In Pilot Pirx, Lem has created an irresistibly likable character: an astronaut who gives the impression of still navigating by the seat of his pants-a bumbler but an inspired one. By investing Pirx with a range of human foibles, Lem offers a wonderful vision of the audacity, childlike curiosity, and intuition that can give humans the courage to confront outer space. Translated ...(展开全部)

Mission: vertical launch at half booster power. Ascent to ellipsis B68. Correction to stable oriental path, with orbital period of four hours and twenty-six minutes. Proceed to rendezvous with shuttlecraft vehicles of the JO-2 type. There await further instructions. Tales of Pirx the Pilot imagines a world in which space travel has become routine and boring - an unremarkable as...(展开全部)

Stanisław Herman Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer. He was the author of many novels, short stories, and essays on various subjects, including philosophy, futurology, and literary criticism. Many of his science fiction stories are of satirical and humorous character. Lem's books have been translated into more than 50 languages and have sold more than 4...(展开全部)

Where the science of black holes, gravitational waves, and time travel will likely lead us. Our minds tell us that some things in the universe must be true. The New Physics tells us that they are not, and in the process, blurs the line between science and science fiction. Here are six accessible essays by those who walk that line, moving ever further out in discovering the patt...(展开全部)

Michio Kaku's "Physics of the Future: The Inventions that will Transform our Lives" is a hypothetical journey through the next 100 years of scientific innovation, as told by the scientists who are making it happen. We all wish we could predict the future, but most of us don't know enough about the science that makes it possible. That's why Michio Kaku decided to talk to the peo...(展开全部)

The eminent Harvard naturalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Wilson marshals all the prodigious powers of his intellect and imagination in this impassioned call to ensure the future of life. Opening with an imagined conversation with Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond, he writes that he has come "to explain to you, and in reality to others and not least to myself, what has h...(展开全部)

Our world is far richer than previously conceived, yet so ravaged by human activity that half its species could be gone by the end of the 21st century. These two contrasting themes - unexpected magnificence and underestimated peril - have originated since the 1980s. In this book, scientist E.O. Wilson describes exactly what treasures of the natural world we are about to lose fo...(展开全部)

We live in a world saturated by future-consciousness. Our lives are constructed around expectations of the future as full and as flawed as our understandings of the past. This volume is a conceptual tool kit for thinking about the hopes and anxieties embodied in ideas of the future. Exploring links between panic and nostalgia, waiting and utopia, technology and messianism, and ...(展开全部)

艾伦·沃尔夫，美国政治学者和社会学家，波士顿学院政治科学教授，宗教与美国公共生活布瓦西研究中心主任，现居于麻省布鲁克莱恩。沃尔夫教授是《新共和》、《威尔逊季刊》和《天下》等杂志的特约编辑，还经常为《大众福利》、《纽约时报》、《哈泼斯》、《大西洋月刊》和《华盛顿邮报》写稿。被美国评论家们誉为“自由主义最后最忠实的孩子”。

A compelling and deeply felt exploration and defense of liberalism: what it actually is, why it is relevant today, and how it can help our society chart a forward course. The Future of Liberalism represents the culmination of four decades of thinking and writing about contemporary politics by Alan Wolfe, one of America’s leading scholars, hailed by one critic as “one of libe...(展开全部)