About

Velcro City Tourist Board is the personal blog of Paul Graham Raven. I am writer, researcher, and a consulting critical and creative foresight practitioner, specialising in narrative prototyping—which is a fancy way of saying that i tell stories about futures from the inside rather than from the outside. (I’m also a fairly minor author of science fiction, which is similar, but not quite the same thing.)

Founded in 2006, this blog has tracked whatever I was interested in at the time, with the result that its core concerns have been science fiction literature, futures and foresight (very broadly conceived), and sociotechnical systems.

These themes persist, though more formal writing around all of them will henceforth be found on Worldbuilding.Agency, which is in turn the online research journal of my foresight firm, Magrathea Futures AB. Please consider taking a paid subscription and supporting independent contra-Panglossian futures work!

In turn, what appears at VCTB will in general be more personally reflective and less fully-formed… which is to say, it’s a personal blog, but it’s the personal blog of someone who should probably have a much firmer line than they actually do between their work and the rest of their life. Do feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed, which will always be free to air.

(You can currently subscribe to a free-to-air newsletter-like format, too, but given the tendencies that the WordPress corporation is demonstrating at time of writing—May 2024—I regret to report that option may not be available for very much longer.)