Word: tors
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...idea that sci-fi is not so much a window to the stars as a mirror of our dark selves is supported by David Hartwell, an editor at Tor Books. "The alien represents metaphorically what's in the real world. The aliens in '50s films often represented communists--faceless invaders who were going to take over our country. The mysterious beings of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 represent our transcendent future. Independence Day sounds like the old form of sci-fi: the foreign invaders intend to wipe out our cultural heritage--ethnic cleansing. They don't want to come...
...Star Trek. "Movie tie-ins outsell regular science fiction by quite a bit," Brown says with a sniff. "We don't consider them real science fiction." A bit more acceptable, though still off the point, are traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasies like Robert Jordan's A Crown of Swords (Tor), which debuted at No. 2 on last week's New York Times list...
...yearn for - what might even be called the Holy Grail of biblical archaeology - is a royal archive from before the time of King David or King Solomon. No such archive has ever been located inside Israel, although surrounding countries have yielded many from the same era. Sighs Amnon Ben-Tor, a Hebrew University archaeologist: "It's like striking oil. Everywhere but here...
...archive must exist, though, and Yigael Yadin even thought he knew where it was: in the ancient city of Hazor, in northern Galilee. At his death, Yadin was planning a major dig there to find the clay tablets he was sure lay hidden beneath the surface. His protege, Ben-Tor, has inherited the project. To date, Ben-Tor has found only a few uninformative tablets. But Hazor is the largest biblical site in the country, and it will take years of digging to explore it fully...
...when Ben-Tor or his successors locate the archive, the effect on biblical scholarship would be be profound. Instead of relying on half-legible inscriptions and fragments of clay and stone, historians would suddenly have access to huge amounts of information, set down not to advance religious ideas but to record secular events. The historical accuracy of much of the Bible could be settled, one way or the other, almost at a stroke...