Since its emergence in the seventeenth century, science fiction has been a sustained, coherent and subversive check on the promises and pitfalls of science. In their turn, invention and discovery have forced fiction writers to confront the nature and limits of reality. Different Engines explores how this fascinating symbiosis shapes what we see, do, and dream.
 
From Johannes Kepler's Somnium to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001, science fiction has emerged as a mode of thinking, complementary to the scientific method. Science fiction's field of interest is the gap between the new worlds uncovered by experimentation and exploration, and the fantastic worlds of the imagination. Its proponents find drama in the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Its readers, many of them scientists and politicians, find inspiration in the contrast between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Brake and Hook's Different Engines is a unique, provocative and compelling account of science fiction as the arbiter of progress.

The World's Great Philosophers provides an introduction to and overview of some of the most profound and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy.

• Presents an introduction to and overview of some of the most profound and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy.
• Contains 40 essays, written by an outstanding international assembly of scholars.
• Provides cogent and accessible discussion of key philosophers from around the world.
• Conveys the historical panorama of philosophical thought on the nature of reality, the human condition, and basic human values.

I recommend this book to teachers hoping to energize their literature or writing classes by positioning all students as creative, ambitious researchers capable of critiquing or even transforming worlds outside the classroom. When I discovered it two months ago, it struck me as just the resource I needed for revitalizing my college survey of multicultural literature for freshman and sophomores, a course which sometimes engaged and sometimes bored students. I have since redesigned materials for the course, using Beach and Myers' idea that to fully understand literature-or our own lives-we must think of individual people (whether characters in a story, authors of those stories, or ourselves and others in the real world) as part of larger systems or "social worlds," acting to protect and continue those systems or to challenge and change them. The book clearly delineates the components of social worlds and is full of sample activities and assignments; with these, I have revised my own discussion questions,presentation assignments and writing prompts. I have also shown Chapter 8, "School and Sports Worlds," to several high school teachers who now plan to assign the ethnographic inquiry projects outlined there rather than assigning traditional research papers. This is a practical, accessible, entirely useable book.

Tasleem Kousar - The Best of Both Worlds
Very simple English, but very difficult subject. People from Pakistan still arrange their children's marriages.
Source: tape