Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Blackletter: Fiction And A Wall Of Precedent, Louis Anthony Di Leo

Dissertations

The eight stories that make up Blackletter explore situations in which people are forced to challenge the legitimacy of authority, rethink and rebuild their own identities, or confront their own involvement in human and environmental degradation. A central theme running throughout the collection is law, broadly, and the ways in which people adhere to or sometimes break from a particular rule, be it social or legislative. In each case, the role of law and its correlation to place and identity—either overt or veiled—serves as a major component of each story. In this way I locate these stories within a sociolegal …

Explorations: Five Science Fiction Stories, Daniel Joseph Pinney

Dissertations

These stories explore a universe populated by the stuff of space opera—enormous space stations, mysterious alien artifacts, starships and terraforming and emission nebulae, a human civilization that over millennia has spread across the galaxy. These explorations are not conducted by the usual swashbuckling heroes of space opera, however, but rather by the sorts of people who would have to live and make a living in such a future.

The perspectives from which this future is explored include those of an asteroid miner who loses his ship even as he is discovering the wonders of art, a man whose misuse of …