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Category: Science Fiction

  • an eminent domain

    An old bit of advice from the days when I was still working seriously on trying to get short fiction published went along the lines of: submit your work to the venues you read most regularly. (I got some fairly prestigious rejections, obvs.) I’ve broadly kept to that dictum with my writings, fictional or otherwise,…

  • far from the ideological panoply promised

    Aware that the regulations concerning feedback to the Central Civic Authority limit my initial complaint to one hundred sentences, I am indulging in sentence structures more complex and digressive than would be my inclination otherwise. It is my understanding that the daemon constructed to assess and rout complaints to the relevant authorities is equipped to…

  • a new New Wave, if you like

    I am beginning to perceive a pattern here, though. There is a loose group – a new New Wave, if you like – of British writers whose work might best be described as the natural successor to the ‘mundane SF’ of the early 2000s. These writers are less interested in the widescreen formats of space…

  • an hollowed-out epistemology, an epistemic poverty

    I’ll stop blockquoting Audrey Watters when she stops saying shit that needs saying. The science fiction of The Matrix creeps into presentations that claim to offer science fact. It creeps into promises about instantaneous learning, facilitated by alleged breakthroughs in brain science. It creeps into TED Talks, of course. Take Nicholas Negroponte, for example, the…

  • dead media beat

    Thanks to Jay Springett and Uncle Warren for alerting me to the sunsetting of Bruce Sterling’s old Beyond the Beyond blog at Wired, which I only stopped following because Wired yanked the RSS on it some time ago—this despite its being perhaps the most influential thing they ever published, or ever will publish. Jay’s accompanying…