Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Science Fiction

  • a world where flesh and machine are in tension: re-reconsidering cyberpunk

    Found myself nodding appreciatively at this re-reassessment of cyberpunk by Lincoln Michel: Everyone has their own definitions of genres, but to me the essence of cyberpunk is not tied to the 1980s visual trappings that have defined it in video games and film. Cyberpunk isn’t merely neon signs or street toughs with high-tech leather jackets…

  • honeymoon objectivity

    Serendipity, thy name is INTERNET. Currently in the midst of working up a big old grant application*, and what should appear but this piece from Sun-Ha Hong at Real Life, neatly filling a reference gap that’s been bugging me for a few weeks? Preach it, brother: Fredric Jameson once wrote that science fiction has become…

  • Smart cities: Policy without polity

    Another publication is getting close to popping out of the pipeline! 23rd November 2021 sees the formal release of the Routledge Handbook of Social Futures, in which yours truly has a chapter entitled “Smart cities: Policy without polity”. Regular readers here will likely be able to guess—and guess correctly!—that this piece does not at all…

  • het från pressen

    Taking what feels like a well-earned and much-needed day off today, after yesterday’s launch of the above narrative prototype / experimental futures vehicle (via the second medium of a slightly kludgy pseudo-Brechtean performance of an online talk-show from 2041). If anyone had been wondering why things have been quiet here lately, getting this thing finished…

  • fear is at the root of such things

    From The Stone Sky by N K Jemisin, p210.