The Ministry for the Future is a visionary novel from acclaimed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson that offers a gripping tale of climate change and its impacts on humanity. The story unfolds through a series of fictional eyewitness accounts, providing a powerful narrative that is both immediate and impactful.
Established in 2025, the titular Ministry for the Future is an organization dedicated to advocating for the world's future generations and protecting all living creatures, present and future. The novel explores how climate change will affect us all over the coming decades, offering a future that is on the brink of our current reality—a future where humanity might just find the means to overcome the extraordinary challenges it faces.
Desperate and hopeful in equal measure, The Ministry for the Future stands as a significant work in the realm of climate fiction, inviting readers to contemplate the profound effects of environmental change and the potential pathways to a better world.
For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best.
Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.
This controversial scientific vision predicts a time in which humans and machines will merge and create a new form of non-biological intelligence, explaining how the occurrence will solve such issues as pollution, hunger, and aging.
Once regarded as a brilliant eccentric whose works skirted the outer fringes of English art and literature, William Blake (1757–1827) is today recognized as a major poet, a profound thinker, and one of the most original and exciting English artists. Nowhere is his glorious poetic and pictorial legacy more evident than in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which many consider his most inspired and original work.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is both a humorous satire on religion and morality and a work that concisely expresses Blake's essential wisdom and philosophy. Much of it is revealed in the 70 aphorisms of his "Proverbs of Hell." This beautiful edition, reproduced from a rare facsimile, invites readers to enjoy the rich character of Blake's own hand-printed text along with his deeply stirring illustrations, reproduced on 27 full-color plates. A typeset transcription of the text is included.
Being There is a modern classic now available from Grove Press, and is one of the most popular and significant works from a writer of international stature. It tells the story of Chauncey Gardiner - Chance, an enigmatic but distinguished man who emerges from nowhere to become an heir to the throne of a Wall Street tycoon, a presidential policy adviser, and a media icon.
Truly a man without qualities, Chance's straightforward responses to popular concerns are heralded as visionary. But though everyone is quoting him, no one is sure what he's really saying. And filling in the blanks in his background proves impossible.
Being There is a brilliantly satiric look at the unreality of American media culture that is, if anything, more trenchant now than ever.