Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • artificial intelligence and the (post-)apocalyptic imaginary

    An interesting and strident talk last night from academic AI critic Teresa Heffernan at the wonderfully zeitgeisty Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelburg: Veterans of AI discourse may not find much that’s new to them in here, but I found her points regarding the necessity of maintaining and reinforcing the distinction…

  • images which know that they are science fictional / Neom

    I would never attempt—nor even wish to attempt—to gainsay Gary Wolfe on the matter of science fiction as it appears in ink on pulp or text on screens; he is a model of critical generosity, and a very nice chap to boot. But there’s an aside in his review of the new Lavie Tidhar that…

  • they’ll not know the difference

    Work is going slow today, which is to say not really going at all; I had a medical procedure this morning—nothing serious: an elective procedure, shall we say, rather than an emergency—and, while I’m in less discomfort than I expected, I’m still fairly distracted. So I figure it’s as good a time as any to…

  • meandering toward a (trans)media ecology of futures

    I realised just the other day that I’d somehow managed not to do a serious wrap-up–or even an unserious and/or cursory wrap-up—on the Futures Brought to Life symposium in Vienna that I attended back in May. I’m not going to do one now, either*, but I thought I might at the very least point at…

  • Nightmare on Planet Thanet: Rosa Rankin-Gee’s Dreamland

    Anyone of the “climate dystopias are surplus to purpose” school of thought might as well click away now; Dreamland is very much not the droid you’re looking for. A staggeringly bleak extrapolation of post-Brexit Britain, taking as its focus the recently (and probably temporarily) reinvigorated seaside town of Margate as its setting, I’m not sure…