Velcro City Tourist Board

velcro city tourist board

a blog by Paul Graham Raven

science fiction / social theory / climate futures / infrastructure / utopian narratology / sometimes cats

Ballard (1962), The Drowned World

I thought I’d read this before, many years ago, and perhaps I did – the handful of dog-eared pages in my paperback copy suggest someone read it, though perhaps I acquired it second-hand. Or perhaps I buried my memories of reading it, whether deliberately or unintentionally? That would certainly be a Ballardian response to a
[… read the whole post.]

Reading Journal

18 Mar 2019
Ziggurat

[… read the whole post.]

General

28 Feb 2019
Social media as trench cyberwarfare

Will Davies at the NYT: Many of the anxieties surrounding “post-truth” and “fake news” are really symptoms of a public sphere that moves too quickly, with too great a volume of information, to the point where we either trust our instincts or latch on to others’. There’s a reason Twitter invites users to “follow” one
[… read the whole post.]

General

25 Feb 2019
Instant Archetypes

So good to see these in their final physical form – a project I’m very proud to have been part of.
[… read the whole post.]

Futures

18 Feb 2019
Opportunity cost

The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those lab rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were
[… read the whole post.]

Poetry

15 Feb 2019

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].”

Paul is consulting writer, researcher, theorist and foresight practitioner, as well as an author and critic of science fiction literature. More details can be found on the About page of this blog.