Velcro City Tourist Board

Tag: Science Fiction

  • Smart cities: Policy without polity

    Another publication is getting close to popping out of the pipeline! 23rd November 2021 sees the formal release of the Routledge Handbook of Social Futures, in which yours truly has a chapter entitled “Smart cities: Policy without polity”. Regular readers here will likely be able to guess—and guess correctly!—that this piece does not at all…

  • failure / retrieval

    Strange vibes in me at the moment. Part of that is adjusting to the sudden (albeit welcome) structure of a full-time job, and with it the sudden proliferation of deadlines for projects in which a significant number of the moving parts are people, and hence priorities and possibilities shift suddenly in ways you weren’t necessarily…

  • all that mattered was sensation

    Much delayed by pandemic disruptions of international mail, here’s a transcript of a heretofore unpublished J G Ballard interview, originally done for an Italian VHS video zine (!) in the Nineties. Comes in both Italian and English, with an accompanying essay by yer man Simon Reynolds… which is presumably where I heard about it, shortly…

  • a new New Wave, if you like

    I am beginning to perceive a pattern here, though. There is a loose group – a new New Wave, if you like – of British writers whose work might best be described as the natural successor to the ‘mundane SF’ of the early 2000s. These writers are less interested in the widescreen formats of space…

  • an hollowed-out epistemology, an epistemic poverty

    I’ll stop blockquoting Audrey Watters when she stops saying shit that needs saying. The science fiction of The Matrix creeps into presentations that claim to offer science fact. It creeps into promises about instantaneous learning, facilitated by alleged breakthroughs in brain science. It creeps into TED Talks, of course. Take Nicholas Negroponte, for example, the…