Category: Science Fiction

  • the pursuit of absolute predictability renders its practitioners foolish

    A conference paper transcript from Terence Blake, in which he smashes together Deleuze and Dune, which results in a much more interesting (and far less reductive) reading of the latter than I’ve seen heretofore. A snippet: Frank Herbert indicates that the « central paradox » of Dune turns on the human perception of time. Paul’s prescience first…

  • an apologia for worldbuilding

    We need to have a chat about worldbuilding. (I’m mostly talking to the futures people, here, rather than the literature people… but the latter may find it of interest anyway, so please stick around!) Your man Dré “Daily Design Fiction” Labre posted a little thing about the movie After Yang (which I have not seen).…

  • solar matter stomache-ache

    So it seems I got a rise out of Matt Webb with my response to his “eating the sun” thing a week or so back. This was not exactly my intention—I had little expectation he’d actually read the thing, tbh—but I’m kinda pleased, for reasons which I’m going to try to explain here, as much…

  • dimensions of experience / accessions in the anarchive

    The middle of the year is always a period of transition to some extent, but this year it feels like it may well be more of one than usual, for reasons which will probably become apparent as I start writing here more regularly in the months ahead—indeed, writing here more regularly is a structural part…

  • indigestible lumps of technical explanation in the guise of purported dialogue

    That invigorating yet frustrating thing where someone smarter than you with a bigger audience makes a fairly neat version of an argument you’ve been trying to peddle for a decade or more. Henry ‘Crooked Timber’ Farrell has been reading Cory Doctorow’s latest, and uses it as a foil for talking about what most sf types…