Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Science Fiction

  • accuracy only happens by mistake

    Aiming to reboot the blog-as-commonplace-book practice, here—a habit which hasn’t so much fallen away as become blocked, in that I keep storing up things to clip in my inbox, but never actually, y’know, clipping them. (Which is a little like continuing to buy cigarettes but not smoking them? Though if I put it that way,…

  • Solargoth

    I keep telling myself I shouldn’t pass public comment on solarpunk, firstly because I haven’t done the reading and legwork, and secondly because I know a few people who really have done the reading and legwork (hi, Jay!), and as a good, responsible academic (cough, cough) I know better than to traipse across someone else’s…

  • to be always asking questions

    In a nicely serendipitous coda to yesterday’s post, here’s the mighty Sherryl Vint talking about the equally (if not more) mighty Ursula le Guin at FiveBooks.com, taking a little aside into the theory of critical utopia, and summing it up in a manner so succinct that it’s obvious why she’s a serious boss in the…

  • 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…

  • 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…