The Irenaut - Spring Edition 2024

Hacia una humanidad segura: el potencial de los sistemas de paz

– By Douglas P. Fry & Geneviève Souillac
Nunca en la historia de la humanidad compartieron todos los pueblos del planeta un destino común ni se dio la urgente necesidad de una acción global concertada para su superviviencia. En el guión típico de la ciencia ficción, ante la invasión marciana, los habitantes…

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Humanity’s open case: A modest anthropodicy

– By Mark-Alec Mellor
What I’ll be exploring here is the possibility of making a case in defence of humankind, and how (in what terms) that case could be presented. I won’t address the question of whether humankind, as a species, does more harm than good…

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Rothko Chapel

– By Rachel Hadas
When I came back everything had changed. Or was I what had changed? Surfaces pulsating into depth…

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Philosofish

– By Jack Parvid
Not quite menacing, nor remotely reassuring, the arcade has slid straight off a de Chirico canvas. Running north amid angled planes of ferric luminosity…

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Lessons

– By Al Sweeney
My children pursue me across the rocks proffering shells or stones, pressing one into my hand…

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Aesop and the Large Language Model

– By Richard McNeill Douglas & David Fell
Aesop, the old rascal, is having an argument with that mangy cur Diogenes. Aesop has recently included him in one of his oh-so-witty fables, something about Diogenes and a bald man and the trading of insults…

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Gray Matters

– By Jerl Surratt
One changes for the sake of change. Take Rimbaud in Paris, for instance, after he’d triumphed at being deranged, the ink still wet in his last sentence…

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People like you

– By Simon Bell
Nothing happened for ten years. Furlong opened the door of the caravan as he always did at this time and stepped out. It was still dark, his special hour before the dawn…

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VILAMBIT: RAS MALAI

– By Nigel S. Thompson
A sweet bought in tiny earthenware pots, unglazed, disposable, as for yoghurt, dahi, street corners left with broken shards…

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Neutrality and anthropodicy

– By Mark Price
The Irenaut’s idea that peace can be ‘an expression of human agency inherent in work’, which strives to recover ‘the origin of work and its goal of human amelioration’, made me think of the battered ideal of Irish neutrality…

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