Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Science Fiction

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • the ubiquitous fictionality of narratives of futurity

    Doing that thing where one quotes a famous and respected person saying things one has been saying for years, in the hope that it’ll be more palatable coming from someone famous and respectable. Once again, it’s yer man KSR, of course: All attempts to speak of the future are science fiction stories, and thus bound…

  • Geology and empire : Jemisin (2015), The Fifth Season

    So, N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season. I’m going to have to try to restrict myself a bit here, because I can’t spend all day writing about a novel (or at least I can’t spend all day today writing about a novel), but it would be very easy to spend all day, or possibly more…