stanley g. weinbaum was one of the american science fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s who anticipated virtual reality early in the development of the genre in the united states. the machine in weinbaum’s science fiction plays a crucial role in the production of virtual space and time. not only does weinbaum’s gadgetry function within the domain of spatial alterity, but they also provide te...

There are two ways in which we can contemplate the global/local dimension in relation to Indian commercial fiction in English: first, in terms of processes of publication and circulation (the means of production); and, second, in terms of the broad characteristics and reception of such fiction (product and consumption). This paper discusses Indian commercial fiction in English since the 1980s a...

Fiction literature has largely been ignored by psychology researchers because its only function seems to be entertainment, with no connection to empirical validity. We argue that literary narratives have a more important purpose. They offer models or simulations of the social world via abstraction, simplification, and compression. Narrative fiction also creates a deep and immersive simulative e...

In December 2010, the FCC completed an almost 4 yearlong rulemaking process related to socalled “Internet Neutrality.” During this process, more than 32,000 comments and related documents were filed with the FCC, arguing for or against net neutrality regulation. The debate over net neutrality is largely understood to be one of access providers vs. content providers. Those companies providing ho...

Jin Feng, in her paper "The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction," proposes that the representation of the "new woman" in Chinese fiction was paradoxically one of the ways in which male writers of the era explored, negotiated, and laid claim to their own emerging identity as "modern" intellectuals. Previous scholarship on fiction of the period probed occasionally the thematic im...

If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one (genres as regions of conceptual space) dominant but inadequate, the other (genres as historical particulars) better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, in...

Il racconto cinematografico e televisivo ha sviluppato numerose narrazioni della criminalità organizzata, tanto da aver dato un contributo determinante alla creazione del suo immaginario. Ma quali sono gli strumenti che a disposizione uno sceneggiatore quando si occupa di questi temi? Come gestisce il rapporto tra realtà finzione? O la necessità conciliare desiderio denuncia civile con le regol...

This article introduces and explores issues regarding the question of what constitute valid forms of development knowledge, focusing in particular on the relationship between fictional writing on development and more formal academic and policyoriented representations of development issues. We challenge certain conventional notions about the nature of knowledge, narrative authority, and represen...

Young children are surrounded by fictional media, including books, videos, and games. Often they are expected to learn new information from these explicitly fictional sources, while simultaneously avoiding confusion about what is true in the real world versus what is true only in fictional worlds. How do children navigate this ‘‘reader’s dilemma”? The current review addresses this question by f...

The Google Books corpus, derived from millions of books in a range of major languages, would seem to offer many possibilities for research into cultural, social, and linguistic evolution. In a previous work, we found that the 2009 and 2012 versions of the unfiltered English data set as well as the 2009 version of the English Fiction data set are all heavily saturated with scientific and medical...