Kij Johnson

Nathaniel Williams

Jamie Lackey

Ted Wilson

Blaise Torrance

Rance D. Denton

Gillian Daniels

Tod McCoy

Michael H. Payne

Pete Butler

Osgood Vance

Robert Bagnall

Kim Krodel

Kristy Buzbee

Nathan McKnight

Juliet & Romeo. Catherine & Heathcliff. Padme & Anakin. Ennis Del Mar & Jack Twist. Cloud & Aerith. Tragic, star-crossed love. But not all love has to be forbidden. Join Kazka Press as we explore the simple love between a man and his pony, a woman and her pony, and the world and their bronies and pegasisters. Foreword is written by Kij Johnson, and the anthology includes her Nebula-winning story "Ponies."

For the Love of Ponies

Bronies

A revealing study of the connections between nineteenth-century technological fiction and American religious faith. In Gears and God: Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain’s America, Nathaniel Williams analyzes the genre of technology-themed exploration novels—dime novel adventure stories featuring steam-powered and electrified robots, airships, and submersibles. This genre proliferated during the same cultural moment when evolutionary science was dismantling Americans’ prevailing, biblically based understanding of human history. While their heyday occurred in the late 1800s, technocratic adventure novels like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court inspired later fiction about science and technology. Similar to the science fiction plotlines of writers like Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard, and anticipating the adventures of Tom Swift some decades later, these novels feature Americans using technology to visit and seize control of remote locales, a trait that has led many scholars to view them primarily as protoimperialist narratives. Their legacy, however, is more complicated. As they grew in popularity, such works became as concerned with the preservation of a fraught Anglo-Protestant American identity as they were with spreading that identity across the globe. Many of these novels frequently assert the Bible’s authority as a historical source. Collectively, such stories popularized the notion that technology and travel might essentially “prove” the Bible’s veracity—a message that continues to be deployed in contemporary debates over intelligent design, the teaching of evolution in public schools, and in reality TV shows that seek historical evidence for biblical events. Williams argues that these fictions performed significant cultural work, and he consolidates evidence from the novels themselves, as well as news articles, sermons, and other sources of the era, outlining and mapping the development of technocratic fiction.

Technocratic Fiction, Faith, and Empire in Mark Twain's America

Gears and God

ABOUT THE BOOK At present we make a fundamental distinction between animals (including apes) and humans, and this distinction guides our ethical code and actions. For instance, as I noted at the start of this chapter, it is considered acceptable to exhibit caged apes in zoos, but it is not acceptable to do the same with humans. I wonder how the public will feel when the identifying label on the chimp cage in the zoo reads 'Homo troglodytes'. The Third Chimpanzee is inspired by the latest genetic data on the close relation of humans and chimpanzees to look at humankind’s place in the world afresh. Author Jared Diamond, a trained physiologist, offers provocative questions to the lay audience on human behavior, morality, environmental policy, and politics. Diamond would return to these issues again in later, more successful books (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse), but this work is the most grounded and least speculative of his best-sellers. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK He speculates on art’s function and concludes that it is primarily to attract mates, increase status, and, occasionally, kill boredom. Diamond is well out of his area of expertise in this chapter and fails to convince the reader of his hypotheses for artistic function. If the book’s purpose is, smartly, to show how similar humans are to chimps and to examine the key differences, why cite examples of artistic behavior in birds and elephants? Why not examine art among our fellow apes? Apparently apes in the wild exhibit little interest in artistic expression, which would make it a very short chapter. But the sexual motivation for art among birds is hardly cause to believe there is a similar cause among humans. Indeed, many of the great historical works of art were decidedly religious in nature. It would take a true cynic to believe Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling to better increase his chances of sexual conquest. “Agriculture’s Two-Edged Sword” Unlike complex language, agriculture is not a distinct dividing line between humans and other animals. After all, many human societies did not adopt agriculture until the 20th century, and a small number today still live as hunter-gatherers. However, as Diamond points out, it is difficult to imagine a single innovation that transformed our relationship with the rest of the planet more than agriculture. Diamond explores interesting research on the early stages of agriculture that showed how adopting an agricultural lifestyle actually diminished the quality and length of human life. With less diverse nutrition, people become smaller and weaker, with greater propensity for bone disease. This innovation made individuals lives worse, while making their larger society more powerful. Diamond returns to his larger theme with a compelling chapter that presages his later best-seller Guns, Germs, and Steel. Examining this historical development through a medical and biological lens, we are jarred from the traditional sense of linear historical progress and allowed to explore this cataclysmic shift in lifestyle with uncommon immediacy... Buy the book to continue reading! Follow @hyperink on Twitter! Visit us at www.facebook.com/hyperink! Go to www.hyperink.com to join our newsletter and get awesome freebies! CHAPTER OUTLINE Quicklet on Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee + About the Book + Introducing the Author + An Overall Summary + Key Terms and Definitions + ...and much more

Quicklet on Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee (CliffNotes-like Book Summary and Analysis)

Nathaniel Williams

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