William Gibson is renowned for pioneering cyberpunk fiction. In his most famous novel, Neuromancer, he initiated the imagination of the virtualization of the physical world by projecting human consciousness into cyberspace, presenting a narrative of individual resistance against capitalist thought and logic in a visually dominant space. Although cyberpunk has become a key element and topic in science fiction, Gibson continues to explore new narrative potentials for the genre. In his 2014 novel The Peripheral, Gibson integrates elements of gaming and time travel, creating an intersection between two future timelines through cyberspace. The protagonist in the first timeline is unaware that quantum tunneling technology allows people from different timelines to communicate through consciousness. When she accesses another timeline via a computer screen, she mistakenly believes that the second timeline’s world is merely a game space. Upon realizing that it is, in fact, a distant future world, her consciousness is connected to a peripheral — a robotic avatar — by the people of that future timeline, enabling her to experience time travel and explore the future world in a quasi-physical form. In this novel, Gibson reconstructs cyberpunk narratives by shifting the focus from spatial narratives to cyber-time-space narratives. He presents this cyber-time-space in a game-like manner, which also reflects the virtualization of physical time and space through visually dominant technology. This reflects the phenomenon of the “perceptual machine” described by Joanna Zylinska. In her book The Perception Machine, Zylinska argues that such a machine is an assemblage composed of technological, corporeal, and social dimensions. Her choice of the term “perception” over “vision” highlights that perception is not derived from fixed, unchanging factors but rather from dynamic interrelations of various factors.The perceptual framework imagined in The Peripheral visualizes time and space, generating a new kind of perception machine. This perception machine integrates all sensory perceptions into a visually driven experience through the structure of a game.

The Grapes of Wrath is a masterpiece by John Steinbeck created during the Great Depression, with the westward journey of the Joad family as its main story, supplemented by interchapters that show the profound impact of the drought in Oklahoma on local farmers. This paper analyzes the narrative situations in this novel, especially the use of shifts in narrators and focalization. Steinbeck skillfully switches perspectives between close-ups of the individual experiences of the Joad family and a broader panorama of social tragedy, using zero focalization to narrate the specific stories of the Joad family, while in the interchapters, he employs a montage technique akin to film editing, seamlessly shifting between intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrators to change focalization, which breaks down two barriers: the intradiegetic narrator’s vision barrier and the extradiegetic narrator’s psychological distance barrier, thus providing a panoramic observation of the effects of the Great Depression. The narrative situation he constructs and “free direct speech” he adopts not only enhance the authenticity of the story but also allow readers to deeply experience different narrative perspectives and understand the real sufferings of a variety of representative characters. Steinbeck’s innovative narrative mode has left an indelible mark on American literature, showcasing the enduring spirit of human struggle in the face of hardship.

Languages and writing systems have evolved for various purposes globally. More than two hundred scripts have been used in human writing systems, each containing symbols that represent phonemes. For example, the English language has 44 phonemes represented by 26 letters in its alphabet. This research explores the impact of climate conditions on the number of symbols in global writing systems. The study classifies Earth's climate according to the Köppen Climate Classification, known for its comprehensive categorization of global climate zones. This paper aims to identify a significant correlation between climate conditions and script characteristics. For instance, writing systems in arid regions tend to contain fewer than 40 symbols, whereas those in tropical regions tend to have more than 40 symbols. In temperate climatic zones, writing systems with fewer and more than 40 symbols have evolved equally. This influence of local climate is not observed in scripts that originated after the eighteenth century. The industrial revolution and European colonization have distanced people worldwide from their natural surroundings and local historical cultures, both of which had evolved over millennia. This detachment has disrupted many of the subtle and profound connections that earlier human-nature relationships once maintained. This paper employs both qualitative and quantitative methods.