The “Wicked Tribe” – a bunch of children represented as flying monkeys. Characters like the dying kid Orlando Gardiner who wants to be a hero in the best tradition of the Lord of the Rings. To see all these themes come together in a fantasy/science fiction novel thrills me no end. I must admit these questions are of interest to me because I’ve been thinking of them myself for years. Is a virtual copy truly “us”? If no such thing as a “soul” exists, then who are we exactly? If we transfer our consciousness into a machine, are we merely killing ourselves and creating a new person, or is that person us? Do we die each time we go to sleep and awaken as someone else? We see themes of virtual immortality, deep philosophical questions concerning our our very identity. From the time they were completely unaware of the “Grail” network, to becoming an intricate part of it. I’ve grown so attached to the characters! When I look back now at the very first books, I’m astounded at how far I’ve traveled with them. Even if the technology for this kind of thing doesn’t exist today, there’s no reason why it couldn’t exist in the future. The “fantasy” as you might call it is extremely grounded in reality. Tad Williams takes the virtual reality bull by the horns and pushes it as far as it will go. So it’s more like eight books instead of 4.Įven though it features a tight cast of characters, the scope is epic. I mean seriously, it’s almost as if each was twice the length of a regular novel. Even though you might say that virtual reality fiction has been around for a long time, I’ve never read anything quite like this. Nor is it like any other science fiction story either. They blew me away.įirst of all, this isn’t like any other “fantasy” book you’ve encountered. I filed them away for later because the first volumes weren’t on the shelf. They were on the bookshelf and I didn’t know why they caught my attention. Keywords: moral theory, ethics, „epistemological ethics” conceptual innovation, value, man, person, Roberto Poli.I first encountered these 4 books when Anupa and I went on a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico. In the light of this new debate, Roberto Poli's perspective on the need to return to “ontological neglect”, “methodological primitivism” and “ignorance of our own roots” continues our present research and interrogations and reveals new coordinates of knowledge and understanding. The entire content of this concept is a theoretical link between epistemic and ethical justification, in terms of mind–body ratio, brought into a unified approach of humanity and knowledge. This idea is in relation with the concept of “epistemological ethics”, that we propose to the scientific community for validation. However, this method requires ethical conceptual clarification on which to build the architecture of knowledge. The meaning of ethical values has been extended and gained various linguistic forms and understandings, basically because the value dimension is not founded on an ethical methodology. In relation to ethics, current theories and guidelines are often mentioned, which, in fact, shows the lack of an epistemological founded ethical apparatus, in the absence of which, moral judgment loses its prime reason, namely valuing the ethical man – as a person. Gray succeeds in utilising the characteristically protean quality of the postmodern age for aesthetic purposes of his own making, challenging by the means of the mutually reinforcing form and content of his work our assumptions about the world as we know it. Under the alias of Sidney Workman, Gray also fulfils the task of the literary critic in annotating the metafictional chapter of Lanark with discursive footnotes and embedding in it an index of earlier authors and texts that have been supposedly plagiarised in the novel under scrutiny. Gray figures in Lanark not only as the author of the text and the creator of the accompanying original illustrations, he also makes a cameo appearance as the morose and mean writer of the work-in-progress, who engages in an intellectual discussion with his protagonist concerning the plot of the very novel. Widely regarded as the leading figure of the 1980s Scottish literary renaissance and the founding father of Scottish postmodern fiction, Gray emerged as a major creative artist with the publication of his influential novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), which epitomises his experimental approach to literary production and consumption. This paper examines the sheer variety of creative roles that the contemporary Scottish iconoclastic writer Alasdair Gray assumes in his works of fiction, discussing the external manifestations of his multifaceted talents in action as well as considering the conveyed effect.
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