Susan Bright

"In a time of protracted economic crisis, failing political systems, and impending environmental collapse, one strand in our collective cultural myth of Progress--the technological--remains vibrantly intact, surging into the future at ramming speed. Amid the seemingly exponential proliferation of machine intelligence and network connectivity, and the increasingly portentous implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists look to an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed. The Singularity, it is supposed, can be no more than a few years off; indeed, some believe it has already begun. Technological Singularity--a trope conceived in science fiction and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse and beyond--is the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, a territory where longstanding binary oppositions between science and fiction, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. In this groundbreaking volume, the first to mount a sustained and wide-ranging critical treatment of Singularity as a subject for theory and cultural studies, Raulerson draws SF texts into a complex dialogue with contemporary digital culture, transhumanist movements, political and economic theory, consumer gadgetry, gaming, and related vectors of high-tech postmodernity. In theorizing Singularity as a metaphorical construct lending shape to a range of millennial anxieties and aspirations, Singularities also makes the case for a recent and little-understood subgeneric formation--postcyberpunk SF--as a cohesive body of work, engaged in a shared literary project that is simultaneously shaping, and shaped by, purportedly nonfictional technoscientific discourses"--Publisher.

"The Modern Studies in Property Law Conference has become well-known as a unique opportunity for property lawyers to meet and confer both formally and informally. The eighth biennial conference was held at the University of Oxford in March 2010, and this book is the sixth in the series Modern Studies in Property Law. The volume is a refereed and revised selection of the papers given at the Oxford conference, covering a broad range of topics of contemporary importance, both nationally and internationally. The book includes chapters written by the key speakers at the conference: Lady Justice Arden, Professor Kevin Gray and Law Commissioner, Professor Elizabeth Cooke."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"This collection of essays, written by leading practitioners, policy makers and academics, looks at patterns of landlord and tenant law: past, present and future. Each sector is explored - commercial, long residential, housing, and agricultural - by taking a look backwards and forwards. The chapters explore the role that legislative, judicial, and policy developments, and market forces have played, and will continue to play, in shaping the law. The book provides a scholarly reflection on the principles of leasehold law that will be of interest to practitioners, academics, and students of landlord and tenant law."--BOOK JACKET.