Without trying to review my own book, I would like to make sure that readers know that, as of January 1998,this book is again available. For several months at the end of 1997 Basic Books was undergoing corporate restructuring and publication ceased temporarily. That process is completed now and the book being published again.

I'd been trying to rent "eXistenZ" for some time, but couldn't find it anywere. Finding the illustrated novel based on the movie, I snatched it up and consumed it. The watercolor panels provided enough clarity to make out what was happening, leaving your imagination to fill in the details of each scene. An excellent substitute/companion to the movie.

When Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" first opened at the local multiplex it played to an audience of twenty. As we left the cinema, each member of the audience wore a mask of what can only be described as haunting, horrified bliss. There was a sense of excitement that we had witnessed a fresh and dangerous talent but also a certain unease - the rules had been changed and the crime genre would never really be safe and comfortable again. Readers of Sean Burke's debut novel "Deadwater" are in for a similar treat.

The premise of the novel is simple. A young prostitute is murdered and the next morning Jack Farissey, an alcoholic self-medicating pharmacist, wakes up covered in blood and unable to remember a thing about the previous night. In a conventional thriller Farissey would be one step ahead of the police, desperate to prove his innocence before the handcuffs were slapped on but this is a novel that rarely chooses the obvious path. The police, led by detective Hargest, have little or no interest in the truth. They are pursuing a different kind of justice and begin a relentless campaign to frame local gangsters, the Baja brothers, for the murder. Things are complicated when Jack's wife Victoria returns and joins the Baja's defence team. Although the plot twists and turns like a Russian gymnast on speed, the reader though frequently breathless is never left behind. There is a lyrical despair to the writing and a depth of characterisation one doesn't find often in thrillers but this is more than just a thriller, it is a deep and penetrating look into the soul of the marginal, disenfranchised and desperate inhabitants of Butetown, an area of Cardiff which makes the mean streets of New York look like EuroDisney. Imagine "Heart of Darkness" written by Raymond Chandler and set in Cardiff and it becomes possible to glean some idea of a book that is doomed, haunting and unforgettable; a book that makes the darkness seem bright in comparison. "Deadwater" is a novel that is both literary and gripping and, in Sean Burke, readers of James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin and James Elroy have found another name to put on their shelves.

The digital explosion is ushering in a frightening future built upon transnational structures of power and greed presided over by the high priests of technology and management. But it is not too late to fight for an alternative future shaped not by the corporate cyborg but by aesthetics, the "pursuit of an ethical mode of being ... despite the conditions in which we find ourselves" of "being digital".

Sean Cubitt spits in the face of the digerati (a species of Cyclops who rule in the land of the blind masses) who foresee an infinitely expanding seamless web of information into which all humankind and industry must disappear. Reader in Video and Media Studies at the Liverpool John Moraes University, Cubitt dives into the multi-disciplinary welter of knowledge architectures to distill hard truths from the technobabble of the technotopians. "The fastest and widest impact that computers have had is in deepening the class structures of contemporary society on a global scale ... the demolition, not just of jobs, of communities and of cultures, but of hope itself as a direct or indirect effect of the electronics communication that have enabled the entirely destructive expansion of finance capital," he writes.

Resistance to and subversion of the "matrix", the technetronic, computer-mediated space dreamed up by sci-fi writer William Gibson in which giant corporations call the shots, offered by hackers, crackers and phreaks is an infantile reaction to a global technology which "while offering the appearance of naturalness and emancipation from onerous chores, introduces new orders of supervision and surveillance", Cubitt points out.

His book, a critique of the hard-sell of the digital revolution, is a mine of information as Cubitt apprehends the linkages between technological developments and their consequences for human society.

The problem of the promised utopia is that communication is reduced to aggression, command, power and submission. The matrix, into which the corporations want everyone and everything jacked in, is coded for the re-engineering of the human soul. The synergistic corporation is the actually existing cyborg, "not an assemblage of people but a machine ensemble ...a massive processing machine whose employees and consumers are its biochips", he warns.

The attack on extant cultures is multi-pronged. At the level of language, English is the standard, "oppressor" language of the Net, eroding the core role of other languages and cultural contexts. "Corporate culture responds to micro-cultural resistance with target marketing." And the designers of the Macintosh and Windows WIMP (window-icon-menu-pointer) interface further saw that "images have a greater efficiency in imparting information than language does" in combination with the expansion of the global market.

Cubitt analyses the process and aesthetics of reading since the human-computer interface allows the infinite generation of texts capable of varied readings. The traditional private and public experience of reading is replaced by the playful, the fantasy. This suits the digerati who foist an illusion of heightened individualism ("the user is in control") and mass personalization on consumers of the digital myth.

Transvestitism and tourism are the features of the Net, much lauded but in truth symptomatic of the shifting, fragmentation and disintegration of the self, Cubitt notes. The new individualism is a projection of the corporate cyborg. Control remains in the hands of the elite who code the heart and confines of the technologies bequeathed to users who are integrated into command heirarchies.

The creation of libraries was followed by the development of systems of classification of information. The synthetic Colon Classification cataloguing system developed by S.R. Ranganathan in 1933 became the founding principle of mechanical systems of information retrieval, the grandparent of Internet search engines and similar knowledge architectures, "no longer dependent on humanist mnemonic culture". Memory fails, and so does meaning, when everything is reduced to an eternal now in real time.

The individual is in danger of losing all privacy with the creation of databases which render him as a "data image" or a "data self". The "real" self is reduced to "mere" writing in binary code, a ghost in the machine. Bizarre forms of desocialisation appear in cyber cultures, community is sacrificed for competition. "To restore the social requires dismantling the binary to build a concept of mediation between presence and absence ... the materiality of media, people and their objects", Cubitt suggests.

He pours cold water on the prophecies of cyber-theologians who deny mortality, the post-humanists and transhumanists who speak of erasing the body and de-materializing the complex human processes of socialization in their fantasies of "downloading the meat-mind into the matrix" and being "human as program or human in programs".

As Cubitt makes his radical analysis of the histories and contributions of poetry, philosophy, art, radio, cinema, video, space technologies, remote sensing and the Hubble telescope, he unveils the magical braid running through it all. "Between the data records and its interpreters there always lies the work of manipulation," he warns. It has to do with the degradation of all "material", including "nature, human-modified nature, human-produced nature and human nature itself" to consumable commodities.

The digitally controlled play-world promises coherence and universalisation, homogenization. It leads to hyper-individualization and dispersion in cyberspace and "the sociality of images and implicitly of shared experience" is lost.

Digital aesthetics, concerned with the question of the future and the whole field of possibilities, suggests that the utopian question cannot be resolved by moving inexorably towards a corporatised technotopia. It must emerge from the shadow of corporate culture, that consciousness industry whose objective is to create brand identity adhered to by synergistic personalities forged through the introduction of play into work, masquerades, role-plays, simulations and alter egos, Cubitt says.

Digital aesthetics must break "the grip of the networked society's culture of selves", refuse being retrofitted into the corporate cyborg and "reinvent the machineries, the processes and selves of human-machine communication", Cubitt states. Thus the foundations for an evolutionary future which is genuinely global and democratic and outside the administered boundaries of the synergistic corporation can be laid. Is humanity up to this challenge? (the end)

This is a terrific humor anthology with a lot of hilarious stories. A lot of the writing is of the Onion/Monty Python/SNL type, with some David Sedaris and Dave Barry-type pieces as well. Very, very funny and highly recommended!

The authors have done a great job in making the Excel 97 easy to learn even for a beginner. Step by step the reader is given clear instructions on how to setup the program and create spreadsheets etc. Formulas and functions are explained simply and concisely. The book reads well and doesn't waste time trying to be too cute.This book will give any learner confidence. It's as good as having a private tutor. Get this book you'll love it. As a former teacher I give the authors an A+.

Ms. Sutcliff has again blowen the dust from the stories which have lain dormant on library shelves for so long and made them come alive. Beowulf has never been so exciting. His epic battles with three of the most horrifing creature in British liturature are amazingly terrifying and suspenseful but they are also profoundly human. Ms. Sutcliff allows feelings of sadness, trust, and loyalty to seep through the pages of the old story and into her hero's heart. She makes Beowulf not only into a great king and hero but into a great man as well.

This great Canadian classic is filled with astonishing, gorgeous storytelling -- alive with the cadences of oral tradition. Don't miss it. Alice Kane is a master teller of tales!

I am not a reader of horror stories and it was by chance that i even read this book. It is a very fast read in that once you start reading the book you just wont stop until you finish the text. To me it was a thrill. I loved the pace and the originality of the story. They should make a movie. It is really the story about a blind girl who receives the eyes of Eden whose mother did not approve of her sons organs being harvested. With the eyes the formally blind girl starts to see allthese grotesque killings and mutilations. Edens body goes missing and so does the mother. Anyway a lot unfolds and the ending was superb. you wont regret buying this book.

This book provides a very important record of a controversial mega-project. In Quebec, political expediency caused the construction of a massive dam complex that virtually destroyed three major wilderness rivers and flooded thousands of acres of wilderness land. The environmental consequences included mercury poisoning of fish and a major caribou drowning event. Yet this project received almost no notice south of the Canadian border. This book is just about the only written record of the events leading up to this project. Since the quebec government continues to make noises about new hydro mega-projects, this is a must read book for the environmentally conscious. Though not inspired writing, the research is sound.