Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Science Fiction

  • “Aesthetic & ethical urbanisms”: Dobraszczyk (2019), Future Cities

    Dobraszczyk, P. (2019). Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination. Reaktion Books. Good, passionate arguments here from my friend Dobraszczyk, making a case for future urban imaginaries as a necessary component of our collective coping with an uncertain future. Note his explicit disavowal of the predictive mode, and the arguments in favour of the imagination as…

  • Treehouse cootie exclusion notice

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Literary author writes book dealing with sf tropes and themes; author is asked if said book is science fiction; author insists it certainly isn’t, while describing it in terms ubiquitous in science fiction critical discourse; science fiction fandom predictably loses its shit and goes on to demonstrate…

  • This could be Rotterdam

    This could be Rotterdam

    An excellent day in Rotterdam yesterday, ending with this appropriately Bladerunner-esque sunset shortly before a screening of Alien, which in turn was tied to the ongoing Science Fiction: a Journey Into the Unknown exhibition at the Kunsthal, which I recommend wholeheartedly. It’s rare to see an exhibition aimed at a general audience on your own…

  • Snapshots from a workshop

    Snapshots from a workshop

    Fast times at Sarum College, Salisbury. Thanks to DSTL for hosting.

  • Distort some central part of the present condition

    Some wisdom from Uncle Warren: TCJ: I talked to a sci-fi editor at Tor in late 2016 about dystopias and their popularity in eras fraught with political disaster, and he said something that stuck out to me: “I think one of the underrated reasons that people read science fiction in particular is that it’s a…