Word: fictions
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...antisocial rebel or hoodlum). Within this odd pairing lurks the essence of cyberpunk culture. It's a way of looking at the world that combines an infatuation with high-tech tools and a disdain for conventional ways of using them. Originally applied to a school of hard-boiled science-fiction writers and then to certain semi-tough computer hackers, the word cyberpunk now covers a broad range of music, art, psychedelics, smart drugs and cutting-edge technology. The cult is new enough that fresh offshoots are sprouting every day, which infuriates the hard-core cyberpunks, who feel they got there...
...that the italicized passages contain the "real story": someone named John is writing these short stories in order to make sense of the loss of his lover, someone named Martin, to AIDS. The short stories we read emerge as one sustained cry of deflected grief, of pain mediated through fiction. From these stories, a sketchy narrative arises: John's violent childhood in Kansas, his adolescence spent as a hustler in New York, the meeting with Martin--and the final move back to Kansas, where Martin dies and where John begins to write...
...childhood as a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi death camps by living as a Gentile. Assimilating to survive is quite different from assimilating to succeed. Begley did both. After the war, he emigrated to the U.S., went to Harvard and prospered as a Manhattan lawyer before turning to fiction. The Man Who Was Late follows his first book by less than two years, suggesting that Begley, nearing 60, has undertaken a literary career with some urgency...
...solve it. Begley shares some of his resume with Ben, but he has not written an autobiography. The Man Who Was Late is a what-if novel -- specifically, What if the author could not have sufficiently distanced himself from the past to discover the healing powers of fiction...
...then deflecting or destroying threatening asteroids or comets before they can hit Earth. That is the recommendation of two NASA-sponsored workshops, one that proposed detection techniques for identifying incoming objects, another that recommended ways of intercepting and dealing with them. While the proposals have the ring of science fiction, they are closer to reality than most people realize; the workshops were authorized by Congress...