Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Futures

  • simply imagining better things isn’t enough

    Team FOAM have started pushing out more of the fragments I sent them a while back. Latest out of the pipe is a bit titled “The unbearable lightness of solarpunk”, which for old hands at VCTB will be recognisably a condensation-rewrite of this post and a few others. The timing is serendipitous, coinciding closely with…

  • intellectual fracking / notes toward the declaration of the Butlerian jihad

    Friend-of-the-show Jay Springett talks a lot about “cultural fracking”, and is back on that beat this weekend. I’m feeling it; the big cultural events I’ve seen discussed this morning in the various feeds I follow have included another Star Wars prequel, another Indiana Jones movie, a “dark” Pinocchio remake. (Lest you think I’m pretending not…

  • bashing the wordbashers

    Another one of those moments when I find myself very much in the same camp as Alan Jacobs, who is here responding to a THORT LORD bit on the future of writing in a world where AI is a thing. Part of my reaction might well be due to the THORT LORD in question, because…

  • 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…