Author: PGR
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The Magrathea Protocol, part A: we’re all worldbuilders now
A—we’re all worldbuilders now (or: justifying a narratology of futures) Early drafts of this essay—and others before it!—were attempts to- explain the differences between different forms of futuring: narrative, experiential, &c. That aim informs the essay you are now reading, too, but through those drafts it became apparent that the easiest way to explore those…
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a fundamental shift in our understanding of where ecofiction might productively occur
Some interesting thoughts at LARB from one Martin Dolan on open-world games like the new Zelda as ecofictional media. I haven’t played any of the Zelda games—and as I remarked to Jay Springett a while back, I sometimes feel like the only person in the universe who has never been involved with that franchise, though…
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Futures Brought to Life, brought to life
That post on worldbuilding I wrote a little while back was fairly well received, which was gratifying—it’s always nice when people like a thing you wrote, of course, but it’s nicer still when the point you felt you were trying to make has been taken in the spirit in which you felt you were making…
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political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level
After getting irked by reviews of Oppenheimer, Adam Kotsko wrote a short thing that feels to me like it’s the missing piece to that Sam Kriss essay I excerpted last week, which has been—as the kids say—living rent-free in my head ever since. Kotsko has an interesting and very valuable insight into “culture war” stuff,…
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21JUL23 / accessions
A couple of laggards that were meant to come in with the previous shipment: Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle proved excellent, so now attention is being turned to earlier works heretofore overlooked. The acquisition of the Prose Edda is at least in part about integrating the institution with the deep history of its socio-cultural environment, but the…