Distress (novel)
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Distress (novel)
''Distress'' is a 1995 science fiction novel by Australian writer Greg Egan. Plot summary ''Distress'' describes the political intrigue surrounding a mid-twenty-first century physics conference, at which is to be presented a unified Theory of Everything. In the background of the story is an epidemic mental illness, related in some way to the imminent discovery of the TOE. The action takes place on an artificial island called "Stateless", which has earned the wrath of the world's large biotech companies for its pilfering of their intellectual property. The narrator is a journalist for a science channel called SeeNet named Andrew Worth who carries video recording software in an intestinal implant. He is offered a story on a new illness called Distress, but declines. He journeys to Stateless through a series of convoluted flights to cover a presentation by 27-year-old South African physicist Violet Mosala, supplanting the preproduction by a colleague, Sarah Knight. When he arrive ...
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Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for Profit (economics), profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, Property rights (economics), property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in Capital market, capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets. Economists, historians, political economists and sociologists have adopted different perspectives in their analyses of capitalism and have recognized various forms of it in practice. These include ''Laissez-faire capitalism, laissez-faire'' or free-market capitalism, anarcho-capitalism, state capi ...
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Australian Science Fiction Novels
Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal Australians, indigenous peoples of Australia as identified and defined within Australian law * Australia (continent) ** Indigenous Australians * Australian English, the dialect of the English language spoken in Australia * Australian Aboriginal languages * ''The Australian'', a newspaper * Australiana, things of Australian origins Other uses * Australian (horse), a racehorse * Australian, British Columbia, an unincorporated community in Canada See also * The Australian (other) * Australia (other) Australia is a country in the Southern Hemisphere. Australia may also refer to: Places * Name of Australia relates the history of the term, as applied to various places. Oceania *Australia (continent), or Sahul, the landmasses ...
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Novels By Greg Egan
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ...
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Aurealis Award-winning Works
''Aurealis'' is an Australian speculative fiction magazine published by Chimaera Publications, and is Australia's longest running small-press science-fiction and fantasy magazine. The magazine is based in Melbourne. History and profile ''Aurealis'' was launched in September 1990 to provide a market for speculative fiction writers, with a particular emphasis on raising the profile of Australian authors. In October 2011 the magazine became a monthly e-publication (published every month except January and December). In 1995 the magazine instituted the Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction. Notable stories featured *" Whispers of the Mist Children" by Trudi Canavan in issue #23, won the 1999 Aurealis Award for best fantasy short story *" The World According to Kipling (A Plain Tale from the Hills)" in issue #25/26, won the 2000 Aurealis Award for best fantasy short story *" Catabolic Magic" by Richard Harland in issue #32, won the 2004 Aurealis Awar ...
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Transhumanist Books
Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement which advocates the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies that can greatly enhance longevity and cognition. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations as well as the technoethics, ethics of using such technologies. Some transhumanists believe that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings with abilities so greatly expanded from the current condition as to merit the label of posthuman#Transhumanism, posthuman beings. Another topic of transhumanist research is how to protect humanity against existential risks, such as nuclear war or asteroid collision. Julian Huxley was a biologist who popularised the term transhumanism in an influential 1957 essay. The contemporary meaning of the term "transhumanism" was foreshadowed by one of th ...
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1995 Australian Novels
File:1995 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman from the year prior in "The Trial of the Century" in the United States; The Great Hanshin earthquake strikes Kobe, Japan, killing 5,000-6,000 people; The Unabomber Manifesto is published in several U.S. newspapers; Gravestones mark the victims of the Srebrenica massacre near the end of the Bosnian War; Windows 95 is launched by Microsoft for PC; The first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, is discovered; Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the Space station Mir in a display of U.S.-Russian cooperation; The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed by domestic terrorists, killing 168., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 O. J. Simpson murder case rect 200 0 400 200 Kobe earthquake rect 400 0 600 200 Unabomber Manifesto rect 0 200 300 400 Oklahoma City bombing rect 300 200 600 400 Srebrenica massacre rect 0 400 200 600 Space Shuttle Atlanti ...
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Gender
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures use a gender binary, in which gender is divided into two categories, and people are considered part of one or the other (boys/men and girls/women);Kevin L. Nadal, ''The SAGE Encyclopedia of Psychology and Gender'' (2017, ), page 401: "Most cultures currently construct their societies based on the understanding of gender binary—the two gender categorizations (male and female). Such societies divide their population based on biological sex assigned to individuals at birth to begin the process of gender socialization." those who are outside these groups may fall under the umbrella term ''non-binary''. Some societies have specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such as the hijras of South Asia; these are often referred to as ''third gende ...
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Epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas: # The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification # Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony # The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs # Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibili ...
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Metaphysics
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of consciousness and the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or behind or among he study ofthe natural". It has been suggested that the term might have been coined by a first century CE editor who assembled various small selections of Aristotle's works into the treatise we now know by the name ''Metaphysics'' (μετὰ τὰ φυσικά, ''meta ta physika'', 'after the ''Physics'' ', another of Aristotle's works). Metaphysics studies questions related to what it is for something to exist and what types of existence there are. Metaphysics seeks to answer, in an abstract and fu ...
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Postmodern
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to epistemic certainty or stability of meaning, and emphasis on ideology as a means of maintaining political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization. Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism and has been observed a ...
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Multinational Corporation
A multinational company (MNC), also referred to as a multinational enterprise (MNE), a transnational enterprise (TNE), a transnational corporation (TNC), an international corporation or a stateless corporation with subtle but contrasting senses, is a corporate organization that owns and controls the production of goods or services in at least one country other than its home country. Control is considered an important aspect of an MNC, to distinguish it from international portfolio investment organizations, such as some international mutual funds that invest in corporations abroad simply to diversify financial risks. Black's Law Dictionary suggests that a company or group should be considered a multinational corporation "if it derives 25% or more of its revenue from out-of-home-country operations". Most of the largest and most influential companies of the modern age are publicly traded multinational corporations, including '' Forbes Global 2000'' companies. History Colonialism Th ...
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