What is the definition of the postmodern concept known as cybernetics? Englishman and mathematician Thomas Rid, a professor in the War Studies department at King's College, London, comprehensively documents the history of cybernetics in his book Rise of the Machines. First, though, he discusses the problem of defining cybernetics. It seems like a logical place to start. Logical it may be, but easy it isn't.

Cybernetics is a postmodern concept; it resists attempts to be pigeonholed with one universally accepted definition. It employs the usual suspects, such as self-awareness, great promise, paradox, parody, and a god complex. Stafford Beer, a UK theorist, specialising in management cybernetics, relates a joke which sums up the dilemma of defining cybernetics.

When Viktor Shklovsky, in his famous 1917 essay 'Art as Technique', asserts that the fundamental task of the poetic function is one of 'making strange' the reader's customary perceptions, he is arguing for more than just the avoidance of linguistic cliché. Through the medium of poetic form, the accepted conventions of our habitualised view of the world can be defamiliarised: the political implications of this approach directly influenced Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, and in turn underwrite Roland Barthes's structuralist unmasking of societal 'mythologies'.

The Russian Formalist critics – and their counterparts in practice, the avant-garde Futurist poets – are frequently cited as precursors by the American poet and critic Charles Bernstein, along with Wittgenstein's similar explorations of the manner in which our perception of the world is shaped by language. (Bernstein's undergraduate dissertation, later published as Three Compositions on Philosophy and Literature [1972], linked Wittgenstein's 'linguistic turn' to the textual experiments of Gertrude Stein.) Yet the political claims made for their often wilfully 'difficult' poems by Bernstein and his associates in the burgeoning international field of 'Language' practitioners have often been contested: as a somewhat perplexed Chinese interviewer puts the question to Bernstein here, 'L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is generally regarded as a renegade brand, but in what way is it rebellious?' Or, as the poet Jackson Mac Low once asked: 'What could be more of a fetish or more alienated than slices of language stripped of reference?'

'Is the Mystery of Raoul Wallenberg's Death Finally Solved?' asked a headline in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, on 6 August 2016. The New York Times published a similar story, reporting on the publication of Notes from a Suitcase: Secret diaries of the first KGB chairman, found over 25 years after his death (2016). Suitcases of journals were discovered hidden in the wall of a house inherited by the granddaughter of the first KGB chairman, Ivan Serov. The diaries state for the first time that the saviour of some 100,000 Hungarian Jews was liquidated on Stalin's orders in a Soviet prison in 1947. Since Wallenberg's arrest by the Soviets, many explanations of his likely fate have circulated, with reported sightings into the 1980s. Determining Wallenberg's fate has been a fervent, worldwide quest. This latest find still needs verification.

Frank Vajda, author of Saved to Remember, published here in June 2016, must be both overcome by this news and disappointed that it did not arrive in time for his book, an account of his own life and his career in medicine, but also a homage to Wallenberg. Like other Hungarians in Australia, Vajda was saved by Wallenberg, an architect and banker turned special envoy sent to Hungary following the Occupation in March 1944. The Nazis, with the complicity of the ruthless Hungarian militia, the Arrow Cross, were determined to rid Hungary of Jews. Vajda's father died of starvation in the Mauthausen camp in 1945 and some sixty members of his extended family also perished.

All thirty-three short stories in Michelle Wright's Fine echo the powdery residue and hairline fractures printed on the cover. Silt and grit and cinders: Wright writes of people navigating worlds often on the brink of crumbling. From the blurry aftermath of the Sri Lankan tsunami to the static shock following a hurried phone call revealing betrayal, Wright's characters stay quietly strong as certainties dissolve around them.