Category: Science Fiction
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subjective and iterative magratheanism / the whys and wherefores of worldbuilding
It’s always nice to get an insight into the creative process from an expert, and this short bit on worldbuilding by Paul McAuley is exactly that. Worldbuilding as a concept is having a bit of a moment, or so it feels, having jumped out of genre fiction theory and metastasised more widely, following in the…
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contract/bridge: Auger (2013), Speculative design: crafting the speculation
Auger, J. (2013). Speculative design: crafting the speculation. Digital Creativity, 24(1), 11-35. This justly well-cited paper is in some respects a tour through the work of Auger and others (mostly RCA-aligned, I think?) in the decade prior to its publication in 2013. My purpose in writing it up is to extract and summarise the methodological…
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being quite serious, the future may be boring
Offered without comment, but with the contextualising note that the interview took place in 1984, some thoughts from J G Ballard on what we might now identify as the formation of European post-Fordist neoliberalism: The young people of Western Europe since the sixties have grown up in a remarkably uniform environment, both in terms of…
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partially-automated bi-utopian communism
I’ve been quietly impressed by the ubiquity of Aaron Benanav across a variety of venues as he promotes his recently-published book Automation and the Future of Work, of which I received a copy a while back. Benanav’s been a guest on blogs and podcasts aplenty, and I’m glad to have read and listened to some…
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whole sets of social and experiential differences
Chip Delany, in just two paragraphs, nails to the wall the very best and worst aspects of science fiction: You can put together more interesting combinations of words in science fiction than you can in any other kind of writing—and they actually mean something. You can say things like, “The door dilated” (as Heinlein did…