Actuality is a border between the world that is and the future worlds that could be. Science- fiction stories look across the border, into the frontiers of ‘the future’. William Gibson did his part in the 1980s to invent cyberpunk fiction as a slick, stylish view into a bleak dystopian future, but by the turn of the century, much of what he’d…[Read more]

Geographic distributions of names can be relatively static over many generations. This paper applies a mapping of English names to places in Great Britain to extract implicit correspondences between the names of hobbit families and their roles in The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien is found to have used family names that predominate near his…[Read more]