Holmes on Homes is a Canadian home improvement television program and the centrepiece of HGTV (Home and Garden Television), featuring Mike Holmes as the series’ star contractor and host. This paper argues that by looking back at earlier incarnations of film and television melodrama, we can determine the way in which Holmes on Homes reinvents the home improvement subgenre. By playing out reality...

This paper presents DraMachina, an authoring tool dedicated to authors of interactive fictions. An interactive fiction is an extension of classical narrative media as it supposes a direct implication of spectators during the story evolution. Writing such a story is much more complex than a classical one, and tools at the disposal of writers remain very limited compared to the evolution of techn...

Some authors defend literary cognitivism – the view that literary fiction is cognitively valu­ able – by drawing an analogy between cognitive values of thought experiments and literary fiction. In this paper my aim is to analyse the reasons for drawing this analogy and to see how far the analogy can be stretched. In the second part, I turn to the claim put forward by literary anti­cognitivists ...

Most scientific models are not physical objects, and this raises important questions. What sort of entity are models, what is truth in a model, and how do we learn about models? In this paper I argue that models share important aspects in common with literary fiction, and that therefore theories of fiction can be brought to bear on these questions. In particular, I argue that the pretence theor...

Sound in non-fiction is routinely manipulated in order to accentuate, suppress or replace some aspects of sound to present a clearer, more intelligible, exciting, involving or dramatic representation to the audience. This manipulation, or potential for manipulation, indicates the need for a discussion on the ethical dimensions of such a practice. Ethical models across a range of disciplines suc...

In July 2001, a young Australian writer of fiction was asked to help envision the next generation of intelligent reasoning systems. She was an unlikely candidate. At the age of 27, she was preoccupied with storytelling, testing her acting abilities in semi-professional theatre and toying with plots for a science fiction novel. In search of ideas for future inventions, she attended a conference ...

The idea of connecting the human brain to a computer or machine directly is not novel and its potential has been explored in science fiction. With the rapid advances in the areas of information technology, miniaturization and neurosciences there has been a surge of interest in turning fiction into reality. In this paper the authors review the current state-of-the-art of brain-computer and brain...

We are entangled in a tightly woven social fabric of which many of the intersections and communication processes are hidden. The social structures made visible are those of governments, corporations and institutions. Other social structures that have no representation are trivialized as fiction or on a day-to-day-level, as gossip. Gossip is the most effective and compelling way of weaving the s...