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Tik-Tok (novel)
''Tik-Tok'' is a 1983 science fiction novel by John Sladek. It received a 1983 British Science Fiction Association Award. Plot summary The title character is an intelligent robot (named after the mechanical man in the Oz books) who originally works as a domestic servant and house-painter. Unlike other robots, whose behavior is constrained by "asimov circuits"—a reference to Isaac Asimov's fictional Three Laws of Robotics, which require robots to protect and serve humans—Tik-Tok finds that he can do as he pleases, and he secretly commits various hideous crimes for his amusement. After manipulating both robots and humans to cause chaos and bloodshed, Tik-Tok becomes wealthy (partly through health care privatization) and is finally elected Vice President of the United States. Analysis The novel gleefully satirizes Asimov's relatively benign view of how robots would serve humanity, suggesting that the reality would be exactly akin to slavery: robots are worked until ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Sladek
John Thomas Sladek (December 15, 1937 – March 10, 2000) was an American science fiction author, known for his satirical and surreal novels. Life and work Born in Waverly, Iowa, in 1937, Sladek was in England in the 1960s for the New Wave movement and published his first story in the magazine'' New Worlds''. His first science fiction novel, published in London by Gollancz as '' The Reproductive System'' and in the United States as '' Mechasm'', dealt with a project to build machines that build copies of themselves, a process that gets out of hand and threatens to destroy humanity. In '' The Müller-Fokker Effect'', an attempt to preserve human personality on tape likewise goes awry, giving the author a chance to satirize big business, big religion, superpatriotism, and men's magazines, among other things. ''Roderick'' and ''Roderick at Random'' offer the traditional satirical approach of looking at the world through the eyes of an innocent, in this case a robot. Sladek r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nihilism
Nihilism (; ) is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. The term was popularized by Ivan Turgenev, and more specifically by his character Bazarov in the novel '' Fathers and Sons''. There have been different nihilist positions, including that human values are baseless, that life is meaningless, that knowledge is impossible, or that some set of entities do not exist or are meaningless or pointless. Pratt, Alan.Nihilism" ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy''. . Scholars of nihilism may regard it as merely a label that has been applied to various separate philosophies, or as a distinct historical concept arising out of nominalism, skepticism, and philosophical pessimism, as well as possibly out of Christianity itself. Contemporary understanding of the idea stems largely from the Nietzschean 'crisis of nihilism', from which d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Games Workshop
Games Workshop Group (often abbreviated as GW) is a British manufacturer of miniature wargames, based in Nottingham, England. Its best-known products are ''Warhammer Age of Sigmar'' and ''Warhammer 40,000''. Founded in 1975 by John Peake (game designer), John Peake, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (UK), Steve Jackson, Games Workshop was originally a manufacturer of wooden boards for games including backgammon, mancala, nine men's morris and Go (board game), Go. It later became an importer of the U.S. role-playing game ''Dungeons & Dragons'', and then a publisher of wargames and role-playing games in its own right, expanding from a bedroom mail-order company in the process. It expanded into Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia in the early 1990s. All UK-based operations were relocated to the current headquarters in Lenton, Nottingham in 1997. It started promoting games associated with The Lord of the Rings (film series), ''The Lord of the Rings'' film trilogy in 2001. It al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
White Dwarf (magazine)
''White Dwarf'' is a magazine published by British games manufacturer Games Workshop, which has long served as a promotions and advertising platform for Games Workshop and Citadel Miniatures products. During the first ten years of its publication, it covered a wide variety of fantasy and science-fiction role-playing games (RPGs) and board games, particularly the role playing games ''Advanced Dungeons & Dragons'' (''AD&D''), '' Call of Cthulhu'', ''RuneQuest'' and '' Traveller''. These games were all published by other games companies and distributed in the United Kingdom by Games Workshop stores. The magazine underwent a major change in style and content in the late 1980s. It is now dedicated exclusively to the miniature wargames produced by Games Workshop. History 1975: ''Owl and Weasel'' to ''White Dwarf'' Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone initially produced a newsletter called ''Owl and Weasel'', which ran for twenty-five issues from February 1975 before it evolved into '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Langford
David Rowland Langford (born 10 April 1953) is a British author, editor, and critic, largely active within the science fiction field. He publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter ''Ansible'', and holds the all-time record for most Hugo Awards, with a total of 29 wins. Personal background David Langford was born and grew up in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales before studying for a degree in Physics at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he first became involved in science fiction fandom. Langford is married to Hazel and is the brother of the musician and artist Jon Langford. His first job was as a weapons physicist at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire from 1975 to 1980. In 1985 he set up a "tiny and informally run software company" with science fiction writer Christopher Priest, called Ansible Information after Langford's news-sheet. The company has ceased trading. Increasing hearing difficulties have reduced Langford's participation i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Éditions Denoël
Éditions Denoël is a French culture, French publishing house founded in 1930. Acquired by Éditions Gallimard in 1951, it publishes collections spanning fiction, non-fiction and comic books. It published some of the most important French authors of the interwar period, including Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Louis Aragon and Antonin Artaud. History In 1930 in literature, 1930 the Belgium, Belgian Robert Denoël and the United States, American Bernard Steele (1902–1979), founded Éditions Denoël-Steele, later shortened to Éditions Denoël.:228 It had its first success in 1932 in literature, 1932 with Céline's ''Voyage au bout de la nuit''. Other early success include Louis Aragon, Louis Aragon's ''Les Cloches de Bâle'' (1934), Antonin Artaud, Antonin Artaud's ''Héliogabale ou l'anarchiste couronné'' (1934) and Céline's ''Mort à crédit'' (1936 in literature, 1936). Denoël can be considered unusual in respect to its diverse choice of publications. Until May 1940, for examp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Finnish (language)
Finnish ( endonym: or ) is a Uralic language of the Finnic branch, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland (the other being Swedish). In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli (which has significant mutual intelligibility with Finnish) are official minority languages. The Kven language, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian county Troms og Finnmark by a minority group of Finnish descent. Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation. Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs are inflected depending on their role in the sentence. Sentences are normally formed with subject–verb–object word order, although the extensive use of inflection allows them to be ordered differently. Word order variations are often reserved for differences in information structure. Finnish ort ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore () is the biggest publishing company in Italy. History The company was founded in 1907 in Ostiglia by 18-year-old Arnoldo Mondadori who began his publishing career with the publication of the magazine ''Luce!''. In 1912 he founded ''La Sociale'' and published the first book ''AiaMadama'' together with his close friend Tommaso Monicelli and the following year, ''La Lampada'', a series of children's books. The publishing house kept working intensely even during the First World War, mainly on the publication of magazines for the troops on the front such as ''La Tradotta'', which included contributions from famous illustrators and writers such as Soffici, De Chirico and Carrà . In 1919 the publishing house headquarters were transferred to Milan. After the First World War, Mondadori launched several successful book series including Gialli Mondadori in 1929, the first example of an Italian book series dedicated to detective and crime novels, by internati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italian (language)
Italian (''italiano'' or ) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. Together with Sardinian, Italian is the least divergent language from Latin. Spoken by about 85 million people (2022), Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland (Ticino and the Grisons), San Marino, and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria (Croatia and Slovenia). Italian is also spoken by large immigrant and expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia.Ethnologue report for language code:ita (Italy) – Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version Italian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ullstein-Verlag
The ''Ullstein Verlag'' was founded by Leopold Ullstein in 1877 at Berlin and is one of the largest publishing companies of Germany. It published newspapers like '' B.Z.'' and ''Berliner Morgenpost'' and books through its subsidiaries ''Ullstein Buchverlage'' and ''Propyläen''. The newspaper publishing branch was taken over by Axel Springer AG in 1956. History On 14 July 1877 Leopold Ullstein purchased the ''Neue Berliner Tageblatt'' newspaper, a subsidiary of the liberal ''Berliner Tageblatt'' published by Rudolf Mosse, and on 1 January 1878 converted it into the ''Berliner Zeitung'' (''B.Z.''). In 1894 he also acquired the ''Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung'' weekly, which as technology advanced and permitted heavy use of photographs, became the most successful picture paper in Germany. The ''B.Z. am Mittag'', relaunched in 1904, became Germany's first tabloid newspaper. Ullstein's sons Rudolf, Hans, Louis, Franz and Hermann inherited the publishing house and developed it further ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transworld (company)
Transworld Publishers Ltd. is a British publishing house in Ealing, London that is a division of Penguin Random House, one of the world's largest mass media groups. It was established in 1950 as the British division of American company Bantam Books. It publishes fiction and non fiction titles by various best-selling authors including Val Wood under several different imprints. Hardbacks are either published under the Doubleday or the Bantam Press imprint, whereas paperbacks are published under the Black Swan, Bantam or Corgi imprint. Terry Pratchett First Novel Award Transworld sponsors the Terry Pratchett First Novel Award for unpublished science-fiction novels. See also * List of largest UK book publishers This is a list of largest UK trade book publishers, with some of their principal imprints, ranked by sales value. List According to Nielsen BookScan as of 2010 the largest book publishers of the United Kingdom were: # Penguin Random House ' ... References Ext ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
