Headlong

Headlong may refer to:

Headlong (Ings novel)

Headlong is a 1999 science fiction novel by English author Simon Ings. It is Ings' fourth novel and depicts the struggle of a man trying to find his humanity after his previously enhanced senses have been removed. A review of the novel in New Scientist praised it as "mature and thoughtful".

Plot summary

Headlong is set England in the mid-21st century. There has been a civil war and reconstruction after a period of corporate excess. Advances in nanoelectronics and robotics have led to the hybridization of human and artificial intelligence (AI). These expensive interfaces have only been installed on a few architects to facilitate their direction of nanobots that are constructing beautiful cities on the Moon. However, a few years before the novel begins, the AIs take over the Moon and precipitate an economic collapse on Earth by subtle market manipulations.

The novel's posthuman protagonist Christopher Yale and his wife Joanne have enhanced senses and are telepathically linked. Christopher has lived on the Moon for years. When his interfaces are removed following the economic collapse, he struggles with Epistemic Appetite Imbalance (EAI), a disorder precipitated by the loss of his enhanced senses. Christopher and his wife divorce, and she is killed a few months later. Christopher is pursued by both his wife's murderers and the police.

Headlong (theatre company)

Headlong is a theatre company noted for reworking plays of the past and commissioning and developing new work.

The company was originally set up in 1974 as The Oxford Stage Company. Previous artistic directors include John Retallack (1989-1999) and Dominic Dromgoole (1999-2005).

When Rupert Goold (2005-2013) took over as artistic director in 2005, the company undertook a major rebrand and was renamed Headlong.

Jeremy Herrin took over the artistic directorship of the company in 2013 and is the current artistic director.

Work

Season 1

Headlong’s first season (2006-2008), was called Reinventing the Epic. Headlong began with two major revivals: Edward Bond’s Restoration (with new songs written for the revival by Bond, scored by Adam Cork) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. The major production, however, was Faustus. This radical reworking of Christopher Marlowe’s epic was a reimagining, half-Marlowe and half new text (written by Rupert Goold and Ben Power) contrasting Faustus’s story with that of the Chapman Brothers and their rectifying of Goya’s The Disasters of War etchings by adding clown faces to them.