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When Nnedi Okorafor was 19, she woke up disoriented in a hospital room. Fluorescent pink and green grasshoppers and praying mantises bounced around her hospital bed, making strange clicks. An enormous crow threw itself against the window, trying to break in. Once she was no longer hallucinating from pain medication, though, things got stranger and…
In early 1988, the British neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick found himself drowning in letters from people who believed they had survived an encounter with death. “I slowly floated down a tunnel, not afraid in any way but looking forward to something,” one man wrote to him. “When it came I was absolutely at peace and going…
In the trilogy’s second book, “Small World” (1984), Morris Zapp, a slick theoretician delivering a lecture at a conference, uses the striptease style supposedly popular in the all-nude go-go bars of Berkeley, Calif., as a metaphor for what continental theory has uncovered about language: “This is not striptease, it is all strip and no tease,…
Science doesn’t usually tolerate frivolity, but the infinite monkey theorem enjoys an exception. The question it poses is thoroughly outlandish: Could an infinite number of monkeys, each given an infinite amount of time to peck away at a typewriter (stocked with an infinite supply of paper, presumably) eventually produce, by pure chance, the complete works…
