Stewart Brand: The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987)

25 March 2014, dusan

A magical mystery tour through the world of MIT’s Media Laboratory, then headed by Nicholas Negroponte and in its third year of existence. Chapter 11 develops the dictum “information wants to be free.”

Publisher Viking, New York, 1987
ISBN 0670814423
285 pages

Review (Visual Resources, 1989)
Review (AI Magazine, Lee S. Brownston, 1990)

PDF (50 MB, updated on 2014-3-26 to an OCR’d version via Marcell Mars)

Alexander Bogdanov: Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (1908–) [FR, EN, DE]

1 December 2013, dusan

A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist.

The book also includes Engineer Menni, a historical novel about the social revolution on Mars, first published in 1913, and the poem A Martian Stranded on Earth, first published as a supplement to the second edition of Red Star in 1924, about a Martian who has reached Earth but is unable to return to his native planet. where mankind has attained a superior level of communist civilization.

Edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites
Translated by Charles Rougle
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1984
ISBN 0253173507, 9780253173508
257 pages

Reviews: Andy Cunningham (Socialist Review), Paul Josephson (Technology and Culture).

Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)

L’Étoile rouge (French, 1913-14, HTML, added on 2014-3-27)
Red Star (English, trans. Charles Rougle, 1984)
Der rote Planet (German, undated, HTML, added on 2014-3-27)

See Monoskop wiki for further writings of Bogdanov.

Ada Journal, Nos. 2–3: Feminist Game Studies / Feminist Science Fiction (2013)

12 November 2013, dusan

“In the inaugural issue of this journal, Mia Consalvo challenged feminist media studies scholars to confront toxic gamer culture, like that faced by Anita Sarkeesian in response to her Kickstarter campaign, through our research, by documenting, archiving, analyzing, and responding to sexism, racism, ageism, and homophobia in games and game spaces. This issue features six original articles that, in unique and methodologically diverse ways, respond to Consalvo’s challenge.” (from the Introduction)

Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology
Issue no. 2: Feminist Game Studies
Edited by Nina Huntemann, June 2013
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Publisher University of Oregon Libraries
ISSN 2325-0496

View online (HTML articles)

“The essays in this issue take us from the past, through Clarissa Lee’s reconsideration of the work of mid-20th-century physicists Emmy Noether and Maria Goeppert Mayer and Jamie “Skye” Bianco’s engagement with the race and class politics of New York City gentrification as refracted through art and fiction, to a wide variety of speculative futures. Many of them take us to the cyborg, yet they do not simply repeat Haraway’s influential figure. For Jilly Dreadful, the cyborg is one among a range of literary tropes that expands into a mode of storytelling; for Deanna Day, the cyborg should be left behind in favor of the critical lens of the zombie. ” (from the Introduction)

Issue no. 3: Feminist Science Fiction
Edited by Alexis Lothian, November 2013

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