Category: Writing
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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…
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structure & narrative
Turns out that sometimes the old, non-metaphorical form of cut’n’paste is the only way to zoom out from the details of a complex story and see how you might fit it all together and make it work. I like to think I’m leaving this for myself as a sort of warning regarding excessive creative ambition,…
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the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth
Apparently it was Gilles Deleuze’s birthday yesterday, so big thanks for BIG OTHER coughing up a selection of quotes by the man himself, among which this one was the one that I really needed to read today: Creation takes place in bottlenecks…A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is…
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simply imagining better things isn’t enough
Team FOAM have started pushing out more of the fragments I sent them a while back. Latest out of the pipe is a bit titled “The unbearable lightness of solarpunk”, which for old hands at VCTB will be recognisably a condensation-rewrite of this post and a few others. The timing is serendipitous, coinciding closely with…
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17JAN23 / accessions
You know how it is: you go to town to buy a webcam (because the one in your Thinkpad has, in some impossible-to-diagnose manner, gone for a burton) and the store with the webcam just happens to be two doors down from the local sf/f bookstore and … ah, well. The Itäranta because, um, I…