Tolkien, Cline, and the Quest for a Silmaril

J. R. R. Tolkien has had a significant influence on American writer Ernest Cline. In Ready Player One (2011), the character Ogden Morrow invites Wade and his friends to his mansion, which is modelled after Rivendell from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (2001- 03). Cline goes further in his sequel Ready Player Two (2021) by staging a part of Wade’s virtual quest on Arda I, the First Age of Middle Earth. In this paper, we focus on this episode and, in so doing, argue for Cline’s insights into how we approach fantasy. First, we attend to the ways in which Cline, through Wade and Samantha, replicates Beren’s and Luthien’s quest for a Silmaril. This parallel enables Cline to acknowledge his debt to his predecessor, while mocking Jackson’s overlong The Hobbit trilogy (2012-14). Secondly, and more importantly, we reveal how Cline offers new and more radical ways for reading fantasy. Success in the quests on Arda I requires “an encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien’s entire Legendarium,” not just “the published version of The Silmarillion. You need to memorize details of a bunch of different, conflicting, unpublished early drafts! And all thirteen volumes of The History of Middle-earth!” If familiarity with the sheer volume of materials separates the expert from the novice, then Cline reveals the inadequacies of book knowledge. This paper contributes to scholarship by illuminating Cline’s allusive practice, by arguing for the value of a more imaginative engagement with texts, and by contextualizing the influence of Tolkien’s posthumously published works

Do Androids Dream of Bad TV?: Un/originality in Neil Burger’s Voyagers

Critics did not take kindly to Neil Burger’s Voyager (2021). On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a dismal 25%, and the consensus is that it’s a trip best not taken: “It has a game cast and a premise ripe with potential, but Voyagers drifts in familiar orbit rather than fully exploring its intriguing themes.” This article seeks neither to reclaim the film as an unjustly neglected cinematic masterpiece nor to assert its importance in the canon of dystopian works. Rather, it treats Voyagers as a test case for exploring our own critical investment in the genre. Our aims are twofold. First, we argue that the film speaks to the dystopian genre’s fundamental distrust of future generations to make the best decisions. It effectively exposes the central irony that we presume to know best though we had signally failed to do right by our planet in the first place. Secondly, we reveal how unoriginal work can still point to new ways forward. By the end of the film, the Humanitas mission is back on course, following Zac’s (Fionn Whitehead) demise. Sela (Lily-Rose Depp) is surely right to wonder, to Christopher (Tye Sheridan), how they should ensure that mutiny doesn’t recur. The short answer? They can’t—and they probably shouldn’t. The capacity for events, like those we witness in Voyagers, to recur—and many times over too—is at least partially responsible for the dystopian genre’s appeal and it contributes to the genre’s persistent ethical ruminations. This essay advances scholarship by suggesting that even the most derivative of cinema can offer profound insights into our world, in this case, how democracies work

Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond to Charles W. Mills’s “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto”

In spite of being written over three decades ago, Mills’s posthumously published “Manifesto” not only anticipates but transcends the majority, if not the totality, of the scholarship on Tolkien, race, and racisms which has been published since 2003. Scholars in philosophy and related fields familiar with Mills’s work will recognize that the essay was a “critical exploration of [how] a fictional racial hierarchy strikingly illuminates the ongoing influence of certain old racist ideas on our present day [sic] social realities.” Reid has invited a wide-ranging Tolkienists who have read the essay to respond, briefly, on the significance of the essay to their wor

Calibrating CHIME, A New Radio Interferometer to Probe Dark Energy

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is a transit interferometer currently being built at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC, Canada. We will use CHIME to map neutral hydrogen in the frequency range 400 -- 800\,MHz over half of the sky, producing a measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) at redshifts between 0.8 -- 2.5 to probe dark energy. We have deployed a pathfinder version of CHIME that will yield constraints on the BAO power spectrum and provide a test-bed for our calibration scheme. I will discuss the CHIME calibration requirements and describe instrumentation we are developing to meet these requirements

Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Pathfinder

A pathfinder version of CHIME (the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) is currently being commissioned at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC. The instrument is a hybrid cylindrical interferometer designed to measure the large scale neutral hydrogen power spectrum across the redshift range 0.8 to 2.5. The power spectrum will be used to measure the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale across this poorly probed redshift range where dark energy becomes a significant contributor to the evolution of the Universe. The instrument revives the cylinder design in radio astronomy with a wide field survey as a primary goal. Modern low-noise amplifiers and digital processing remove the necessity for the analog beamforming that characterized previous designs. The Pathfinder consists of two cylinders 37\,m long by 20\,m wide oriented north-south for a total collecting area of 1,500 square meters. The cylinders are stationary with no moving parts, and form a transit instrument with an instantaneous field of view of $\sim$100\,degrees by 1-2\,degrees. Each CHIME Pathfinder cylinder has a feedline with 64 dual polarization feeds placed every $\sim$30\,cm which Nyquist sample the north-south sky over much of the frequency band. The signals from each dual-polarization feed are independently amplified, filtered to 400-800\,MHz, and directly sampled at 800\,MSps using 8 bits. The correlator is an FX design, where the Fourier transform channelization is performed in FPGAs, which are interfaced to a set of GPUs that compute the correlation matrix. The CHIME Pathfinder is a 1/10th scale prototype version of CHIME and is designed to detect the BAO feature and constrain the distance-redshift relation.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures. submitted to Proc. SPIE, Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation (2014

Direct observation of DNA threading in flap endonuclease complexes

Maintenance of genome integrity requires that branched nucleic acid molecules are accurately processed to produce double-helical DNA. Flap endonucleases are essential enzymes that trim such branched molecules generated by Okazaki fragment synthesis during replication. Here, we report crystal structures of bacteriophage T5 flap endonuclease in complexes with intact DNA substrates, and products, at resolutions of 1.9–2.2 Å. They reveal single-stranded DNA threading through a hole in the enzyme enclosed by an inverted Vshaped helical arch straddling the active site. Residues lining the hole induce an unusual barb-like conformation in the DNA substrate juxtaposing the scissile phosphate and essential catalytic metal ions. A series of complexes and biochemical analyses show how the substrate’s single-stranded branch approaches, threads through, and finally emerges on the far side of the enzyme. Our studies suggest that substrate recognition involves an unusual “flycasting, thread, bend and barb” mechanis

A Novel Role for CD55 in Granulocyte Homeostasis and Anti-Bacterial Host Defense

Background: In addition to its complement-regulating activity, CD55 is a ligand of the adhesion class G protein-coupled receptor CD97; however, the relevance of this interaction has remained elusive. We previously showed that mice lacking a functional CD97 gene have increased numbers of granulocytes. Methodology/Results: Here,wedemonstratethatCD55-deficientmicedisplay a comparable phenotype with about two-fold more circulating granulocytes in the blood stream, the marginated pool, and the spleen. This granulocytosis was independent of increased complement activity. Augmented numbers of Gr-1-positive cells in cell cycle in the bone marrow indicated a higher granulopoietic activity in mice lacking either CD55 or CD97. Concomitant with the increase in blood granulocyte numbers, Cd55-/mice challenged with the respiratory pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae developed less bacteremia and died later after infection. Conclusions: Collectively, these data suggest that complement-independent interaction of CD55 with CD97 is functionall

Vaccines against Tuberculosis: Where Are We and Where Do We Need to Go?

In this review we discuss recent progress in the development, testing, and clinical evaluation of new vaccines against tuberculosis (TB). Over the last 20 years, tremendous progress has been made in TB vaccine research and development: from a pipeline virtually empty of new TB candidate vaccines in the early 1990s, to an era in which a dozen novel TB vaccine candidates have been and are being evaluated in human clinical trials. In addition, innovative approaches are being pursued to further improve existing vaccines, as well as discover new ones. Thus, there is good reason for optimism in the field of TB vaccines that it will be possible to develop better vaccines than BCG, which is still the only vaccine available against TB

Development of Gene Expression Markers of Acute Heat-Light Stress in Reef-Building Corals of the Genus Porites

Coral reefs are declining worldwide due to increased incidence of climate-induced coral bleaching, which will have widespread biodiversity and economic impacts. A simple method to measure the sub-bleaching level of heat-light stress experienced by corals would greatly inform reef management practices by making it possible to assess the distribution of bleaching risks among individual reef sites. Gene expression analysis based on quantitative PCR (qPCR) can be used as a diagnostic tool to determine coral condition in situ. We evaluated the expression of 13 candidate genes during heat-light stress in a common Caribbean coral Porites astreoides, and observed strong and consistent changes in gene expression in two independent experiments. Furthermore, we found that the apparent return to baseline expression levels during a recovery phase was rapid, despite visible signs of colony bleaching. We show that the response to acute heat-light stress in P. astreoides can be monitored by measuring the difference in expression of only two genes: Hsp16 and actin. We demonstrate that this assay discriminates between corals sampled from two field sites experiencing different temperatures. We also show that the assay is applicable to an Indo-Pacific congener, P. lobata, and therefore could potentially be used to diagnose acute heat-light stress on coral reefs worldwide