velcro city tourist board
a blog by Paul Graham Raven
science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats
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Past futures / participatory panopticon revisited
It’s a head-spinning experience to think back and recall how I started the journey to where I’m at now, in terms of what I do for a living, not least because I had no idea where I was going. Well, that’s not strictly true – I decided circa 2004 that I was going to have
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Weird futurings in the academic hinterlands
Vibrations in the web suggest that folk I don’t yet know are trying in various ways to force a bit of weirdness into the academic futures literature. I’m particularly taken with this title and abstract: Sport hunting and tourism in the twenty-second century: humans as the ultimate trophy / Wright, Daniel W M (2019) This
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Thick skein
You can’t talk about every possible future in one work of science fiction—that would be crazy. But what you could do is tell a bunch of stories that are relatively plausible, that are set in the near future, and that describe a course of action that readers can imagine in a kind of “thick” texture.
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A brief pause for breath and reflection
Things have been pretty hectic this last four or five weeks, in (for the most part) agreeable yet challenging ways. Picking up one of those increasingly common viral things at the start of June – y’know, the ones that just make you tired and intestinally out-of-sorts and generally unable to operate at full capacity, but
Who is Paul Graham Raven?
“… who, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with [his] voice, thanks to the god in [him].”