Category: Science Fiction

  • rough guidance: some reflections on the making of travel guides to places that don’t (yet) exist

    Somehow I haven’t really talked much about the Rough Planet Guide to Notterdam here at VCTB; I think that’s partly due to an anxiety about “crossing the streams”, getting my day-job stuff tangled up in what is very much a scratch-pad-pub-booth-talking-to-myself sort of website these days, but also to some extent the same anxiety that…

  • (failed) states of exception

    I’ve been an admirer of Christopher Brown’s fiction ever since I bought a two-handed piece for Futurismic that he wrote with Chairman Bruce (“Windsor Executive Solutions”, which is still up and available to read, amazingly enough). I finally got my hands on one of his recent novels back in the spring, and found myself thinking…

  • cyberpunkish pontifications

    Over the weekend I iterated my Extremely Minor Public Intellectual routine once again, at the invitation of Mark Everglade, who interviewed me as part of World Cyberpunk Day (which is, or at least was, apparently A Thing*). Mark describes me as “a post-doctoral scholar of sociotechnical futures who works with science fiction tools and ideas…

  • reific(a)tion

  • failure / retrieval

    Strange vibes in me at the moment. Part of that is adjusting to the sudden (albeit welcome) structure of a full-time job, and with it the sudden proliferation of deadlines for projects in which a significant number of the moving parts are people, and hence priorities and possibilities shift suddenly in ways you weren’t necessarily…