Word: faustian
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...academic who sold his soul to the devil for an easy out. Very few people have compared him to Marguerite, the naive, innocent young girl whom Mephistopheles lures into damnation. The Faust interpretation, after all, has one important flaw; it presumes that the Yale administration is made up of Faustian academics overflowing with guile and cunning, who completely controlled the events of last spring. In fact, the reverse was true...
...Three pillars of Science Fiction, then, are psychology, mythology, and of course technology. But they are all bound by a common force: fear. Fear often comes in two quantitative clinical groups, fear of the Mad Scientists and fear of Alien Invasion. The first category is a variation on the Faustian theme. The scientist and his deadly invention, the Machine, aspire to godly heights and thus destroy themselves and quite possibly the entire planet...
...mother figure who still lives in her son's subconscious and demands all his attention to the exclusion of his fiancee. And the monster is also a persecuting father figure who must be overcome if the son is to be successful. This Oedipal theme is a variation of the Faustian theme of man challenging God, son challenging father. The monster is in all a double threat, a hideous combination of psychological horrors. He is not simply aesthetically displeasing. He is a monster because he disturbs something very deep in us. Technology serves as the midwife to this frightening birth...
...wrong place. While the north has a water surplus, for example, most of the state's 20 million people live in the parched south. Since these people are loath to move to the north's watersheds, the state's indefatigable engineers have devised a Faustian scheme to move the watersheds south. Ecologists, and a good many other Californians, are appalled...
...about its true nature-and above all, about the true nature of the alternatives to capitalism. And yet one wonders with a pang: Do they know something we don't know? Have they got hold of an insight that we have not yet quite faced ourselves-that acquisitive, Faustian man may be dying? The notion is not limited to youth. Isn't one extraordinary, still-echoing piece of evidence the fact that even a Republican President in a State of the Union speech cast doubt on the gospel of growth...