The Wizard and the War Machine PDF Download

Author: Lawrence Watt-Evans
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780586207505
Category : English fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Author: Lawrence Watt-Evans
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1434408736
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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In the tradition of the old "Ace Doubles" two-in-one books (flip one over to read the second title) -- here is the fifth Wildside Double: the two-volume "War Surplus" series by Lawrence Watt-Evans, "The Cyborg and the Sorcerers" and "The Wizard and the War Machine." THE CYBORG AND THE SORCERERS The cyborg code-named "Slant" was sent out as an Independent Reconnaissance Unit during an interstellar war between Earth and its colonies. The fighting ended three hundred years ago, but Slant's computer does not admit this -- he is compelled to carry on as if the war were still raging. Then he comes across a planet where his sensors register ''gravitational anomalies.'' The computer interprets these as enemy weapons research. The local inhabitants call the anomalies ''magic.'' THE WIZARD AND THE WAR MACHINE At the end of The Cyborg and the Sorcerers, Sam Turner was making a life for himself on the planet Dest. He thought he had left the long-lost interstellar war between Earth and its rebellious colonies behind him forever. "Forever" turned out to be eleven years. That was how long it took for another Independent Reconnaissance Unit to respond to the distress call his ship had sent before it was destroyed. And this one made his own berserk killer computer look sane.

Author: Daniel Pick
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300067194
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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This intriguing study examines Western perceptions of war in and beyond the nineteenth century, surveying the writings of novelists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, philosophers, poets, natural scientists, and journalists to trace the terms of modern thought on the nature of military conflict. Daniel Pick brings together philosophical and historical models of war with fictions of invasion, propaganda from the Great War, interpretations of shellshock and speculations about the biological value of conquest. He discusses the work of such familiar commentators as Clausewitz, Engels, and Treitschke, and examines little-known writings by Proudhon, De Quincey, Ruskin, Valery, and many others, culminating in the extraordinary dialogue between Freud and Einstein, Why War? He analyses Victorian fears of French contamination through the Channel Tunnel as well as the widespread continuing dread of German domination. And he charts the history of the pervasive European belief that war is beneficial or at least functionally necessary. A central theme of the book is the disturbing relationship between machinery and destruction. Visions of relentless technological 'progress' and the inexorable advance of the military-industrial complex often seem to distort our understanding of war, even to reduce it to a sophisticated game played out by high-precision automata. Pick explores both the reassuring and troubling aspects of such representations. Shorn of human agency or responsibility, war apparently threatens to become technologically unstoppable, the remorseless 'perfect abattoir' of the industrial age. War Machine explores the enduring historical fascination with - and recoil from -brutal mechanical slaughter, and the modern aquiescence in, and enthusiasm for (in Rilke's phrase), 'these days of monstrously accelerated dying'.

Author: Lawrence Watt-Evans
Publisher: Del Rey
ISBN: 9780345334596
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Author: David Edgerton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199832676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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The familiar image of the British in the Second World War is that of the plucky underdog taking on German might. David Edgerton's bold, compelling new history shows the conflict in a new light, with Britain as a very wealthy country, formidable in arms, ruthless in pursuit of its interests, and in command of a global production system. Rather than belittled by a Nazi behemoth, Britain arguably had the world's most advanced mechanized forces. It had not only a great empire, but allies large and small.Edgerton shows that Britain fought on many fronts and its many home fronts kept it exceptionally well supplied with weapons, food and oil, allowing it to mobilize to an extraordinary extent. It created and deployed a vast empire of machines, from the humble tramp steamer to the battleship, from the rifle to the tank, made in colossal factories the world over. Scientists and engineers invented new weapons, encouraged by a government and prime minister enthusiastic about the latest technologies. The British, indeed Churchillian, vision of war and modernity was challenged by repeated defeat at the hands of less well-equipped enemies. Yet the end result was a vindication of this vision. Like the United States, a powerful Britain won a cheap victory, while others paid a great price.Putting resources, machines and experts at the heart of a global rather than merely imperial story, Britain's War Machine demolishes timeworn myths about wartime Britain and gives us a groundbreaking and often unsettling picture of a great power in action.

Author: Christopher Stasheff
Publisher: Stasheff Literary Enterprises
ISBN: 0991358295
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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THERE'S NO JUSTICE, AND LITTLE FREEDOM, IN A WORLD WHERE MIGHT MAKES RIGHT... The medieval planet of Maltroit seems to be repeating Earth's bloody history in the worst possible manner: endless feudal warfare, at the expense of peasants just trying to survive. It's up to the Rogue Wizard to give the downtrodden a crash course in revolution, and set in motion a plan for the common soldiers to take back power and end the bloodshed. Disguising himself as a mercenary soldier, teaching nobles the rudiments of democracy and schooling peasants in the basics of radical politics, before you can say "Magna Carta," the Rogue Wizard has bent the course of history and set the planet on a course toward peace and democracy.

Author: Alan G. V. Simmonds
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136629963
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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The First World War appears as a fault line in Britain’s twentieth-century history. Between August 1914 and November 1918 the titanic struggle against Imperial Germany and her allies consumed more people, more money and more resources than any other conflict that Britain had hitherto experienced. For the first time, it opened up a Home Front that stretched into all parts of the British polity, society and culture, touching the lives of every citizen regardless of age, gender and class: vegetables were even grown in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Britain and World War One throws attention on these civilians who fought the war on the Home Front. Harnessing recent scholarship, and drawing on original documents, oral testimony and historical texts, this book casts a fresh look over different aspects of British society during the four long years of war. It revisits the early war enthusiasm and the making of Kitchener’s new armies; the emotive debates over conscription; the relationships between politics, government and popular opinion; women working in wartime industries; the popular experience of war and the question of social change. This book also explores areas of wartime Britain overlooked by recent histories, including the impact of the war on rural society; the mobilization of industry and the importance of technology; responses to air raids and food and housing shortages; and the challenges to traditional social and sexual mores and wartime culture. Britain and World War One is essential reading for all students and interested lay readers of the First World War.

Author: Roger Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351959565
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

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At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain was amongst the world leaders in the production of machine tools, yet by the 1980s the industry was in terminal decline. Focusing on the example of Britain's largest machine tool maker, Alfred Herbert Ltd of Coventry, this study charts the wider fortunes of this vital part of the manufacturing sector. Taking a chronological approach, the book explores how during the late nineteenth century the industry developed a reputation for excellence throughout the world, before the challenges of two world wars necessitated drastic changes and reorganisations. Despite meeting these challenges and emerging with confidence into the post-war market place, the British machine tool industry never regained its pre-eminent position, and increasingly lost ground to foreign competition. By using the example of Alfred Herbert Ltd to illuminate the broader economic and business history of the British machine tool industry, this study not only provides a valuable insight into British manufacturing, but also contributes to the ongoing debates surrounding Britain's alleged decline as a manufacturing nation.

Author: Williamson Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113991586X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Military Adaptation in War addresses one of the most persistent problems that military organizations confront: namely, the problem of how to adapt under the trying, terrifying conditions of war. This work builds on the volume that Professor Williamson Murray edited with Allan Millett on military innovation (a quite different issue, though similar in some respects). In Clausewitzian terms, war is a contest, an interactive duel, which is of indeterminate length and presents a series of intractable problems at every level, from policy and strategy down to the tactical. Moreover, the fact that the enemy is adapting at the same time presents military organizations with an ever-changing set of conundrums that offer up no easy solutions. As the British general, James Wolfe, suggested before Quebec: 'War is an option of difficulties'. Dr Murray provides an in-depth analysis of the problems that military forces confront in adapting to these difficulties.

Author: Patrick Deer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191567515
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Culture in Camouflage aims to remap the history of British war culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the literature of the Second World War. The book offers the first comprehensive account of the emergence of modern war culture, arguing that its exceptional forms and temporalities force us to reappraise British cultural modernity. The book explores how writers like Ford Madox Ford, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, James Hanley, Rex Warner, Alexander Baron, Keith Douglas, Henry Green, and Graham Greene contested the dominant narratives of war projected by an enormously powerful and persuasive mass media and culture industry. Patrick Deer reads war literature as one element in an expanded cultural field, which also includes popular culture and mass communications, the productions of war planners and military historians, projections of new technologies of violence, the fantasies and theories of strategists, and the material culture of total war. Modern war cultures, Deer contends, are defined by their drive to normalize conflict and war-making, by their struggle to colonize the entire wartime cultural field, and by their claim to monopolize representations and interpretation of the conflict. But the mobilization of cultural formations during wartime reveals, at times glaringly, the constitutive contradictions at the heart of modern ideas of culture. The Great War failed to produce a popular war culture on the home front, producing instead an extraordinary literature of protest, yet the strategists struggled to regain their oversight over both the enemy across no man's land, and the minds and bodies of their own mass conscript armies. The interwar years saw a massive effort to make strategic fantasies a reality; if the technology of imperial air power or mobile armoured warfare did not yet exist, culture could be mobilized to shore up the ramshackle war machine. During World War Two a fully fledged British war culture emerged triumphant in time of national crisis, offering the vision of a fully mobilized island fortress, a loyal empire, and a modernized war machine ready to wage a futuristic war of space and movement. This was the struggle that British World War Two writers confronted with extraordinary courage and creativity.