Category: Worldbuilding
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divestor storytime: reading “Village People”at Media Evolution
I keep promising an in-depth post about the Media Evolution collaborative foresight cycle I was involved with late last year. Apologies, but this is not that in-depth post—partly because I’m currently very busy working on the next collaborative foresight cycle (of which ME do three each year), among various other client-facing things. But this post…
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a general atmosphere in which a particular conclusion seems undeniable
Building on yesterday’s post about writing yourself into (or out of) beliefs and opinions, I want to return to a piece from late last year which I keep rereading, and which I think has important lessons for us all in this year of many elections of consequence. The title is plain and forthright—“You Can’t Fact…
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you trick yourself into thinking that it’s true
John Higgs, in his most recent newsletter, begins by mentioning a piece he wrote for The Big Issue proposing that the super-rich be put in prison, and comparing it to the political notion now known as limitarianism (which is pretty much the same idea, just without the prison bit). Typically modest, Higgs discounts any possibility…
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she invites us in and holds us back
Stephanie Burt (at Strange Horizons) on John Plotz on Ursula K Le Guin; my emphasis. Leaving blank spaces for readers to see how well, and how often, we fill things in, Le Guin’s prose is (Plotz writes) “the antithesis of the well-rendered verisimilitude of a high-end video game” (p. 48). Those games show us everything,…
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leaving spaces for her readers to fill: Diana Wynne Jones as worldbuilder
I have talked a fair bit recently about building futures (and ways of futuring) that are open, and it looks like I’m going to be talking about it a lot more in times to come. It’s an idea that I’m very committed to, but I’m also aware that it comes very much from the creative…