Word: alchemists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first but soon makes one feel teased and irritated. The stories glimmer with promise and technical polish and they dazzle for a minute--but suddenly one suspects that it's all a false promise and the real thing has been forsaken for the fool's gold of the alchemist. Mark Helprin's intriguing short stories simply fail to transmute into any sort of remedy for a passed-out art form...
...door to Albertus' cell at the Dominican monastery in Cologne, asked visitors what they wanted and even engaged them in polite conversation. The end of the legend was that Albertus' celebrated pupil, Thomas Aquinas, smashed the robot to pieces because he considered it demonic. The Swiss alchemist Paracelsus, who was himself considered rather demonic, gave lectures on the creation of a homunculus and even offered a recipe of ingredients, including human blood and putrefied semen. In 16th century Prague, too, the devout Rabbi Judah Loew was reported to have created out of clay a giant robot known...