Jahan N. Schad

It is not likely that we will ever convincingly know how and why we came to be on this planet; of course, this has never prevented inquisitive minds from pushing the frontiers of understanding and discovery further. Our origin is the subject of scientific theories and continuous inquiries with no end in sight, as the shells of related complexities are getting much harder to crack. Paraphrasing philosopher and historian Will Durant, a very few people are getting to know more and more about less and less. This knowledge and the scientific language used to express it are now becoming more and more incomprehensible to most humans; therefore, despite the sincere efforts of communication media’s countless “talking heads,” we may be inevitably driven by default to a new religion of worshiping the church of science, along with its scientist “priests,” and to a life filled with the unequivocal dangers that could befall us from such devotions. Humanity and the planet are faced with dangers that have and can be issued from the absence or deficiency of proper public knowledge and guiding ethical principles for handling many of the new scientific and engineering discoveries and innovations, such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and plant, animal, and human gene editing, etc. To avoid inadvertent adverse impacts, which could seriously endanger our normal ways of life and even existence, knowledge has to be humanized and massively disseminated. Even at the expense of some mistakes, the benefits certainly outweigh the loss. This book is a small effort along this path.

Last Train to Oxford - a thought thriller. A dramatised adaptation of John Schad’s documentary novel by Fred Dalmasso & John Schad Someone called Jacques Derrida, the philosopher, someone called him on the phone, someone who was dead. A mystery, he thought, a mystery that begins in 1968 when Derrida visits Oxford and there he dies, several times. Murder, he thought. So too thought my father, an Oxonian, in his final nightmare years. And so we investigate, not just the Oxford of the 1960s but the Oxford of the 1930s and a public school in the middle of the Second World War. In the end, the question is: 'Can one die of another's death? Or can one live?'

A dramatised adaptation of John Schad’s documentary novel by Fred Dalmasso & John Schad Someone Called Derrida is a real-life murder mystery that focuses on not only the famous French philosopher, Jacques Derrida’s complex relationship to Oxford but also the final years in the life of the author’s own father, 1990-1996 - years overwhelmed by dementia, nightmare and memories of, inter alia, the public school at which he had boarded during the Second World War. Every factual detail is, as far as the author can tell, correct; moreover, the voices which surround the author are verbatim: Jacques Derrida’s words come directly from a single book of his called The Post Card ; the nightmare-words of the author’s father are as transcribed in the 1990s by the author’s mother; and the words that detail life both in Oxford and at the boarding school all come direct from published accounts. All references for all details and quotations can be found in the book.