Topeka, Kansas
Topeka is the capital city of the U. S. state of Kansas and the seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States; as of the 2010 census, the city population was 127,473. The Topeka Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes Shawnee, Jefferson and Wabaunsee counties, had a population of 233,870 in the 2010 census; the name Topeka is a Kansa-Osage sentence that means "place where we dug potatoes", or "a good place to dig potatoes". As a placename, Topeka was first recorded in 1826 as the Kansa name for what is now called the Kansas River. Topeka's founders chose the name in 1855 because it "was novel, of Indian origin and euphonious of sound." The mixed-blood Kansa Native American, Joseph James, called Jojim, is credited with suggesting the name of Topeka. The city, laid out in 1854, was one of the Free-State towns founded by Eastern antislavery men after the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Bill.
In 1857, Topeka was chartered as a city. The city is well known for the landmark U. S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson and declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. Three ships of the U. S. Navy have been named USS Topeka after the city. For many millennia, the Great Plains of North America were inhabited by Native Americans. From the 16th century to 18th century, the Kingdom of France claimed ownership of large parts of North America. In 1762, after the French and Indian War, France secretly ceded New France to Spain, per the Treaty of Fontainebleau. In 1802, Spain returned most of the land to France. In 1803, most of the land for modern day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2.83 cents per acre. In the 1840s, wagon trains made their way west from Independence, Missouri, on a journey of 2,000 miles, following what would come to be known as the Oregon Trail.
About 60 miles west of Kansas City, three half Kansas Indian sisters married to the French-Canadian Pappan brothers established a ferry service allowing travelers to cross the Kansas River at what is now Topeka. During the 1840s and into the 1850s, travelers could reliably find a way across the river, but little else was in the area. In the early 1850s, traffic along the Oregon Trail was supplemented by trade on a new military road stretching from Fort Leavenworth through Topeka to the newly established Fort Riley. In 1854, after completion of the first cabin, nine men established the Topeka Town Association. Included among them was Cyrus K. Holliday, an "idea man" who would become mayor of Topeka and founder of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Soon, steamboats were docking at the Topeka landing, depositing meat and flour and returning eastward with potatoes and wheat. By the late 1860s, Topeka had become a commercial hub providing many Victorian era comforts. Topeka was a bastion for the free-state movement during the problems in Kansas Territory between anti- and proslavery settlers.
After southern forces barricaded Topeka in 1856, Topeka's leaders took actions to defend the free-state town from invasion. A militia was organized and fortifications were built on Quincy Street; the fortifications seemed to consist of low-lying earthwork levies strengthened by the presence of at least one cannon. There was stone in the fortifications; the militia manned the fortifications until at least September 1856, when the siege around the town was lifted. After a decade of abolitionist and pro-slavery conflict that gave the territory the nickname Bleeding Kansas, Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861 as the 34th state. Topeka was chosen as the capital, with Dr. Charles Robinson as the first governor. In 1862, Cyrus K. Holliday donated a tract of land to the state for the construction of a state capitol. Construction of the Kansas State Capitol began in 1866, it would take 37 years to build the capitol, first the east wing, the west wing, the central building, using Kansas limestone. In fall 1864 a stockade fort named Fort Simple, was built in the intersection of 6th and Kansas Avenues to protect Topeka, should Confederate forces in Missouri decide to attack the city.
It was abandoned by April 1865 and demolished in April 1867. State officers first used the state capitol in 1869, moving from Constitution Hall, what is now 427-429 S. Kansas Avenue. Besides being used as the Kansas statehouse from 1863 to 1869, Constitution Hall is the site where anti-slavery settlers convened in 1855 to write the first of four state constitutions, making it the "Free State Capitol." The National Park Service recognizes Constitution Hall - Topeka as headquarters in the operation of the Lane Trail to Freedom on the Underground Railroad, the chief slave escape passage and free trade road. Although the drought of 1860 and the ensuing period of the Civil War slowed the growth of Topeka and the state, Topeka kept pace with the revival and period of growth Kansas enjoyed from the close of the war in 1865 until 1870. In the 1870s, many former slaves known as Exodusters, settled on the east side of Lincoln Street between Munson and Twelfth Streets; the area was known as Tennessee Town.
The first African American Kindergarten west of the Mississippi was organized in Tennessee Town by Dr. Charles Sheldon, pastor of the Central Congregational Church in 1893. Lincoln College, now Washburn University, was established in 1865 in Topeka by a charter issued by the State of Kansas and the General A
Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, science fiction, fantasy. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, television series, comic books. King has published six non-fiction books, he has written 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Society Awards. In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he has received awards for his contribution to literature for his entire oeuvre, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. In 2015, King was awarded with a National Medal of Arts from the United States National Endowment for the Arts for his contributions to literature, he has been described as the "King of Horror". King was born September 1947, in Portland, Maine, his father, Donald Edwin King, was a merchant seaman.
Donald was born under the surname Pollock, but as an adult, used the surname King. King's mother was Nellie Ruth; when Stephen King was two years old, his father left the family. King's mother raised Stephen and his older brother, David, by herself, sometimes under great financial strain; the family moved to De Pere, Fort Wayne and Stratford, Connecticut. When King was 11, his family returned to Durham, where his mother cared for her parents until their deaths, she became a caregiver in a local residential facility for the mentally challenged. King lost his belief in organized religion while in high school. While no longer religious, King chooses to believe in the existence of God; as a child, King witnessed one of his friends being struck and killed by a train, though he has no memory of the event. His family told him that after leaving home to play with the boy, King returned, speechless and in shock. Only did the family learn of the friend's death; some commentators have suggested that this event may have psychologically inspired some of King's darker works, but King makes no mention of it in his memoir On Writing.
King related in detail his primary inspiration for writing horror fiction in his non-fiction Danse Macabre, in a chapter titled "An Annoying Autobiographical Pause." King compares his uncle's dowsing for water using the bough of an apple branch with the sudden realization of what he wanted to do for a living. That inspiration occurred while browsing through an attic with his elder brother, when King uncovered a paperback version of an H. P. Lovecraft collection of short stories he remembers as The Lurker in the Shadows, that had belonged to his father. King told Barnes & Noble Studios during a 2009 interview, "I knew that I'd found home when I read that book."King attended Durham Elementary School and graduated from Lisbon Falls High School, in Lisbon Falls, Maine. He displayed an early interest in horror as an avid reader of EC's horror comics, including Tales from the Crypt, he began writing for fun while still in school, contributing articles to Dave's Rag, the newspaper his brother published with a mimeograph machine, began selling to his friends stories based on movies he had seen.
The first of his stories to be independently published was "I Was a Teenage Grave Robber". That story was published the following year in a revised form as "In a Half-World of Terror" in another fanzine, Stories of Suspense, edited by Marv Wolfman; as a teen, King won a Scholastic Art and Writing Award. From 1966, King studied at the University of Maine, graduating in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in English; that year, his daughter Naomi Rachel was born. He wrote a column, Steve King's Garbage Truck, for the student newspaper, The Maine Campus, participated in a writing workshop organized by Burton Hatlen. King held a variety of jobs to pay for his studies, including janitor, gas pump attendant, worker at an industrial laundry. King met his future wife, fellow student Tabitha Spruce, at the University's Fogler Library after one of Professor Hatlen's workshops. King sold his first professional short story, "The Glass Floor," to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. After graduating from the University of Maine, King earned a certificate to teach high school but, unable to find a teaching post initially supplemented his laboring wage by selling short stories to men's magazines such as Cavalier.
Many of these early stories have been republished in the collection Night Shift. The short story The Raft was published in a men's magazine. After being arrested for driving over a traffic cone, he was fined $250 and had no money to pay the petty larceny fine. However, payment arrived for the short story The Raft, King was able to pay the fine. In 1971, King was hired as a teacher at Hampden Academy in Maine, he worked on ideas for novels. In 1973, King's novel Carrie was accepted by publishing house Doubleday. Carrie was King's fourth novel, it was written on a portable typewriter. The novel began as a short story intended for Cavalier magazine, but King tossed the first three pages of his work in the garbage can. Tabith
Nuclear warfare
Nuclear warfare is a military conflict or political strategy in which nuclear weaponry is used to inflict damage on the enemy. Nuclear weapons are weapons of mass destruction. A major nuclear exchange would have long-term effects from the fallout released, could lead to a "nuclear winter" that could last for decades, centuries, or millennia after the initial attack; some analysts dismiss the nuclear winter hypothesis, calculate that with nuclear weapon stockpiles at Cold War highs, although there would be billions of casualties, billions more rural people would survive. However, others have argued that secondary effects of a nuclear holocaust, such as nuclear famine and societal collapse, would cause every human on Earth to starve to death. So far, two nuclear weapons have been used in the course of warfare, both by the United States near the end of World War II. On August 6, 1945, a uranium gun-type device was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days on August 9, a plutonium implosion-type device was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
These two bombings resulted in the deaths of 120,000 people. After World War II, nuclear weapons were developed by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the People's Republic of China, which contributed to the state of conflict and extreme tension that became known as the Cold War. In 1974, in 1998, two countries that were hostile toward each other, developed nuclear weapons. Israel and North Korea are thought to have developed stocks of nuclear weapons, though it is not known how many; the Israeli government has never admitted or denied to having nuclear weapons, although it is known to have constructed the reactor and reprocessing plant necessary for building nuclear weapons. South Africa manufactured several complete nuclear weapons in the 1980s, but subsequently became the first country to voluntarily destroy their domestically made weapons stocks and abandon further production. Nuclear weapons have been detonated on over 2,000 occasions for testing demonstrations. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the resultant end of the Cold War, the threat of a major nuclear war between the two nuclear superpowers was thought to have declined.
Since concern over nuclear weapons has shifted to the prevention of localized nuclear conflicts resulting from nuclear proliferation, the threat of nuclear terrorism. The possibility of using nuclear weapons in war is divided into two subgroups, each with different effects and fought with different types of nuclear armaments; the first, a limited nuclear war, refers to a small-scale use of nuclear weapons by two belligerents. A "limited nuclear war" could include targeting military facilities—either as an attempt to pre-emptively cripple the enemy's ability to attack as a defensive measure, or as a prelude to an invasion by conventional forces, as an offensive measure; this term could apply to any small-scale use of nuclear weapons that may involve military or civilian targets. The second, a full-scale nuclear war, could consist of large numbers of nuclear weapons used in an attack aimed at an entire country, including military and civilian targets; such an attack would certainly destroy the entire economic and military infrastructure of the target nation, would have a devastating effect on Earth's biosphere.
Some Cold War strategists such as Henry Kissinger argued that a limited nuclear war could be possible between two armed superpowers. Some predict, that a limited war could "escalate" into a full-scale nuclear war. Others have called limited nuclear war "global nuclear holocaust in slow motion", arguing that—once such a war took place—others would be sure to follow over a period of decades rendering the planet uninhabitable in the same way that a "full-scale nuclear war" between superpowers would, only taking a much longer path to the same result; the most optimistic predictions of the effects of a major nuclear exchange foresee the death of many millions of victims within a short period of time. More pessimistic predictions argue that a full-scale nuclear war could bring about the extinction of the human race, or at least its near extinction, with only a small number of survivors and a reduced quality of life and life expectancy for centuries afterward. However, such predictions, assuming total war with nuclear arsenals at Cold War highs, have not been without criticism.
Such a horrific catastrophe as global nuclear warfare would certainly cause permanent damage to most complex life on the planet, its ecosystems, the global climate. If predictions about the production of a nuclear winter are accurate, it would change the balance of global power, with countries such as Australia, New Zealand, China and Brazil predicted to become world superpowers if the Cold War led to a large-scale nuclear attack. A study presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 2006 asserted that a small-scale regional nuclear war could produce as many direct fatalities as all of World War II and disrupt the global climate for a decade or more. In a regional nuclear conflict scenario in w
Cyborg
A cyborg, short for "cybernetic organism", is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. The term was coined in 1960 by Nathan S. Kline; the term cyborg is not the same thing as biorobot or android. While cyborgs are thought of as mammals, including humans, they might conceivably be any kind of organism. D. S. Halacy's Cyborg: Evolution of the Superman in 1965 featured an introduction which spoke of a "new frontier", "not space, but more profoundly the relationship between'inner space' to'outer space' – a bridge...between mind and matter."In popular culture, some cyborgs may be represented as visibly mechanical or as indistinguishable from humans. Cyborgs in fiction play up a human contempt for over-dependence on technology when used for war, when used in ways that seem to threaten free will. Cyborgs are often portrayed with physical or mental abilities far exceeding a human counterpart, such as RoboCop. According to some definitions of the term, the physical attachments humanity has with the most basic technologies have made them cyborgs.
In a typical example, a human with an artificial cardiac pacemaker or implantable cardioverter-defibrillator would be considered a cyborg, since these devices measure voltage potentials in the body, perform signal processing, can deliver electrical stimuli, using this synthetic feedback mechanism to keep that person alive. Implants cochlear implants, that combine mechanical modification with any kind of feedback response are cyborg enhancements; some theorists cite such modifications as contact lenses, hearing aids, or intraocular lenses as examples of fitting humans with technology to enhance their biological capabilities. As cyborgs are on the rise some theorists argue there is a need to develop new definitions of aging and for instance a bio-techno-social definition of aging has been suggested; the term is used to address human-technology mixtures in the abstract. This includes not only used pieces of technology such as phones, the Internet, etc. but artifacts that may not popularly be considered technology.
When augmented with these technologies and connected in communication with people in other times and places, a person becomes capable of much more than they were before. An example is a computer, which gains power by using Internet protocols to connect with other computers. Another example, becoming more and more relevant is a bot-assisted human or human-assisted-bot, used to target social media with likes and shares. Cybernetic technologies include highways, electrical wiring, electrical plants and other infrastructure that we hardly notice, but which are critical parts of the cybernetics that we work within. Bruce Sterling in his universe of Shaper/Mechanist suggested an idea of alternative cyborg called Lobster, made not by using internal implants, but by using an external shell. Unlike human cyborgs that appear human externally while being synthetic internally, Lobster looks inhuman externally but contains a human internally; the computer game Deus Ex: Invisible War prominently featured cyborgs called Omar, where "Omar" is a Russian translation of the word "Lobster".
The concept of a man-machine mixture was widespread in science fiction before World War II. As early as 1843, Edgar Allan Poe described a man with extensive prostheses in the short story "The Man That Was Used Up". In 1911, Jean de La Hire introduced the Nyctalope, a science fiction hero, the first literary cyborg, in Le Mystère des XV. Edmond Hamilton presented space explorers with a mixture of organic and machine parts in his novel The Comet Doom in 1928, he featured the talking, living brain of an old scientist, Simon Wright, floating around in a transparent case, in all the adventures of his famous hero, Captain Future. He uses the term explicitly in the 1962 short story, "After a Judgment Day," to describe the "mechanical analogs" called "Charlies," explaining that "yborgs, they had been called from the first one in the 1960s...cybernetic organisms." In the short story "No Woman Born" in 1944, C. L. Moore wrote of Deirdre, a dancer, whose body was burned and whose brain was placed in a faceless but beautiful and supple mechanical body.
The term was coined by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in 1960 to refer to their conception of an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments: Their concept was the outcome of thinking about the need for an intimate relationship between human and machine as the new frontier of space exploration was beginning to open up. A designer of physiological instrumentation and electronic data-processing systems, Clynes was the chief research scientist in the Dynamic Simulation Laboratory at Rockland State Hospital in New York; the term first appears in print five months earlier when The New York Times reported on the Psychophysiological Aspects of Space Flight Symposium where Clynes and Kline first presented their paper. A book titled Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possib
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot, "one of the twentieth century's major poets" was an essayist, publisher and literary and social critic. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling and marrying there, he became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39. Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, it was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", Four Quartets. He was known for his seven plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry". The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family with roots in New England. Thomas Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there.
His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, wrote poetry and was a social worker, a new profession in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Eliot was born at a property owned by his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, his four sisters were between 19 years older. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of Thomas Stearns. Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socializing with his peers; as he was isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy became obsessed with books and was absorbed in tales depicting savages, the Wild West, or Mark Twain's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer.
In his memoir of Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living." Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more than any other environment has done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam, he said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.
Published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student magazine. He published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King"; the last mentioned story reflects his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis; such a link with primitive people antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard. Eliot lived in St. Louis, Missouri for the first sixteen years of his life at the house on Locust St. where he was born. After going away to school in 1905, he only returned to St. Louis for visits. Despite moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a friend that the "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world."Following graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer who published The Waste Land.
He studied philosophy at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four. While a student, Eliot was graduated with a pass degree, he recovered and persisted, attaining a B. A. in an elective program best described as comparative literature in three years, an M. A. in English literature in the fourth. Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature; this introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life; the Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American writer and critic. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
He read poetry with Henri Alban-Fournier. From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian Sanskrit. Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914, he first visited Marb
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass
Wizard and Glass is a fantasy novel by American writer Stephen King, the fourth book in The Dark Tower series, published in 1997. Subtitled "Regard", it placed fourth in the annual Locus Poll for best fantasy novel; the novel begins. After Jake, Eddie and Roland fruitlessly riddle Blaine the Mono for several hours, Eddie defeats the mad computer by telling childish jokes. Blaine is unable to handle short-circuits; the four gunslingers and Oy the billy-bumbler disembark at the Topeka railway station, which to their surprise is located in the Topeka, Kansas, of the 1980s. The city is deserted, as this version of the world has been depopulated by the influenza of King's novel The Stand. Links between these books include the following reference to The Walkin' Dude from The Stand on page 95, "Someone had spray-painted over both signs marking the ramp's ascending curve. On the one reading St. Louis 215, someone had slashed watch out for the walking dude", among others; the world has some other minor differences with the one known to Eddie and Susannah.
The ka-tet leaves the city via the Kansas Turnpike, as they camp one night next to an eerie dimensional hole which Roland calls a "thinny", the gunslinger tells his apprentices of his past, his first encounter with a thinny. At the beginning of the story-within-the-story, Roland earns his guns—an episode retold in the inaugural issue of The Gunslinger Born—and becomes the youngest gunslinger in memory, he did it because he discovered his father's trusted counsellor, the sorcerer Marten Broadcloak, having an affair with his mother, Gabrielle Deschain. In anger, Roland challenges his mentor, Cort, to a duel to earn his guns. Roland bests his teacher, his father sends him east, away from Gilead, for his own protection. Roland leaves with Cuthbert Allgood and Alain Johns. Soon after their arrival in the distant Barony of Mejis, Roland falls in love with Susan Delgado, the promised "gilly" of Thorin—the mayor, his love for Susan Delgado clouds his reasoning for a time and nearly results in a permanent split between him and his inseparable friend Cuthbert.
He and his ka-tet discover a plot between the Barony's elite and "The Good Man" John Farson, leader of a rebel faction, to fuel Farson's war machines with Mejis oil. After being seized by the authorities on trumped-up charges of murdering the Barony's Mayor and Chancellor, Roland's ka-tet manages to escape jail with Susan's help, destroy the oil and the detachment Farson sent to transport it, as well as the Mejis traitors; the battle ends at Eyebolt Canyon, where Farson's troops are maneuvered into charging to their deaths into a thinny. The ka-tet captures the pink-colored Wizard's Glass, a mystical, malevolent orb or crystal ball from the town witch, Rhea of the Cöos; the globe had entranced Rhea so much that she was starving herself and her pets to death because she spent every free moment watching the visions in the orb. The glass shows Roland a vision of his future, of Susan's death; the visions send him into a stupor, from which he recovers—at which point the glass torments him with other visions, this time of events that he was not present for but nonetheless shaped his fate and Susan's, such is the nature of the Wizard's Glass.
Thus Roland's sad tale comes to a close. In the morning, Roland's new ka-tet comes to a suspiciously familiar Emerald City; the Wizard of Oz parallels continue inside, where the Wizard is revealed to be Marten Broadcloak known as Randall Flagg, who flees when Roland attempts to kill him with Jake's Ruger and narrowly misses. In his place he leaves Maerlyn's Grapefruit, which shows the ka-tet the day Roland accidentally killed his own mother. Roland, it has been explained time and again, tends to be bad medicine for his friends and loved ones. Nonetheless, when given the choice, Eddie and Jake all refuse to swear off the quest. Readers of the uncut version of The Stand may be confused by the dates given in the book; the uncut edition takes place in 1990, while Wizard and Glass brings the ka-tet to that world in 1986. When The Stand was first published, it took place in 1980, it may be said" than the novel The Stand, as pointed out by Roland. "There are other worlds than these" Dave McKean created eighteen Illustrations for The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass.
The original eighteen illustrations appear only in the first edition hardback released in 1997. All subsequent trade paperback editions of the novel only feature twelve of McKean's illustrations. Official website
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger
The Gunslinger is a fantasy novel by American author Stephen King, the first volume in the Dark Tower series. The Gunslinger was first published in 1982 as a fix-up novel, joining five short stories, published between 1978 and 1981. King revised the novel in 2003, this version is in print today; the story centers upon Roland Deschain, the last gunslinger, chasing after his adversary, "the man in black," for many years. The novel fuses Western fiction with fantasy, science fiction and horror, following Roland's trek through a vast desert and beyond in search of the man in black. Roland meets several people along his journey, including a boy named Jake Chambers who travels with him part of the way; the novel was inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", which King read as a sophomore at the University of Maine. King explains that he "played with the idea of trying a long romantic novel embodying the feel, if not the exact sense, of the Browning poem." King started writing this novel in 1970 on a ream of bright green paper that he found at the library.
The five stories that constitute the novel were published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: "The Gunslinger" "The Way Station" "The Oracle and the Mountains" "The Slow Mutants" "The Gunslinger and the Dark Man" It took King twelve and a half years to finish the novel. The finished product was first published by Donald M. Grant, Inc. as a limited edition in 1982. The following year, as the Pet Sematary cover noted The Gunslinger among King's previous works, many fans called the offices of King and Doubleday wanting more information on the out of print book; this led to another run of ten thousand copies. In 1988, Plume released it in trade paperback form. Since the book has been re-issued in various formats and included in boxed sets with other volumes of the series. In 2003 the novel was reissued in a revised and expanded version with modified language and added and changed scenes intended to resolve inconsistencies with the books in the series, it is dedicated to Edward L. Ferman, long-time editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
The book tells the story of The Gunslinger, Roland of Gilead, his quest to catch the man in black, the first of many steps towards Roland's ultimate destination, The Dark Tower. The main story takes place in a world, somewhat similar to the Old West but exists in an alternate timeframe or parallel universe. Roland exists in a place where "the world has moved on." This world has a few things in common with our own, including memories of the old song "Hey Jude" and the child's rhyme that begins "Beans, the Musical Fruit." Vestiges of forgotten or skewed versions of real-world technology appear, such as a reference to a gas pump, worshipped as a god named "Amoco," and an abandoned way station with a water pump powered by an "atomic slug." As Roland travels across the desert in search of the man in black whom he knows as Walter, he encounters a farmer named Brown, Zoltan, his black crow. Roland spends the night there, recalls his time spent in Tull, a small town which Roland passed through not long before the start of the novel.
The man in black had stayed in the town. Roland meets the leader of the local church who reveals to him that the man in black has impregnated her with a demon, she turns the entire town against Roland. When he awakens the next day, his mule is dead, forcing him to proceed on foot. Roland arrives at first encounters Jake Chambers, a young boy. Roland collapses from dehydration, Jake brings him water. Jake does not know how long he has been at the way station, nor how he got there and hid when Walter passed through. Roland hypnotizes Jake to determine the details of his death and discovers that he died in a different universe when he is pushed in front of a car while walking to school in Manhattan. Before they leave and Jake search for food in a cellar and encounter a demon. Roland takes a jawbone from the hole from where it spoke to him. Roland and Jake make their way out of the desert. Roland rescues Jake from an encounter with a succubus and tells him to hold on to the jawbone as a protective charm.
Roland couples with the succubus, an oracle, to learn more about his fate and the path to the Dark Tower. In a flashback, it is revealed that Roland was the son of Steven Deschain, a Gunslinger and lord of Gilead. Roland reveals how he was tricked into demanding to prematurely declare his manhood by dueling with Cort at the age 14, earlier than any other apprentice, he was provoked by Marten, who served as Steven's wizard, who cuckolded Roland's father by sleeping with Roland's mother, Gabrielle Deschain. It is established that this was a time of revolution. Roland succeeded in defeating Cort in battle through weapon selection - sacrificing his hawk, David, to distract Cort. Jake and Roland see the man in black at the mountain and he tells them he will meet just one of them on the other side, which aggravates Jake's fears that Roland will either kill him or abandon him, they make their way into the twisting tunnels within the mountain, traveling on an old railway handcar. They are attacked by "Slow Mutants," monstrous subterranean creatures.
At the tunnel's exit, as the track on which t
