The Ministry of Time
10.0
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A BOY MEETS A GIRL. THE PAST MEETS THE FUTURE. A FINGER MEETS A TRIGGER. THE BEGINNING MEETS THE...
Speculative fiction Historical fiction time travel
Ross (3282 KP) rated Black Mirror - Season 1 in TV
Jan 8, 2018
The first episode sees the UK prime minister forced into considering an unpleasant act after a ransom demand from a kidnapper. It serves as a good representation of media coverage and their involvement in spreading panic and stoking outrage.
The next episode was a near-future look at a world where some classes of people spend their days on exercise bikes, presumably powering society. They are forced to watch endless hours of a small number of TV shows and are charged a fee to skip pop-up adverts for porn shows. The indictment of where society is headed, including the disposability of talent shows and how much more mandatory watching adverts could become, felt like something of a warning to turn back now!
The final episode revolved around people having the ability to instantaneously rewind and re-view moments of their lives and cast it to TV screens. The story looks at how this plays a part in a man's suspicions over his wife's faithfulness to their marriage. Similar to the previous 2 episodes, it shows that the technology, and people's reliance on it, does not help real life in any way, rather it further fuels suspicion and malcontent.
Three stories about the way the human race is headed told brilliantly.
Substance of Shadow: A Darkening Trope in Poetic History
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John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative...
Alice in Space: The Sideways Victorian World of Lewis Carroll
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In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll created fantastic...
Value Making in International Economic Law and Regulation: Alternative Possibilities
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This book examines the contemporary production of economic value in today's financial economies....
German Naval Camouflage: v. I: 1939-41
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For half a century German warship camouflage has been something of a mystery for warship enthusiasts...
Monster, She Wrote
Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson
6.0
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Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature’s strangest tales, from...
The Memory of Animals
10.0
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Neffy is a young woman running away from grief and guilt and the one big mistake that has derailed...
Speculative fiction Literary fiction apocalyptic
Suswatibasu (1701 KP) rated Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind in Books
Nov 20, 2017 (Updated Nov 20, 2017)
What begins as a scientific exploration in to the separation or perhaps merging of the distinct human genuses ie. Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, quickly becomes a political and social study. As a result, the book begins well but deteriorates as he moves away from a more analytical approach.
As the story moves towards times that we are more familiar with, it's not enough for the writer to tell us what happened, and perhaps share some of his pet theories on the sweep of history. Instead, we get increasingly speculative interpretations of what the author thinks are the big ideas in history. He takes no care to qualify these grand statements of opinion, but instead presents them as facts.
While I agree with his anthropological assertions surrounding religion as a method of homogenising populations and allowing flow of information, many reviews seem to be quite antagonistic towards this point of view and as a result there are definitely two camps of thoughts in regards to this book.
However, his whitewashing of colonialism and imperial rule is disparaging, literally explaining the benefits reaped by colonised countries from such destructive regimes, glossing over partition and genocide. Overall, I think that it is written well, but there are too many opinions and not enough evidence-based arguments.