Sterling Crispin is a sort of efficient riddle wrapped in an enigma, a product of our inscrutable contemporary cyber-web environment.
A soft-spoken teacher with a social media dependence endures a twisty emotional road in Japanese filmmaker Iwai Shunji's overlong yet alluring "A Bride for Rip Van Winkle," a movie that could be described as contemporary cyber-gothic.
It's also good to set his call to arms next to the practices of online English prose because, among the guardians of contemporary culture (cyber and otherwise), the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a talisman.
When the "House of Cards" plot turns to China, the themes are contemporary and plausible: cyber espionage, rare earths, territorial disputes, and a cunning, meditative, libertine Communist Party plutocrat who plays on his connections at the highest ranks in Beijing.
In each episode, savvy characters solve contemporary problems including: cyber bullying, online predators, and plagiarism.
Drawing from a variety of academic and government sources, this course serves as an introduction to the contemporary policy debates and challenges of cyber conflict.
The show took on thorny contemporary events, with lines about the Sony cyber attack and Bill Cosby rape allegations and a serious-minded speech from Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.
His latest, "Skinner" (Mulholland, 400pp, $26), is a searingly contemporary, character-driven international thriller built around a mysterious cyber attack that has parallels in today's news.
Here Lin is reminding us of an interesting fact about contemporary life: physical travel has become almost as effortless and commonplace as cyber travel.
The setting is contemporary and, as the title attests, the vocabulary is peppered with modern cyber lingo, but the theme remains the same as it was in 1985.
Or, perhaps more tellingly, the entire notion that we must determine how to assign merit to UAV pilots -- or perhaps future "cyber warriors" points to a different set of questions (and problems) in contemporary war-fighting.
