Author: Alan N. Shapiro

  • All Our Yesterdays

    Kirk, Spock, and McCoy beam down to the planet Sarpeidon, the only natural satellite of a star, Beta Niobe, which is going to explode as a supernova. Although it has been previously established that a “civilized humanoid species” dwells on the planet, Enterprise sensor scans strangely indicate that there is no intelligent life remaining anywhere on that world.

  • A Taste of Armageddon

    The Enterprise is en route to the NGC 321 star cluster to try to establish diplomatic relations with Eminiar VII, the most technologically advanced planet in the area. More than fifty years earlier, the Federation starship U.S.S. Valiant was listed as missing in space after it transmitted a report from Eminiar and then vanished.

  • L’importance de Baudrillard pour l’avenir

    L’un des meilleurs commentateurs de Baudrillard est Gary Genosko, l’auteur du Baudrillard and Signs, un livre qui place Baudrillard dans le contexte de la sémiotique et de la pataphysique. Genosko écrit: «Baudrillard est l’inventeur d’un langage sophistiqué décrivant les capacités de simulation les plus avancées des systèmes d’information.»

  • Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

    The basic situation of Robinson Crusoe’s early life was that of a young man who did not want to get a job. Robinson was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family. His father was a successful businessman, a trader in “merchandise.”

  • Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary America

    In one terminology, cultural citizenship is a process which takes place in the context of a specific historical relationship between the individual and the social. In what may be the most highly socialized society that ever existed, Americans tend to almost completely deny that there exists a social or cultural realm.

  • Charles A. Lindbergh’s The Spirit of St. Louis

    We think of Lindbergh as the far-right most prominent speaker at rallies of the “America First” movement in the early 1940s, an isolationist precursor of the unilateralist Donald Trump and his horrible MAGA movement. I present here an alternative existentialist view of Lindbergh’s pioneering 1927 flight.