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One could view this as a kind of dualism. Since if there are properties in reality that transcend our physics there are things which are not physical in the strict sense. But on the other hand one could view this as a kind of physicalism. If the physics of the future is expanded to include these more basic features then in a way we can say that these things are physical. In a way this has happened already. It is a familiar story that modern physics as we know it today only developed because of the addition of a fundamentally new kind of thing, the field. So in a way this view preserves what the physicalist wants but it also preserves the spirit of dualism.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Richard Brown.
This is not a post-apocalyptic tale, a tale of what happens after the end of the world. The theorist in Bronson understood this, about the story he was in, understood that the end of the world was really a reactionary fantasy, the dream of thin-blooded tyrants, spun into popular narrative by writers and artists and movie makers. The landscape around him—the broken roads and disfigured buildings and polluted rivers—was not some dystopian fantasy of the slate-wiped-clean, but something far more dangerous: things as they are.
The second instalment of a six part story by Nicholas Rombes.
One could view this as a kind of dualism. Since if there are properties in reality that transcend our physics there are things which are not physical in the strict sense. But on the other hand one could view this as a kind of physicalism. If the physics of the future is expanded to include these more basic features then in a way we can say that these things are physical. In a way this has happened already. It is a familiar story that modern physics as we know it today only developed because of the addition of a fundamentally new kind of thing, the field. So in a way this view preserves what the physicalist wants but it also preserves the spirit of dualism.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Richard Brown.
The book partly originated from my own travels and realising I was a war tour voyeur while inter-railing around Europe and beyond. On the one hand, when people visit places there is an authentic desire to understand and find out about history and there is also a problem if past horror is erased and people choose to forget, as has happened in our cultural memories of colonialism. But these acts of looking are part of a holiday and visiting other places, of fun and entertainment, so it was this tension between the two that spurred me to write the book. After a while there was a sense that it’s impossible to escape from war zones and the remnants of war, so in ‘With Their Backs to the Fort’ the couple find war memorials even on an idyllic quiet island.
Kerry Ryan interviews Zoe Lambert.
One way in which writers have tried to reconcile, or at least evade, the irreconcilable issues of an all-benevolent, omnipotent God with the existence of evil is to introduce a shape-shifting trickster devil. Given free will and culpability, he’s merely a means to an end. All of the inhabitants of Dante’s Inferno are there because they willingly transgressed. The devil can only encourage a person to lead themselves to ruin. He does this, or rather we do this, in the secrecy of our minds, often represented in print by the solitude of night. “The night is the devil’s black book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions” wrote Thomas Nashe in his extraordinary forgotten The Terrors of the Night. The desires Satan exploits, and which the night awakens, are those which make virtually all story-telling interesting.
Darran Anderson examines the greatest anti-hero in literature: the Devil.
Never one to let mere impossibility get in the way of a good story, Italo Calvino retold Marco Polo’s tales even more extravagantly in Invisible Cities. Crucially, Calvino switched the perspective with Polo recounting his discoveries to a sceptical but entranced Kublai Khan. The premise was essentially a jumping-off point for the writer to create his own metropolises of the imagination: Tamara where everything is symbolic, Chloe the chaste city where everyone is a stranger, Adelma populated by doppelgängers of the dead, Thekla a skeleton city of scaffolding, the expanding microscopic Olinda and so on. It is a beguiling, paradoxical, poetic work and like much of Calvino’s writing fully embraces the inventive possibilities of fiction. If art is the telling of beautiful lies, he seems to be saying, then let our lies be boundless, let them alter the world around us or, failing that, the way we see the world and speak of it. It is a book to mesmerise architects as much as poets.
Darran Anderson explores the fictional metropolis and its history.