Results 121 to 124 of 124 | « previous
- The heart goes last / by Atwood, Margaret,1939-author.;
Stan and Charmaine are a married couple trying to stay afloat in the midst of an economic and social collapse. Job loss has forced them to live in their car, leaving them vulnerable to roving gangs. They desperately need to turn their situation around--and fast. The Positron Project in the town of Consilience seems to be the answer to their prayers. No one is unemployed and everyone gets a comfortable, clean house to live in ... for six months out of the year. On alternating months, residents of Consilience must leave their homes and function as inmates in the Positron prison system. Once their month of service in the prison is completed, they can return to their "civilian" homes. At first, this doesn't seem like too much of a sacrifice to make in order to have a roof over one's head and food to eat. But when Charmaine becomes romantically involved with the man who lives in their house during the months when she and Stan are in the prison, a series of troubling events unfolds, putting Stan's life in danger. With each passing day, Positron looks less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled.- Subjects: Dystopias.; Man-women relationships; Married people; Prisons; Regression (Civilization);
- Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
-
unAPI
- The hive / by Lyga, Barry.; Jacobson, Tom.; Beals, Jennifer.; Baden, Morgan.;
It's the near future--the day after tomorrow--and the government has shut down online bullying once and for all. With BLINQ, its new social media platform, users can "like" or "share," but they can also "condemn" posts--and if condemns reach a certain level, users can exact punishment from the original poster in real life. No more anonymous trolling! Instead... hive justice. Seventeen-year-old Cassie McKinney is angry at everything. She's just lost her beloved father, a cult hero in the hacking world. She's been uprooted to a new apartment and--worse--a new school. Cassie is barely enduring senior year when she's drawn into a powerful group of girls and their effort to make their posts go viral. Cassie's just trying to be funny when she posts a cutting BLINQ. But when that BLINQ goes viral in all the worst ways, she becomes the target of a furious mob. Abandoned by her friends, betrayed by the system, and bristling at the injustice of it all, Cassie goes on the run. In the shadows, she finds people to help her hide. If she wants to clear her name, though, she will have to work with them to unravel a conspiracy beyond her imagination.LSC- Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Dystopias.; Conspiracies; Bullying; Social media; Teenagers;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
-
unAPI
- Code noir : by Lubrin, Canisia,1984-author.;
"Eagerly awaited debut fiction from one of Canada's most exciting and admired young writers. A daring and inventive reimagining of the infamous set of laws, the "Code Noir," that once governed Black lives. Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art: a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple and ingenious: it is modeled on the infamous real-life "Code Noir," a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. In other words, the Code that contained and restricted the activities of Black people in the Caribbean. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine short, linked fictions that present vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments of Black life as it really existed and still exists, winding in and around, over and under the official decrees, refusing to be contained or "ruled." Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from fantasy to historical fiction, this loosely linked stream of 59 irrepressible stories comments on, underscores, undermines, mocks, breaks and redefines the Code's intent. An original, timely, culturally daring, virtuoso performance by a rising literary star."-- Provided by publisher.- Subjects: Short stories.; African Americans;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
-
unAPI
- The coming wave : technology, power, and the twenty-first century's greatest dilemma / by Suleyman, Mustafa,author.; Bhaskar, Michael,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance--from a cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind. Imagine a world in which anyone with a $20,000 desktop DNA synthesizer could develop and unleash a deadly virus. Imagine an undetectable deepfake video of a U.S. president making a racial slur racing across the internet on the eve of an election. Imagine terrorists or paramilitaries stockpiling autonomous weapons designed to make their own decisions about when to engage. As cofounder of DeepMind, the pioneering AI company now owned by Google, Mustafa Suleyman has witnessed firsthand just how rapidly our technology is advancing--and how flawed our approaches to grappling with these changes are. The coming decades, he argues, will be defined by a burst of innovation, an inevitable wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies across fields like synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Driven forward by immense strategic and financial incentives, these breakthroughs will solve huge challenges and create vast wealth--but upheaval, too, on a once unimaginable scale. Will humankind make it through the narrow corridor between dystopia and catastrophe? In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how this new technological super-wave fits a historical pattern of innovation and proliferation, while departing from it in key ways: namely, the speed of change, the breadth of risks, and the wave's potential to democratize access to dangerous, world-altering power. The cumulative risks threaten the very nation state, humanity's centuries' old "grand bargain" of living under centralized authority in exchange for security. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into catastrophe, humanity is left in an existential bind, with techno-authoritarianism on one side and even more catastrophic outcomes, like societal collapse, on the other. We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman firmly establishes "the containment problem"--or the challenge of maintaining human control over dangerous technologies--as the essential dilemma of our age, showing that radical steps must be taken if we are to live alongside technology of once unimaginable power"--- Subjects: Artificial intelligence; Information technology;
- Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
-
unAPI
Results 121 to 124 of 124 | « previous