Velcro City Tourist Board

Author: PGR

  • maureen

    I can’t recall the first time I meet Maureen Kincaid Speller, but I assume (with some sense of certainty) that it would have been at one of the first few BSFA gatherings I attended in London, some time back in the Noughties. I found her an easy person to like, which is rarer than you…

  • give ’em enough hope

    At the end of this bleak but oddly comforting long-read from Marlowe Hood—whose name suggests he missed out on a potential career as a noir gumshoe character—is this quote from one of the many climate scientists and activists Hood has interviewed over the years: “Hope is an active verb,” said [Clover] Hogan. “We continue to…

  • the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax

    A great extended-metaphor explainer for money, from Cory Doctorow, channeling Warren Mosler: … consider this thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of…

  • organ of leviathan

    A very on-point aside found among a splurge of interesting musings on queuing from Jo Lindsay Walton: The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all. Jo Lindsay…

  • 14SEP22 / accessions

    The Nicholls partly on the basis of Adam Roberts’s qualified recommendation (which I would link to, only I read it via RSS, and cannot recall upon which of the half-dozen websites Roberts runs it appeared), partly on the basis of Nicholls’s nigh-legendary status, and partly because it’s a way to support the Science Fiction Encyclopedia…