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1993
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

In an candid and informative account, two French jounralists set out to conduct an objective and unbiased study of the Baha'i Faith, an emerging world religion. Through a series of frank and lively interviews, interspersed with personal observations, they examine who the Baha'i's are and what they believe.

Greening the Academy

Greening the Academy
Author: Samuel Fassbinder
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2012-12-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9462091013

This is the academic Age of the Neoliberal Arts. Campuses—as places characterized by democratic debate and controversy, wide ranges of opinion typical of vibrant public spheres, and service to the larger society—are everywhere being creatively destroyed in order to accord with market and military models befitting the academic-industrial complex. While it has become increasingly clear that facilitating the sustainability movement is the great 21st century educational challenge at hand, this book asserts that it is both a dangerous and criminal development today that sustainability in higher education has come to be defined by the complex-friendly “green campus” initiatives of science, technology, engineering and management programs. By contrast, Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts takes the standpoints of those working for environmental and ecological justice in order to critique the unsustainable disciplinary limitations within the humanities and social sciences, as well as provide tactical reconstructive openings toward an empowered liberal arts for sustainability. Greening the Academy thus hopes to speak back with a collective demand that sustainability education be defined as a critical and moral vocation comprised of the diverse types of humanistic study that will benefit the well-being of our emerging planetary community and its numerous common locales.

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic
Author: Mary Going
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2024-06-10
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 166694596X

Religious Horror and the Ecogothic explores the intersections of Anglophone Christianity and the Ecogothic, a subgenre that explores the ecocritical in Gothic literature, film, and media. Acknowledging the impact of Christian ideologies upon interpretations of human relationships with the environment, the Ecogothic in turn interrogates spiritual identity and humanity’s darker impulses in relation to ecological systems. Through a survey of Ecogothic texts from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book illuminates the ways in which a Christianized understanding of hierarchy, dominion, fear, and sublimity shapes reactions to the environment and conceptions of humanity’s place therein. It interrogates the discourses which inform environmental policy, as well as definitions of the “human” in a rapidly changing world.

Presences and Absences – Transdisciplinary Essays

Presences and Absences – Transdisciplinary Essays
Author: Katarína Labudova
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2013-10-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443853208

This volume discusses the question of presence and/or absence from a transdisciplinary perspective, and intends to provide insights into how a wide range of disciplines addresses this issue which has been at the centre of philosophical, theoretical and critical debates in the past decades. As the essays in the volume prove, apparently diverse areas can have a lot in common and talk to each other in sometimes surprising ways. The topics discussed include modals in various languages and black slave funeral sermons, pragmatic markers and the Australian Stolen Generation, the transcendental in poems by Ann Bradstreet, Arthur Symons and Philip Larkin, short stories by Katherine Mansfield, generic presences in Virginia Woolf and contemporary journalism, haunting presences in fin-de-siècle ghost stories and in a contemporary horror film, mythical structures in John Cowper Powys and Margaret Atwood, and gender politics in Pat Barker and Sarah Waters. The analyses, as they talk to each other, create multiple dialogues without imposing closures and ultimate interpretations on the plethora of possible meanings emerging from the juxtaposition of these essays. This transdisciplinary volume, written in an erudite but reader-friendly language, will be of great interest to both the academic world, as well as a broader readership interested in how linguistic phenomena in general, cultural myths of all kinds, various cinematic, literary and journalistic genres from diverse periods can be approached and opened up to new readings and meanings from the perspective of presences and absences.

Posthumanity in the Anthropocene

Posthumanity in the Anthropocene
Author: Esther Muñoz-González
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2023-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000866270

In this book, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels—The Handmaid’s Tale, the MaddAddam trilogy, The Heart Goes Last, and The Testaments—are analyzed from the perspective provided by the combined views of the construction of the posthuman subject in its interactions with science and technology, and the Anthropocene as a cultural field of enquiry. Posthumanist critical concerns try to dismantle anthropocentric notions of the human and defend the need for a closer relationship between humanity and the environment. Supported by the exemplification of the generic characteristics of the cli-fi genre, this book discusses the effects of climate change, at the individual level, and as a collective threat that can lead to a "world without us." Moreover, Margaret Atwood is herself the constant object of extensive academic interest and Posthuman theory is widely taught, researched, and explored in almost every intellectual field. This book is aimed at worldwide readers, not only those interested in Margaret Atwood’s oeuvre, but also those interested in the debate between critical posthumanism and transhumanism, together with the ethical implications of living in the Anthropocene era regarding our daily lives and practices. It will be especially attractive for academics: university teachers, postgraduates, researchers, and college students in general.

Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition

Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition
Author: Christian Baron
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-07-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 331956577X

This book explores what science fiction can tell us about the human condition in a technological world, with the ethical dilemmas and consequences that this entails. This book is the result of the joint efforts of scholars and scientists from various disciplines. This interdisciplinary approach sets an example for those who, like us, have been busy assessing the ways in which fictional attempts to fathom the possibilities of science and technology speak to central concerns about what it means to be human in a contemporary world of technology and which ethical dilemmas it brings along. One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate what can be achieved in approaching science fiction as a kind of imaginary laboratory for experimentation, where visions of human (or even post-human) life under various scientific, technological or natural conditions that differ from our own situation can be thought through and commented upon. Although a scholarly work, this book is also designed to be accessible to a general audience that has an interest in science fiction, as well as to a broader academic audience interested in ethical questions.