Bøger af David Ashford

Surveying an unusually wide variety of material, ranging from the Victorian triple-decker novel, to Modernist art and architecture, to Pop music and graffiti, this book suggests that the tube-network is a transitional form, linking the alienated spaces of Victorian England to the virtual spaces of our contemporary consumer-capitalism.

This books traces the rise to prominence in the twentieth-century of a sub-genre of gothic fiction that is, emphatically, a horror of enlightenment rationality rather than gothic darkness, examining post-modern revisions of Modernist "Promethean" tropes in an eclectic range of gothic, fantasy and SF writing. Whether the subject be terror of London's churches in the psychogeographical fiction of Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore, the Orcs in the linguistic fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, King Kong, killer-computers, or demon-children in post-war British science-fiction, A Book of Monsters offers illuminating perspectives on the darker recesses of the post-modern imagination, setting out a compelling, and comprehensive, overview on our contemporary unconscious.

The philosophy of Ayn Rand has had a role equal or greater than that of Milton Friedman or F.A. Hayek in shaping the contemporary neo-liberal consensus. Its impact was powerful on architects of Reaganomics such as Alan Greenspan, former Director of the World Bank, and the new breed of American industrialists who developed revolutionary information technologies in Silicon Valley. But what do we really know of Rand's philosophy? Is her gospel of selfishness really nothing more than a reiteration of a quintessentially American "rugged individualism"? This book argues that Rand's philosophy can in fact be traced back to a moment, before World War I, when the work of a now-forgotten German philosopher called Max Stirner possessed an extraordinary appeal for writers and artists across Europe. The influence of Stirnerian Egoism upon that phase of intense creative innovation we now call Modernism was seminal.The implications for our understanding of Modernism are profound - so too for our grasp of the "cultural logic of late capitalism". This book presents the reader with a fresh perspective on the Modernist classics, as well as introducing less familiar art and writing that is only now beginning to attract interest in the West. It arrives at a fresh and compelling re-evaluation of Modernism: revealing its selfish streak.

Amid a century devastated by war, space exploration was perhaps mankind's greatest achievement of the twentieth century. Yet remarkably, in a world where most technology progresses constantly, space exploration appears to have gone backwards. Man has not returned to the moon since 1972; the space shuttle programme has finished and not been replaced; much-vaunted promises of space tourism have not become realistic.In this remarkable book, David Ashford looks back at the story of space exploration, identifying the factors that were a driving force behind the eye-catching programmes of the cold war, and showing how now new driving forces are needed. Using his own extensive experience as a practitioner and researcher of space exploration, Ashford then outlines a new, realistic roadmap for achieving the new space age soon and at an affordable cost.This accessible and readable book will appeal both to students and general readers, giving a fascinating introduction to space exploration - and what matters most about it.