Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Vision of a world crippled by biological terrorism (May 16th 2012)

Jane Rogers the 59 year old UK novelist and teacher, best known for her novel ‘Mr Wroe’s Virgins and The Voyage Home’ has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, for her first novel  in the science fiction genre ‘The Testament of Jessie Lamb’, a narration by a fictional teenager. The award director Tom Hunter, stated “It wasn’t an obvious Arthur C Clarke winner – it’s not from a science fiction publisher but from a small Scottish press. But I don’t think anyone was surprised it was nominated. It really is a very good book and it has found a real audience in the science fiction readership, it offers a route into dealing with quite serious issues, about science, about maternity and about making choices.” Described by Alison Flood in The Guardian as a “vision of a world crippled by biological terrorism… Taking place in a world in which a deadly virus, Maternal Death Syndrome, affects all pregnant women, putting the future of the human race in jeopardy, The Testament of Jessie Lamb is the story of one 16-year-old who decides she wants to save humanity. She volunteers for a programme in which she will be injected with an immune embryo, but also put into a coma from which she will not recover.”

Inspired by Alison Flood http://ow.ly/aOQ6c image source United Agents http://ow.ly/aOPA9

Drastic increase in the death rate of words (April 13th 2012)

Joel Tenenbaum the 28 year old doctoral student in physics at Boston University is part of a team undertaking a scientific analysis of language usage over the past two centuries in literature. In an article by Alison Flood published in the Guardian, Tenenbaum’s team states in their report “words are competing actors in a system of finite resources” with a “drastic increase in the death rate of words… Most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10 to 20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words… The words that are dying are those words with low relative use. We confirm by visual inspection that the lists of dying words contain mostly misspelled and nonsensical words… Analogous to recessions and booms in a global economy, the marketplace for words waxes and wanes with a global pulse as historical events unfold, and in analogy to financial regulations meant to limit risk and market domination, standardisation technologies such as the dictionary and spellcheckers serve as powerful arbiters in determining the characteristic properties of word evolution.”

Inspired by Alison Flood http://ow.ly/a7012 image source P2P Webblog http://ow.ly/a6ZVo