Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • Review of Carl Abbot’s Imagining Urban Futures at Planning Theory & Practice

    After a dozen years of writing book reviews, this is the first one I’ve had published in an academic journal*. Here’s the intro: It’s long been a truism of science fiction (sf) scholarship that the genre has rarely dealt with the city as anything more than an engineering problem to be solved. I said as…

  • Arming the archipelago / guerrilla na(rra)tion

    If people don’t have the conceptual mechanisms in place to understand how narrative is created and employed to manipulate, then the better the fake, the more susceptible and increasingly large segment of the population becomes to this kind of attack. Maybe this kind of media literacy should be the domain of primary-school education not art-activism,…

  • Represent the world without reproducing it

    … science fiction is fundamentally a metaphorical literature, because it seeks to represent the world without reproducing it. Now the structure of metaphor as such is the knight’s move, my favourite manoeuvre in chess: leading you in a certain metonymic direction, the logically correct A to B to C, and indeed sometimes it leads you…

  • It’s about data and smugness.

    In practice, I don’t know that mainstream economists really care that much about the “ends” side of things. For instance, when they talk about “demand,” they aren’t talking about how many people actually want something or how badly they want it. For these guys, “demand” is the quantity of a commodity that people are willing…

  • Once more unto the breach