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As plays 1 and 2 get nearer to curtain, everything about redemption and revenge starts to get real, in surprising ways: the players are revising their roles and owning them with Anne-Marie to back them up; Miranda is making her presence heard. Most significantly a part of the production that Felix can’t control, luring his enemies into a trap, becomes a more bountiful prize thanks to the cosmic influences of Estelle.

Painful self-reflection as the story flashforwards a couple of weeks and the cast is in the thick of reshaping the show for their purposes while secretly fulfilling Felix’s revenge fantasy. The stomp-dance Evil Bro exposition is quite creative, but rubs up against Prospero’s ego. Even the act of buying costumes and props has Mr. Phillips questioning his role as Mr. Duke, but the real kicker is Miranda being shut out.

Casting a play has its own special magic to it, knowing where the alchemical transformations will come from even with less experienced and disinterested actors, and Felix treats this spellbinding directorial task with great care. His former enchantment of Anne-Marie still has its hold and even the most obstinate inmate seems ready to dive in. The black magic plot with white-hat hacker 8Handz begins to take its shape.

Fifteen prisoners wanting to play Caliban - seems like the correctional system is populated with the put-upon island monsters. They are still keeping up with the Shakespearean-slang curse words, but it will only last, it seems, as long as Felix’s magic holds. Like these Players, he is trapped in a prison that includes tin bathtubs and decency-observing imaginary daughter. Is this jail for himself or for someone else?

The play gets its plot and its double agenda, to be carried out through closed-circuit tv. Felix convinces his players on the more feminine characters of Miranda and Ariel, a challenge well met by Duke: he first reconnects with his spritely gymnast, and then he sells Ariel as a digital expert. Even in the early days of VR’s second wave (January 2013) the technology’s presence still remains “no real alchemy” (p. 110).

Schweyk is kind of a bumbling smartass who may appear to bounce from one calamity tot he next with only his chipper attitude and sense of decency with which to get by. Not enough for a kind-hearted dog thief to make his way safely through occupied Europe with the rhyming couplet Fürher and his goons running and ruining everything. With American audiences just entering WWII, how much of the play’s pacifism played out?

Felix at work, and what an intriguing job site he has: three months a year, now in its fourth year, the Fletcher Correctional Players are astute and keen, despite the ever-present threat of violence. From the guards and facility staff to the inmates themselves, everyone there treats Mr. Duke’s presence with respect and curiosity. Yet inside his revenge-filled mind tells a different story, an eventual wild disruption.

Perhaps the old coot living in a farmland shack isn't as crazy or desperate as one would assume, despite measuring the years of exile by the age his daughter would have been. He dedicates himself to teaching Shakespeare to nearby inmates, and as the planets align on a special day, he can resume the revenge plot that had kept him going, in secret from his imaginary daughter. The plot just fell onto his plate at lunch.

Taking the side of philosophers who have a more authentic view of the way a human mind works, as opposed to epistemological and psychological views, may seem like a step back from previous statements about the mental mirror. While not necessarily deriding all psychology, it is the breed of behaviorists who are analyzed for their reductionist image on mind. Surprising to see Rorty discussing computers in a pre-PC age.

Painstakingly in-depth analysis of symbols common across alchemical and religious texts, not just paired up with their direct opposite but placed inside quarternities (and occasionally a double quarternio) makes for much reading. Some of it obvious on the surface: i.e., sun is hot, moon cold, but still an impressive account of his readings and their connection to the mind. Really surprised by interpretations of salt.

More characters come into focus as a doting chairman makes Felix’s Gonzalo, equipping his rusty sportscar with costumes and props for the soon-to-be remounted Tempest. Mr. Duke’s landlords may just be minor elementals in his tragicomedy yet welcome this stranger to his home with its limited study: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky need not worry about their books being drown, but Montgomery and Mother Goose watch out!

An intriguing Atwoodian mixture of small-town Canadiana together with too-big-to-fail dreams of Artistic Director Felix, reeling over the rejection by the Board of Directors and placing all his anger on usurping Tony. While the plot closely follows the Shakespearean template, it is also an everyday tale told by its unreliable narrator, of loss and recovery, jumpstarted by Felix’s pressing need to extract his revenge.

Leavy's own Low-Fat Love is a catchy narrative that serves a scholarly purpose, retelling the turmoil of young adults taking her sociology courses (perhaps also Leavy's initial frustration with the pigeoned-holed publishing world with regards to career-orientated women). Her following chapter on fiction's pedagogical potential is a bit tacked on, quoting at length other professors who use fiction in classes.

A few more cracks at this precious mirror Rorty is determined to destroy, with no definitive breakthrough yet. The analytic psychologists and behaviourists are perhaps the most privileged views on how the mind supposedly works as they have peddled their easy solutions to troublesome reality of lived experience. Rorty stands up for pre-linguistic babies and others existing off the Cartesian grid by un-‘idea’ing ideas?

It takes a moon-village to sabotage a smelting plant, or at least the small band of criminals Jazz was able to recruit - her dad must have been the toughest ally to win over. Yet this new mission is more than just a million-slug ticket to the good life for Jazz, but a chance to redeem her lunar community from the crime syndicate who would have stopped at nothing to keep their money laundering scheme zero-g afloating.

The slight shift in power dynamic sends this grifting story into Chinatown on the Moon mode, where clever thugs, fatal femmes and corrupt authority figures come into play. Jazz shows her resourcefulness in knowing where to hide out, who the creeps are and when to pounce (at the bottom, everyone and in high heels). Yet even with her lifetime of training in evasive moves, the baddie still gets the drop on her.

Shorter samples of fiction to draw upon, and yet still weighty in their topic and intrigue, the novella and opening chapters of the novel quickly establish the stories de Freitas and Dellasega wanted to tell, creating the virtual reality Leavy writes about. While I am curious to know more about the way research is presented, I also wonder if the audiences each author wanted to reach are in fact reading these stories.

A couple chapters to play out how the perfect caper was pulled off, made perfect in the narrative sense as there are plenty of loose ends threatening to snag on something and cause Jazz’s scheme to unravel. An added bonus, as well, are the descriptions of Artemis and her surrounding area, all told from a life-long insider’s perspective. On top of this, relatable character development for Kelvin and perhaps even Dale.

After the stoical frustration of Mark Watney, it is great to see Weir switching gears to show the seedy side of the Moon through the point of view of crafty Jazz Bashara, as determined not to return to Earth as Mark was about leaving Mars. About a dozen other characters are introduced through dialogue, setting up an intriguing take-over plot, with a bit of Abelard and Heloise at the end of each chapter for backstory.

The race to get to the MAV is over, the retrofitting (otherwise trashing) of the rocket that will send Mark to intercept the returning Hermes is sped through to get to the final chapter where all of the crew pull together in a matter of minutes what NASA, JPL and other geniuses had years of planning, pretty much all thrown out the same window that was dismantled and left on the surface of a Watney-less Mars.

The love of knowledge that etymologically gives us philosophy must be one of those love-hate relationships for Rorty, pointing to a collection of the usual suspects (Plato, Descartes, Locke and Kant) who all frame the Mirror of Nature in order to see, and show, their world as each would like to believe in. Rorty has yet to declare boldly what his vision of reality is, but one senses it is without such mental mirrors.

The dizzying array of theories Boal shoots off are as complex as the chapter and section headings in his table of contents - each one seeming to start with an accepted definition of the familiar: a stage is this, and mind does thus, etc. - but like focused beams of light that get diffracted through a prism, producing the eponymous rainbow of desire, parts that make up the whole theatrical experience are metaphorized.

The impressive trek across the Greater Arabia Terra gets punctuated by a couple third-person narrative moments at conflict with the slow-and-steady rovering. The dust storm Mark enters into would have been devastating if the probabilistic math worked out with him heading off in a stormier direction. Nice to see “Survived Something That Should Have Killed Me” dinner got eaten according to the rules he set for himself.

Very enthusiastic to dive into my own fiction-based research after reading two short story examples, perhaps not for the right writerly reasons: my research doesn't have to be a fanfic version of my favourite authors' work! Both Bloom with her ungrammatical verbatim and Vitale with his not-so industry standard screenplay formatting demonstrated that I do not need technical precision but rather academic inventiveness.

Impressive how much Rorty commits to the far-flung concept of the Antipodeans and their mindless monitoring of neuronic bundles rather the thoughts and feels Terrans would more readily understand. Not just an illustrative paragraph or two but extended throughout the whole section, making this famous critique of reality’s representationism an arts-based specifically science-fiction-based work of postmodern philosophy.

Some very intriguing statements about his profession get filtered through his thoughts on the role that language and human thinking, especially as he quotes Goethe’s Faust, yet still seems to be grasping at greater connections than the relatively new science allows, as is evident in his Nobel lecture that only goes so far as to list the achievements of fellow physicists and no room for poets or philosophers.

The argument Rorty builds towards an understanding of mind as something other than immaterial or phenomenal takes some mental stretching to wrap my own mind around, given that most of what he has to say is disproving other philosophers’ stances. It became more clear, naturally, when linked to a short passage from Measure for Measure and how “Glassy” our notions of self reflected through mind actual might be.

Several topics addressed in the Appendices take root in earlier chapters and sprout forth expanded musings on postsymbolic communication, phenotropics and the clash between the old economy and algorithm-fueled networks where our attention to screen is a product for tech corporations with a steady supply of raw material: content we create by ourselves. Lanier’s futurism is hopeful but requires reading before we click.

Before wrapping things up on a hopeful humanistic note, Lanier recounts the plight of the World Wide Web, how one fateful decision (really a bunch of better decisions that were ignored) to make obtaining information a one-way path, meaning millions were hooked on presumably free access while tech companies seized control of the net. His simple equation of inversing AI with VR is sound and it might involve SecondLife!

A chilling play that cuts across the millennia, of young political lions who do not heed the warning of the gods and accuse foreigners of doing misdeeds. Dionysus stage manages Pentheus’ woes, even takes out his revenge faithful followers like Agave and Cadmus who both in their tragic ways brought shame to Semele’s memory by somehow denying her son. And yet how complicit was Tiresias who already knew of Thebes’ fall?