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a blog by Paul Graham Raven

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

  • maureen

    I can’t recall the first time I meet Maureen Kincaid Speller, but I assume (with some sense of certainty) that it would have been at one of the first few BSFA gatherings I attended in London, some time back in the Noughties. I found her an easy person to like, which is rarer than you…

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  • give ’em enough hope

    At the end of this bleak but oddly comforting long-read from Marlowe Hood—whose name suggests he missed out on a potential career as a noir gumshoe character—is this quote from one of the many climate scientists and activists Hood has interviewed over the years: “Hope is an active verb,” said [Clover] Hogan. “We continue to…

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  • the creation of a non-discretionary door-tax

    A great extended-metaphor explainer for money, from Cory Doctorow, channeling Warren Mosler: … consider this thought experiment devised by economist Warren Mosler, one of the foremost proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT, the theory built upon this understanding of money): Sometimes when Mosler is explaining money to an audience, he’ll hold up a handful of…

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  • organ of leviathan

    A very on-point aside found among a splurge of interesting musings on queuing from Jo Lindsay Walton: The Guardian is perhaps the most Hobbesian of the British papers, in its unwavering insistence that any order, however arbitrary, is preferable to disorder, which can only be understood as a war of all against all. Jo Lindsay…

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  • 14SEP22 / accessions

    The Nicholls partly on the basis of Adam Roberts’s qualified recommendation (which I would link to, only I read it via RSS, and cannot recall upon which of the half-dozen websites Roberts runs it appeared), partly on the basis of Nicholls’s nigh-legendary status, and partly because it’s a way to support the Science Fiction Encyclopedia…

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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.