Velcro City Tourist Board

Month: December 2020

  • partially-automated bi-utopian communism

    I’ve been quietly impressed by the ubiquity of Aaron Benanav across a variety of venues as he promotes his recently-published book Automation and the Future of Work, of which I received a copy a while back. Benanav’s been a guest on blogs and podcasts aplenty, and I’m glad to have read and listened to some…

  • ecocultural theory top ten of the Teens

    Not sure where I saw this one, but Adrian Ivakhiv has done a round-up of the ten best books on ecocultural theory of the Twentyteens. Fairly pleased to note that I’ve read two of them (both of which are actually in the top three—that’ll be Tsing’s Mushroom and Saint Donna’s Staying With the Trouble, for…

  • solstice

    One more time around the sun, my friends.

  • whole sets of social and experiential differences

    Chip Delany, in just two paragraphs, nails to the wall the very best and worst aspects of science fiction: You can put together more interesting combinations of words in science fiction than you can in any other kind of writing—and they actually mean something. You can say things like, “The door dilated” (as Heinlein did…

  • the sprawl